Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last week, I wrote a post discussing why I think it’s important to use a trailing slash in WordPress.
The point of the post was to state that when you’re working with URLs and you’re looking for the last index of the array, the only way to guarantee the it’s always at the final position is if there’s a trailing slash so that you can `explode` on the ‘/’ character.
This post lead to some good discussion about why or why not to use `trailingslashit`, it brought to light to some other important and useful functions, and actually reminded me that there are times when trailing slashes should be used and when they shouldn’t.
To that end, I thought I’d thought I’d do a more thorough explanation as to each of the “trailing slash” functions WordPress offers, their purpose, and why trailing slashes are even important in the context of URLs.
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