Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 364 of 427)

A Few Thoughts on WordPress Craftsmanship

One of the words that has begun to surface in the software development community in the last few years is craftsman. I attribute this to Uncle Bob Martin, his Clean Code book, and his whole Clean Coder movement (for lack of a better term).

I want to be clear: I love this idea. I’m a fan of Bob Martin and attribute much of the way that I approach software development to him (among a few others).

But a lot of his work is done in the context of the enterprise. That is, he speaks largely to people who are working on large-scale systems for large companies.

Good coding principles transcend their environment though, right?

On top of that, WordPress in an of itself could be considered an enterprise-level application not only considering how widely used it is, but how many large sites it actually powers.

With all of that said, I’ve been thinking a lot about WordPress craftsmanship as it relates to themes, plugins, and applications, and thought I’d share some of them here.

Continue reading

Show The Date on Every Post in WordPress

When it comes to displaying the date on blog posts, many WordPress themes – not all, but many – opt to display the date on the most recent post of the day, and then simply display the title and the content for the rest of the posts throughout the day.

This results in the content feed looking something like this:

But not everyone likes that. Luckily, there is an easy fix for this.

Continue reading

A Case For WordPress Code Comments

Source code – let alone WordPress code comments – is one of those things that often divide developers:

  • Some developers believe that code should be the documentation
  • Some developers believe that we should document every single line
  • Other developers feel that only complicated areas of code should be documented

In my latest series on Envato, I discuss a case for WordPress code comments on both the server-side and the client side.

Continue reading

WordPress Hub Magazine

One of the things that I love to see is how people use different ways to contribute to the WordPress community. Outside of the usual theme, plugin, and application development efforts, there are also a number of blogs, sites, and podcasts (of which I should have more information on later this month, as well).

Thanks to Apple, the iTunes store, and the Newsstand application, authors are now able to publish their own magazines to the App Store.

One of the latest contributions I’ve found in the WordPress community is WordPress Hub Magazine.

Continue reading

WordPress Boilerplates: Widget and Plugin Officially at 1.0

Earlier this month, I mentioned that I was looking to bring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate and the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate to 1.0. Throughout the month, I received a several pull requests most of which I merged into the projects.

I made a few changes that I’ll detail momentarily, but as of right now both WordPress Plugin Boilerplates are officially tagged as 1.0 and are available in their respective GitHub repositories.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑