Author: Tom (Page 329 of 430)

The Great Expectations of Modifying WordPress Themes

June 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I was talking with Chris – our product midwife at 8BIT – about the differences in expectations between engineers, developers, designers, tweakers, and end users when it comes to modifying WordPress themes.

I started my career in software engineering – specifically, I used to work in .NET followed by Ruby on Rails – as well as object-oriented programming before moving into fulltime WordPress development.

And you know what they say: Old habits die hard.

Did someone say “die hard?”

Case in point: ask my team what I did when I first became the lead developer of Standard. I spent more time yanking out template code, abstracting it into `functions.php` and a collection of other files all of which would make sense to someone comes from a different background, but not WordPress.

And here I am, years later, where I’m significantly more familiar with “the WordPress-way” (even writing blog posts on Coding Standards and various APIs even) and there are still issues to be solved around this very issue.

Markdown Code For WordPress 0.2.0

June 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I released an extremely simple plugin for easily using markdown code syntax within the WordPress post editor.

I receive a lot of great suggestions in the comments (many of which I’m still planning to get around to working on); however, I had a few minutes to introduce one more feature: markdown code for comments.

My Second Post on Medium: Do For One

June 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few years ago, one of the most profound and influential pieces of advice that I’ve heard is the following:

Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.

The thing about hearing things like this is that it always lands in different places with different people. Like I said, for me, it’s ended up being something that’s profoundly influenced certain things in my life; however, for others, statements like that don’t land anywhere near a point of significance.

And that’s okay – if we were all influenced and persuaded by the same things, we’d all be doing the same things and that’d make for a boring world.

But for those of you who have been following this blog, read some of my other contributing articles, or seeing what we’re currently working on at 8BIT you know that education is a big interest, and is important to me.

So in my second post on Medium, I attempt to explain something that I’m currently working on that jives with the statement above.

Improve WordPress Code: PHP Code Readability – Strings

June 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

On of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most about working through the live workshop on WordPress plugin development is the conversation that’s ensued around writing WordPress code and PHP code readability in our Basecamp discussions.

For those of you who have been around a while, you know that I’m opinionated when it comes to writing WordPress code. Specifically, I believe that just because WordPress is written in PHP does not mean that we should forgo the APIs and use PHP functions just because we’re either more familiar with them or because we find them easier to use.

That said, there are times in which the native PHP functions are the way to go.

For example, string comparison.

Press Start: Blog Up! – An Atlanta Blogger Meetup

June 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that my team at 8BIT is passionate about is education specifically in the publishing space. It’s taken us some time to begin putting together a series of events now that we actually have space to support it, we’re offering a 100% free Atlanta blogger meetup here at the office.

This is the first of a series of events that we have planned for the summer.

Some are paid, some are free, but one thing that we’re looking forward to the most is meeting like-minded people who love blogging, development, designer, the Internet, and all things in between.

But our ultimate goal is not simply to meet people – it’s to equip people to do a better job at what they already do, or what they want to do.