Author: Tom (Page 332 of 430)

An Introduction To The WordPress PHP Coding Standards

June 5, 2013 / Tom

Comments on are closed on this post so we can keep the discussion on the original articles.

I’ve written several times about the importance of coding standards in both development in general, as well as it relates to WordPress. In short, I think that coding standards are often overlooked but can help contribute so much to improving the quality of the code that we write for ourselves, for the overall economy, and for future contributors.

I’ve recently completed an eight part series for WPTuts+ that provides an in-depth look at the WordPress PHP Coding Standards. Throughout the series, I look at each aspect of the coding standards, tease out the significance of why they are the way that they are, and how to make sure that you’re properly applying them in your work.

On Being a Pragmatic Developer

June 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last week, I received an email from a fellow developer asking me if I had any thoughts on the pros and cons of using Vagrant versus Apache in in WordPress development.

At one point in my career, I would have spent extensive amount of time researching both, reading articles, and even testing out the two pieces of software along side one another because I didn’t want to respond with an “I don’t know.”

Years ago, I got over that attitude – in fact, I don’t think it’s possible to keep that mentality up and actually advance your career – but I responded with the following:

So I haven’t really done much with Vagrant, at least not right now. I’m hoping to eventually tinker around with it but I tend to work with things on a need-to-know basis so I pick them up as I go along.

Right now, my current projects are on the typical stack so I’ve yet to really need to pick up Vagrant or have the time to spend tinkering with it.

Wish I had more to offer, but that’s all I’ve got for you right now :).

It’s okay to say I don’t know, but that isn’t an excuse for laziness. I think that it’s important for developers to balance pragmatism with laziness when dealing with new technologies.

A New Version of WordPress Plugin Support

June 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve written at length about the dilemma of supporting WordPress plugins and looking at various support systems both of which generated some good discussion on offering WordPress plugin support.

Over the past few months, I’ve been [slowly] mapping out exactly where I want to take the direction of the work that I do on plugins (as well as other projects), and how I want to offer support.

Last week, I took the first step and began directing all of the support requests for my current plugins into my inbox.

Keka – A Free Mac File Archiver

May 31, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ever since November, I’ve tried to keep up a running list of the various tools and applications that I have in my development toolbox.

As of now, the list is a little out of date, which I’ll aim to update soon enough, but I recently needed a free Mac file archiver for certain purposes and stumbled across Keka (thanks to Michael for the heads up).

Generally speaking, the default Mac file archiver isn’t bad, but I use Amazon Cloud Drive as my backup solution of choice, and they only allow up to 2GBs per upload. Kinda weak, sure, but for the amount of storage that you get, it’s hard to beat the price.

So in order to handle this, I needed a way to split some of my larger files into 2GB chunks.

Enter Keka.

Gitty – GitHub For iPhone

May 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I love GitHub, it’s lack of mobile applications has always been kind of a bummer to me. Sure, there is GitHub Issues and it’s not bad, but it’s basically a way to keep up with issues and bugs that crop with your repositories. Personally (and surely I’m not alone), I’ve always wanted a full-featured version of GitHub for iPhone.

A couple of years a go, I met a Matthew Strickland via Twitter – he’s a solid guy, solid developer, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up more than a couple of times around Atlanta.

Matthew, Jared, and Myself at a recent meetup.

Recently, he released Gitty – and it solves the problem of a missing client of GitHub for iPhone. Continue reading