Author: Tom (Page 364 of 427)

A WordPress Plugin Base

December 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I dig about the WordPress community – or, really, any open source community – is the diversity that exists with respect to its contributions.

For WordPress specifically, I always get a kick out of seeing the various plugins, themes, documentation, and other projects that people create that help others do their job better.

These include things like the Developer plugin and the Underscores theme. Projects like this and contributions from others are those that help keep me motivated to continue working on the Widget and the Plugin boilerplates.

The thing is, there are alternative projects that are out there that help do the same thing, and I’m way more a fan of the collaborative environment than the competitive environment (at least when it comes to educating others!).

Case in point: Mario Peshev’s WordPress Plugin Base.

Partnering on the WordPress Plugin Development Handbook

December 6, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Shortly after the WordPress Community Summit, Siobhan McKeown pushed forward with an effort to formally put together several handbooks for the WordPress community.

The Handbooks include:

Core
Support
Documentation
Mobile
…and several more.

Out of all the handbooks being written, I’ll be contributing to the WordPress Plugin Guide – a handbook for plugin developers.

A Few Thoughts on WordPress Craftsmanship

December 5, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

Show The Date on Every Post in WordPress

December 4, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

A Case For WordPress Code Comments

December 3, 2012 / Tom / 0 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.