Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Author: Tom (Page 328 of 430)

Using Help Scout For WordPress Support

A few months ago, I wrote about Finding The Right WordPress Support System in which I laid out my points for what I’d look for in a support system. The post ended up generating a lot of really good feedback, and – as of last week – I officially chose Help Scout as my WordPress support system.

Obviously, it’s been about three months since I originally published that post so I clearly took my time (read: evaluated services after the responsibilities of my day job) deliberating on which service I to use.

As with any more decision, there were a number of factors that contributed to this decision.

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The Truth About Building Premium WordPress Plugins

Earlier this week, I was talking with a fellow developer about building premium WordPress plugins (though this is true for any premium WordPress product) and he simply remarked:

It is amazing how much work goes into a single premium plugin.

Nothing profound, sure, but there’s a lot of truth to it, and I periodically get emails asking what all should one expect when it comes to building and releasing free and/or premium WordPress products.

With that said, here are some of my thoughts on all of the above.

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Preprocessing Comments in WordPress

For a recent project, I needed to inspect the data incoming comments before any of the other filtering on the data took place. Sounds like a big snore-fest, right? In WordPress, preprocess comment filtering is something that’s actually really easy to do, but the thing is that the documentation was lacking.

Anyway, I did actually find a hook that allowed me to do what I needed to do, though there was no official Codex page explaining exactly how to use the filter.

As such, here’s a break down of exactly what I was trying to do, and then a link to the of the Codex article I drafted after I ended up getting familiar with the hook.

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My Interview with WP Engine

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Last week, I had the pleasure of being featured on the WP Engine blog for their “Finely-Tuned Consultants” series.

If you’ve been following them on Twitter or their blog for any time now, you know they’ve interviewed some really neat people doing some really cool things with WordPress, so I consider it an honor to be able to be featured with the other consultants.

In the interview, I talk a little bit about how I got into computers, how I got into WordPress, and then answer a series of questions provided by Austin Gunter.

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Two Months of Free Flywheel Hosting!

Today, I’m happy to share that I’ve recently partnered with the guys at Flywheel to offer you guys two months of free Flywheel Hosting.

As much as I enjoy talking about development and related topics on this blog, one of the things that I dig the most is being able to do giveaways primarily because I appreciate the time you guys take to read and comment on various articles.

But enough of all this emo stuff – let’s talk about Flywheel, the service, and how you can take advantage of the giveaway.

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