Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
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:
Out of all the handbooks being written, I’ll be contributing to the WordPress Plugin Guide – a handbook for plugin developers.
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.
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.
Source code – let alone WordPress code comments – is one of those things that often divide developers:
In my latest series on Envato, I discuss a case for WordPress code comments on both the server-side and the client side.
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.
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