Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Last month, I published two articles on Unit Testing in WordPress. Specifically, I discussed the practicality of unit testing and how it can better our projects, and I discussed the theory of unit testing to give a little bit of background and context of where it came from, why it matters, and a methodology for doing it.
In my most recent article on Unit Testing in WordPress, I provide a short quiz to help you review the material.
If you're experienced with programmatically creating pages, you may wish to skip down to the code.
I’m currently working on two applications that I’m building on top of WordPress (of which I hope to share once they’re complete).
Both projects have views – basically pages with templates – that need to be created when the application is installed and the pages aren’t meant to be deleted.
Though I’ve covered how to programmatically create a post in WordPress, I thought I’d share a quick example of how you can programmatically prevent a page from being deleted in WordPress, too.
Last week, I commented on a blog post on the Mika Epstein’s blog – also known (or perhaps more commonly known) as @Ipstenu – on Handling Negatives.
In the article, Mika talks about the fun that comes with developing plugins, themes, and generally any product where customers can share their thoughts with you. And if it isn’t obvious by the title, she covers how to handle negative feedback.
It was a good read and fun discussion and it definitely rings true for anyone who is an open source developer, but I think that it rings true for anyone who’s an aspiring developer, photographer, videographer, blogger, and so on.
So, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the pervasive negativity on the Internet and how it’s hit home for me.
One of the questions that I’m often asked from developers is how to get started with WordPress theme development. Sure, there are great resources like the Theme Development guide, but if you’re looking to dive headfirst into working with an existing theme, your options are limited.
At least, that used to be the case.
Yes, you can tinker around with Twentyten, Twentyeleven, or another theme, but sometimes the best place to learn is to watch someone develop a theme from the ground up. Thanks to GitHub, being able to do this is easier than ever.
Brian Krogsgard is currently in the process of building a theme and he’s made his work available on GitHub.
So much of software development consists of actually maintaining projects after they’ve been released. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of time is actually spent refactoring that didn’t necessarily have to occur if more planning had been done from the outset of the project.
Sure – some teams get this right, some teams don’t, and sometimes it’s just the nature of bad luck. After all, the best we can do is try to make the smartest decisions possible given the initial requirements.
When it comes to building plugins, there’s a specific way that I organize my WordPress plugin files that I’ve found to make bug fixes, future updates, and overall development much easier as a the lifetime of a plugin increases.
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