Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
A little less than two months ago, Pippin Williamson, Andrew Norcross, and I decided that we were going to collaborate on a WordPress comment reply plugin.
Specifically, we were going to work on a plugin that was going to make it easy for publishers to identify comments to which they’ve not responded. We also set the arbitrary deadline of having it completed by the end of WordCamp Miami.
We met the deadline, soft launched the plugin yesterday, and are officially launching it today.
Ever since I’ve gone into business for myself, software project estimation has been one of those skills that I feel as if I’m constantly refining.
Sure, I have a process for how I go about doing it now, and I have open conversations with potential customers as I try to understand their core business need before I go off to estimate the project, but the truth of the matter – and anyone who’s ever estimated a project knows this – is that estimating a project is also a function of how well the customer understands their current problem.
By that, I simply mean that if a customer has a felt need and they have a vision for how their process can be improved, it’s easier to come up with an estimation for a project than for a customer who has a felt need but a vague idea as to how it may be solved.
There’s a lot that can be written on this topic, but I’m primarily concerned with just one aspect of estimation in this post: should estimates be free or paid?
Last week, I release a relatively major update to Category Sticky Post. For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time, you know that I released the first version back in August of last year.
Since then, there are been several minor updates most of which were primary bug fixes or hot fixes.
Though this update is still a relatively minor update, it introduces a few things both behind-the-scenes and functionality-wise that should improve how it works especially with posts having multiple categories
One of the neat things about attending conferences like WordCamp Atlanta is that you get the opportunity to get some facetime with other people that you may typically only interact with via Twitter.
Case in point: This past WordCamp Atlanta, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dougal Campbell, Brian Krogsgard, Dave Donaldson, Mike Schinkel, Jonathan Davis, James Dalman, and others.
But one of the neater things that happened was, over lunch, Dave happened to demo something that he had baked into a number of his Max Foundry products. Specifically, it was a WordPress system info tool specifically for helping him diagnose errors while handling support requests.
During a brief conversation, he mentioned that he was considering releasing it as its own plugin and placing it on GitHub.
I dug the idea.
I try to keep a running list of the tools that I use in my day-to-day development. The challenge in doing this is that finding new tools can get buried in that single post, so whenever I stumble across something that I introduce into my toolbox, I try to capture it here.
Other examples include:
With Chrome being my preferred browser, I’ve had a hard time finding an extension for taking a web page screenshot that I really like – every single one of them as come up short in one way or another.
Except for this one. Continue reading
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