Author: Tom (Page 350 of 427)

My WordPress Developer Meetup

February 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

This post is Part 1 in Leading a WordPress Meetup Group. Read Part 2 if you're looking to start one.

One of the things that I love about the development community – regardless of what language, platform, or technology used – is that we love holding meetups in order to get together and chat about what’s relevant to our work as well as to help one another get better at what we do.

Last year, shortly after WordCamp Atlanta, I ended up joining my local WordPress Developer Meetup group (and props to Naomi C. Bush for putting that together).

One of the challenges of holding a developer-specific meetup group is that it can seem irrelevant to even those who may be considered advanced users versus, y’know, developers.

As such, Naomi and I are working together to increase the quality of the group by widening the scope. We also have some plans to help to keep those of you who aren’t local to stay up to date with what our group is doing.

In the this posts and the one following, I want to share what we’re doing locally and then some tips that we’ve learned from experience as to what you can do locally to help begin a local development group.

The Ethics of WordPress Developer Responsibilities

February 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I shared a post on You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems. In the post, I shared a few reasons as to why it’s dangerous to expect and/or trust your customers to upgrade WordPress.

You can read the full article for my reasons why, but Mike brought up an interesting statement in the comment feed that got me thinking about the ethics of our responsibilities a developers for building projects for clients.

Though ethics are subjective and that you’ll rarely hear me talk about them on this particular blog, I think that there is room for discussion as to what constitutes the ethics of programmers in the case of building, releasing, and maintaing software for others, and, in this case, within the WordPress space.

WordPress For Application Development

February 7, 2013 / Tom

Several times now, I discussed the potential and feasability of building web using WordPress for Application Development.

For those of you who haven’t read, I’ve written:

And today, I’m continuing the discussion with a post on WP Daily.

How To Use Sequel Pro with MAMP For Local Development

February 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who have read my previous blog posts, you know that my local development environment consistents of using MAMP for Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Though I’m not particularly hardcore about any given IDE, I’ve been using Coda 2 since it was released and have enjoyed it especially because of its integrated database environment.

But with the need to work with several other remote databases outside the context of an IDE, and the recent release of Sequel Pro 1.0, I thought it may be useful to share how I’ve also been using Sequel Pro with MAMP.

You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems

February 6, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think one of the major characteristics of anyone who’s a digital native – that is, anyone who spends a vast amount of time on the Internet and that has a certain level of proficiency – has no problem upgrading their apps to the latest version and tinkering around with the new features and/or looking for new bugs.

I mean, we can always roll back, right?

And when it comes to WordPress – especially for those who build things for the platform – it’s not at all uncommon to see us urging our users and others to upgrade, as well.

I love updates as the next geek, but we can’t blame others for wanting to wait to upgrade WordPress immediately, nor can we expect everyone to upgrade WordPress as quickly as we do.