Author: Tom (Page 334 of 429)

PHP Code Formatter For Maintaining Cleaning Source Code

May 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the biggest hurdles that I’ve experienced when working with pull requests in some of the projects I have on GitHub is the use of tabs and spaces and how they impact how code appears on the landing page.

Naturally, code should be well-formatted and easy to read not only for those who are simply investigating the project but also who are contributing to it.

Though I’ve shared a few plugins specifically for Coda on how to automate this, but we all use different editors, have different formatting techniques, and so on. The thing is, there’s not much we can do about how others configure their editor.

But here’s the thing: I think that if you’re the one in charge of a project, you have the responsibility of making sure that all merged code is easy to read and easy to manage.

Just as we have linters for various languages, we also have code formatters for different languages. Last week, I discovered PHP Formatter which is a really solid web application that serves as a solid, ahem, PHP code formatter.

Three of My Favorite Coda Plugins For WordPress

May 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As I’ve previously mentioned, I use Coda as my IDE for WordPress development. Honestly, it lacks a lot features that I miss about IDE’s like Visual Studio, but I’m a fan of the user interface and have found a number of Coda Plugins for WordPress that make it more a pleasant experience.

To that end, there are a number of plugins that I’ve added to Coda that enhance the overall development experience for WordPress and that I’ve found make it much easier to resolve some of the common problems that arise when writing WordPress-based code while trying to stay true to the coding standards.

An Introduction To Design Patterns in WordPress

May 14, 2013 / Tom

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

When it comes to software development, design patterns are commonplace; however, we don’t often seen them in WordPress development. As such, I thought it would worth covering an introduction to design patterns in WordPress.

Over the course of the month, I’m running a four-part series on Envato that covers Design Patterns in WordPress.

Some Thoughts on The Light Side of Developing Open Source Software

May 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I wrote an article in which I shared my thoughts on The Dark Side of Developing Open Source Software. I generally try to be balanced in my perspective on things like this, and I had planned to write this particular article at some point, but I received an anonymous comment that said the following:

wonderful issues altogether, you just received a brand new reader.
What would you suggest in regards to your post that you simply made a few days in the past?

Any positive?

The short answer is of course there are positives, so here is my experience with the benefits of developing open source software.

How To Internationalize WordPress Plugins

May 10, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

During my time on working on the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, I’ve had some really good discussions with Gary Jones about some of the practices and conventions used throughout the code.

Up until this point, I’ve traditionally included a plugin.po file with each of my plugins to make it easy for translators; however, Gary’s been kind enough to point out the a .pot file should actually be included.

From a discussion on GitHub:

If you read the Codex page you linked to, you’ll see that it explains that .pot is the correct extension to use for the original translation file, since it is the template from which .po and .mo files are generated.

I’m not above admitting when there’s something I’ve not been doing correctly – after all, most developers should constantly be improving right?

At least I hope that’s the case.

Luckily, there are tools that make generating this catalog trivially easy so I thought I’d provide the steps necessarily to internationalize WordPress plugins specifically how I did so for the latest release of the Boilerplate.