Author: Tom (Page 343 of 429)

Offering WordPress Support on Twitter? No Thanks.

March 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I shared my problems with the WordPress plugins repository. Above all else, I’ve really enjoyed the comments that people have shared – it’s full of good ideas, I’ve had my opinions changed a bit from the initial post, and the conversation is generally respectful.

For those who have been following along, you know that all of this is being shared as I’m slowly working towards the process of restructuring how I build, maintain, and support my plugins.

As such, I’m trying to be as open as I possibly can be about what I like, what I dislike, and what I’m planning to do as this particular restructuring comes into fruition.

One of the things that’s becoming common among businesses – especially larger businesses – is to offer support via Twitter. The more I’ve begun thinking about how to offer support, the more I’m deciding against offering WordPress support on Twitter.

The Most Exhaustive Set of WordPress Test Data

March 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the toughest things about building products for WordPress is making sure that you exhaustively test every single nuance of your theme.

Aside from things like post, pages, images, and headings, it includes, widgets, menus, non-breaking test, threaded comments, and so on.

At WordCamp Atlanta, Michael Novotny – the guy responsible for running QA at 8BIT – released WP Test arguably the best tests for WordPress.

Why I Believe in Pressgram

March 22, 2013 / Tom

The dangers in blogging about a product or service that your friends are offering is that it comes off as gimmicky or as if there are ulterior motives for doing such.

I recognize that risk and anyone who’s done this has felt this tension; however, I also believe that there’s value in sharing good work from people regardless of if you know them or not.

And for those of you who have followed 8BIT via Twitter or the web for sometime, or who are familiar with John Saddington, you know that he’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign to back his project Pressgram.

An Introduction To How To Enqueue jQuery in WordPress

March 21, 2013 / Tom

One of the most common problems that plagues professional theme, plugin, and application developers in WordPress is when libraries such as jQuery are improperly dequeued, deregistered, or simply moved to load else where in the page.

Not only can this drastically impact the site on which the code is running, it can adversely affect the performance of every other well-coded plugin or theme that a user may eventually use.

So in my latest article on WPTuts+, I attempt to provide a beginner’s to for how to enqueue jQuery in WordPress.

Introducing The WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards

March 21, 2013 / Tom

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One of the things that open source advocates always claim is that you should give back to the software that has given you so much.

For some, this comes in the form of code, others this comes in the form of bug testing, tracking tickets, writing documentation, or something along the lines thereof.

Only occasionally do I discuss JavaScript on my blog, but it’s actually one of my favorite languages. In fact, there was a time in my career where I was looking to pure JavaScript applications.

Preferences change, though.

Last year, I made my first contribution to WordPress Core, which was exciting, and I’m currently working to edit the Plugin Developer Handbook with a group of a developers far more talented than I am (so I’m getting to learn from their work for free ;).

Anyway, one of the things about the WordPress Coding Standards that’s always seemed incomplete to me is how little it focused on JavaScript. It provides guides for PHP, for HTML, and it even has a stub for CSS, but there’s nothing in the Codex about JavaScript.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on exactly that. Today, I contributed to the WordPress Coding Standards by introducing the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards.
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