Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
If you're experienced with programmatically creating pages, you may wish to skip down to the code.
I’ve been working on a project where the requirements simply stated this:
The WordPress API offers the get_avatar function for easily retrieving a users gravatar image, but there’s currently no API function that allows us to check if a user has a gravatar.
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One of the fun things about maintaining a blog and getting plugged into a community is that it affords opportunities both for yourself and others. In those opportunities, you also have the chance to experiment with a variety of options when it comes to monetizing your property.
For a couple of months now, I’ve been running advertisements on posts that are older than two weeks and that sit between the post content and the comment content. For example.
It’s proven relatively successful by my own internal metrics, so I wanted to continue the experiment. Today, I’m opening up more advertisements on the sidebar.
The short of it:
This is the second post in the Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products series.
In this series of posts, I’m sharing my thoughts on what it means to think holistically about WordPress plugins as products rather than simple extensions for WordPress.
In the first post in the series, I defined this by saying:
Thinking holistically about WordPress Plugins is about the top-to-bottom, end-to-end experience that goes into building and that will go into using the product.
I generally consider the top-to-bottom aspect of plugins as the developer’s experience and the end-to-end aspect of plugins as the user’s experience.
So while sharing specific tips for developing WordPress plugins, I’ll be looking at the developer’s experience – or the top-to-bottom approach – thinking holistically about WordPress plugins.
This is the first post in the Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products series.
It goes without saying that one of the best (and worst) things about WordPress is the 20,000-some-odd plugins that are available. It would seem that there’s literally a plugin for everything, and if there’s not, then one can be or inevitably will be created.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that because a plugin is available that it will fulfill its intended purpose or will do it well.
Talking about plugins and whether or not they’re well-built or if they should be vetted against some type of set of rules are hot topics right now so I’ve no desire to rehash those topics here. Instead, I think there needs to be a shift in thinking by developers who are building WordPress plugins for a living or consider themselves to be professional WordPress developers.
Rather than looking to churn out as many plugins as possible that do as many things as possible, what if we were to begin thinking about WordPress plugins as products?
That is, what if we were to think holistically about what goes into a plugin rather than just source code?
Japh – a fellow tweep and WordPress evangelist at Envato – recently shared a post on his blog titled “The Problems with themes on ThemeForest are problems with Themes.”
The topic of discussion boils down to this:
Though I’ve little experience with ThemeForest, I shared my thoughts as a developer who cares about the importance of code quality, as someone who as worked directly work Automattic’s theme team, and as someone who is highly aware of the problems with WordPress themes. Continue reading
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