Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
One of the things that we – that is, developers and designers – hear more often than not is that plugins should “do one thing and do it well.”
But what does that mean?
I think that it sounds good in theory but I’m not convinced that if you were to ask each developer and/or designer separately what that means, then you’d get a variety of answers.
I think that there’s a reason that we feel this way, but I’m not really sure that we know what it even means.
A good friend of mine recently released Static for iPhone – a really simple application for tracking statistics for various web services.
Straight form the website itself:
Static is the easiest way to view the most important statistics from Twitter, Google Analytics, Instagram, Dribbble, and Github.
As I mentioned in the video above, I’ve been using the application for the past week, and despite expecting not to find it particularly useful, I actually really enjoy using it.
Jayson, the lead developer on the project, has been gracious enough to share several promotional codes to use for the application that I’ll be giving away in this post, but first I wanted to share my thoughts on the application.
Check out my video and several points below:
When it comes to programming – regardless of the platform, language, or system that you’re using – there’s a concept of abstraction that most programmers understand even if they don’t know that that’s what the concept is called.
Perhaps the clearest definition on abstraction in programming (straight from Wikipedia) explains:
Abstraction is the process by which data and programs are defined with a representation similar in form to its meaning (semantics), while hiding away the implementation details.
A simple, practical example of an abstraction would be the concept of functions: It completes a unit of work and optionally accepts parameters and returns data to the caller
The details are implemented – are abstracted – into the function so that other programmers (or even the original developer himself or herself) can simply make a single call to the function.
Easy enough, right? Especially since we’ve all written functions.
Of course, abstractions can be more complex. Starting from functions, moving up to classes, moving up to full API’s and so on. Everything in programming lives at some level of abstraction.
I bring all of this up because I’ve seen – and continue to see – huge opportunities for refactoring WordPress-based code (specifically in themes and plugins) into more abstract units in other code as well as my own.
I’m not a designer and I’ve never claimed to be one, but that’s not an excuse for sacrificing an attempt at creating good user experiences, right?
To be clear, I am not equating user interfaces and user experiences – that’s incorrect. They aren’t the same (though they’re often treated as such). Generally speaking, user interfaces make or break the user experience.
The thing is, developer’s are notorious for creating terrible interfaces.
I’d even go as far as to say as that we have a reputation of creating a horrible user interface then calling the user stupid when they can’t figure out how to use what we created.
Lame.
A Stereotypical UI By a Developer
Personally, I try to do what I can to make sure that I don’t create interfaces like what you see above.
I’m not great at it, but I am attempting to get better and I try to make each project an improvement over the last, and I try to make sure that as I go back and revisit, refactor, and improve existing projects, that I incrementally improve parts of it that I can.
That said, there are a few things that I try to keep in mind whenever I’m working on a new project. The majority of the work that I do is with WordPress, so this will be clearly geared towards that, but I’ve tried to generalize these points so that they are applicable to a variety of platforms.
Blogging can be a really weird hobby especially in the development space. Obviously, the majority of what I personally write is geared towards developers – at least on some level.
Some articles are straight up “How To’s” (such as get a post ID by its meta value) that are meant for anyone. Others are meant for people who may be experienced in software development, but not necessarily WordPress, and others are geared towards open conversation in which anyone that works as (or for!) a developer can have an opinion.
But there’s a problem with this: Whenever you – or I – opt to write an op-ed piece about why someone should avoid using a certain plugin or practice, or we share how certain things are Doing It Wrong rather than Doing It Right, or anything of like, we run the risk of cultivating an environment that fools us into thinking our perspective is of much more significance or is much more “correct” than it really is.
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