Author: Tom (Page 380 of 428)

WordPress Designer, Developer, or Blogger? Advertise!

September 11, 2012 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. If you'd like to talk with me about advertising, email me!

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:

Sidebar 300×250: $20 / month for 30 days (which is currently filled)
2x Sidebar 125×125: $15 / month for 30 days

Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products – The Developer’s Experience

September 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products – The Gold Rush

September 10, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

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?

The Problems with WordPress Themes

September 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Problems with WordPress Themes

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:

ThemeForest has a massive library of themes that are available for purchase
Some of the themes that are available for purchase consist of poor code that ultimately affect plugins and/or the overall WordPress experience
A proposed solution for how to increase standards and improve the theme review process

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

How To Get Started with WordPress Plugin Development

September 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I mentioned that I’m often asked by aspiring WordPress Developers is how to get started within the community. After all, it’s active, there are a lot of people, and there are various ways to contribute.

One thing that seems to be a common thread is that developers often come wanting to know how to develop themes or develop plugins. If they’re interested in both, their interest still seems to lean in one of the two areas.

That said, the same challenge exists: How do you get started with WordPress Plugin Development?