Author: Tom (Page 349 of 430)

Incorporating The jQuery Date Picker in WordPress

How To Include The jQuery Datepicker in WordPress

February 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the first quarter of this year, I’ve been working on two client projects both of which have called specifically for incorporating advanced date management into various aspects of WordPress.

Because of various formats, user error, and so on can make working with dates a bit difficult, I’ve always been partial to working with date pickers to make date selection and management a bit easier.

And since WordPress includes both jQuery and jQuery UI, I tend to use the features that are included rather than introducing yet-another-library.

In my latest series on WPTuts+, I walk through the process of how to incorporating the jQuery datepicker in WordPress.

My Day-To-Day: Getting Things Done

February 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For me, Twitter’s utility has changed a bit over the last few years. What once was used as a way for my friends and I to share what we were up to, where we were, and so on has more or less morphed into a way for me to chat with other people who share similar interests regardless of where we are.

In fact, I’ve seen that each of my friends use Twitter in their own respective ways.

For people that I know personally, Path – yep, I actually use it – has worked out pretty well. But I’ve met a lot of really cool, interesting, and smart people on Twitter that I interact with on a daily basis many of which I would’ve never met otherwise.

Case in point: Jason Resnick is a fellow developer and tweep that I’ve known for a little over a year via Twitter. Yesterday, he asked me this question:

https://twitter.com/rezzz/status/306412898425651200

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been asked this question, and although this isn’t strictly related to development, I figure that it’s close enough to how I actually get development done that I’d share my response here.

Support Doesn’t Scale (or “Avoid Free WordPress Support”)

February 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recently, I’ve been talking quite a bit about profiting from open source software, strategies for supporting WordPress plugins, and debating just how much to support to offer.

To say that I’ve been exploring business models and support offerings for my plugins would be a bit of an understatement. Clearly, this has been something that’s been on my mind for the last few months.

The thing is, this won’t be the first time that I’ve ventured into this territory. In fact, I’ve done this for two plugins – WP Social Icons and Author Admin – that I retired some time ago. Ultimately, I want to make sure that if I do this again, I do this right.

But while I’m still working on the logistics of everything, I thought it’d be worth sharing why I’m even doing this.

Quite simply: Support doesn’t scale.

Introduction To WordPress Theme Development

February 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to my local WordPress Developer Meetup group on an introduction to WordPress theme development.

Ultimately, the goal was to give a foundational talk so that more advanced topics in theme development could be shared throughout the rest of the year all of which I’d love to continue to share here, should it pan out. Continue reading

A Look at The UI Design Process in WordPress Plugins

February 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m no designer. I don’t aspire to be one, nor do I claim to be one that; however, I am interested in the topic and enjoy seeing the work that others do as well as following blogs, articles, books, etc. on the topic.

Though user interface design is a bit of a different field, it hits much closer to home for me than other types of design. After all, a user interface is basically the face of the code that we’re writing.

And if we’re not careful, then we’re going to continue perpetuating the stereotype that developers do not care about design.

I’ve spoken previously about sharing case studies on WordPress projects, and though I don’t have a full project to share right now, I thought it might be fun to look at some I’ve been working on and the evolution of a particular user interface that evolved from a first pass, to discussion, then from mockup, to implementation.