Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Author: Tom (Page 359 of 430)

The Pro WordPress Subreddit

One of the things that’s nice about the WordPress development community is that there’s no shortage of places to discuss what’s going on in the community.

Aside from chatting with people on Twitter, we can hop into IRC chats, listen in to other developer’s podcasts, and naturally read and respond to what other’s are writing on their blogs.

But late last week, I noticed the following tweet show up in my stream:

It’s been a long time since I’ve paid any attention to anything like Reddit – probably since college, but this particular subreddit caught my attention.

Continue reading

Save Custom Post Meta – Improving The Code

Comments are closed on this post. See the updated version for more information.

Last week, I was talking to a couple of developers on Twitter about some of the code that’s required to save custom post meta in WordPress when working with plugins or themes.

For the most part, good serialization functions are consistently formatted in the same way:

  • First, we check for security. If the security check fails, then we exit the function.
  • If security passes, then we proceed with our serialization functionality.

The thing is, the security checks are generally the same thing across the board so much so that you may even consider it somewhat of a boilerplate.

This seems like an opportunity to improve developer’s processes a bit by abstracting out some of the code that is used to save custom post meta data.

So let’s try this:

Continue reading

Tips For Beginning WordPress Development

Tips For Beginning WordPress Development

The web is filled with a variety of questions and answers, tutorials, and demonstrations of how to accomplish certain tasks with WordPress. Sometimes, the code is really good; other times, the code is not so good.

This can be dangerous primarily because some developer-types are more concerned with copying and pasting code just to get something working rather than truly understanding and learning the application.

In my latest post on Envato, Practical Tips For Aspiring WordPress Developers, I try to provide some advice for those who are serious about beginning WordPress development.

Continue reading

My Thoughts on Leading Development in a Startup

Leading Development in a Startup

As most of you know, I also spend a significant portion of my time working on Standard, Hello Dolly as well as some other internal projects with my team at 8BIT.

At this point, it’s been several years since we’ve been working together, and as with anything new, there are plenty of lessons learned – some things that work, some things that don’t, and some things that started as experiments and ended up being things that we’ve consistently implemented.

From the perspective of being the developer on the team, one of the biggest hurdles in moving from a typical 9-to-5 to a startup is the responsibility of leading development in a startup.

On today’s post on the 8BIT blog, I share a bit about it. Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑