Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
About a month and a half ago, I was hanging out at WordCamp Atlanta and I was speaking on the topic of how to Level-Up Your WordPress Development Skills.
To summarize, I covered the following topics:
The video has finally been published on WordCamp.tv and I’m sharing it as well as the accompanying slides below, as well.
The title of this post is somewhat misleading as I’m not actually sharing how to programmatically populate a WordPress template – instead, I’m walking through the process of populating a page that also has a page template applied to it.
Anyway, creating WordPress templates is easy business:
Back in March, I shared a proof-of-concept plugin for including a template file in a plugin. If you browse through the comments, note that there’s a lot of discussion on how to do it, why one way is better than the others, and so on.
But as I’ve continued to work on a project in which I include templates in plugins, I’ve also been working on populating template-based pages with content from HTML files.
Here’s how I’ve been working to programmatically populate a WordPress template.
Last week, I talked mentioned I try to write every day. Personal stuff aside, it’s clear that I aim to write for this particular blog five days a week.
Though I’ve no plans to change that, I’ve know that writing daily can create a backlog for readers that makes it difficult to keep up with.
Ultimately, this results in readers opting not to discuss anything in the comments, or it results in subscribers calling bankruptcy on the RSS feed.
To that and (and perhaps somewhat ironically), I’m curious as to what you guys think as well as hearing your thoughts on some potential alternatives.
In my developer toolbox post, I’ve covered that I prefer to use to MAMP for local development. For the most part, the default settings (or some variation thereof) work just fine; however, if you end up needing to do some work on a secure site, then you’ll need enable SSL in MAMP.
On production-level servers, you’ll need to have purchased an SSL certificate; however, MAMP makes it trivially easy to setup a certificate in your development environment.
Last week, I talked about using WordPress as an application platform – once again, even – but Ted Waller brought up an interesting comment that I’ve not heard (at least here on this blog) that I wanted to discuss a bit more.
Specifically, Ted said:
Whether or not it’s wise to use it as the final application framework, I do think it’s very good for rapid prototypes of web apps.
And what really caught my attention about this particular comment was that I’ve not often heard of WordPress as being a tool for rapid application development (or RAD).
The thing is, RAD – for whatever reason – has often been used whenever someone is talking about prototyping an application or doing some type of development, but nothing that’s seriously ready for prime time, for the enterprise, or for whatever term you’d opt to use.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered:
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