Author: Tom (Page 384 of 423)

You’re Not a Computer Programmer

July 30, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

In this video, DHH – author of Ruby on Rails, partner at 37signals, and one of the developers that I admire most – talks about the idea of a pure programmer and whether or not programming is going to get easier as time progresses.

In the past couple of years, I’ve begun to drastically narrow the focus of my efforts into a few select technologies and there are three things than Hansson says that really hit home with me both as someone who has worked in software for several years and as someone who is now working primarily with open source software.

Plugins For WordPress Developers

July 27, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a number of plugins for WordPress Developers that I consider to be must-have for any local development environment. These include:

Theme Check
Log Deprecated Notices
RTL Tester
Debogger
Theme Unit Test even though is is technically import data

Each of these serves a unique purpose when working on themes and plugins especially if you care about localization and using the latest version of the WordPress API.

The downside is that it can be somewhat of a pain to install these each time you setup a new development environment (depending on how you actually setup your local machine).

But thanks to the guys over at WordPress VIP, this process for getting up and running with the necessary suite of plugins for WordPress developers is much easier.

Recap: Introduction To and Advanced Topics on WordPress Plugins

July 26, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recap: Introduction To and Advanced Topics on WordPress Plugins

Photo credit to Teresa Rosche Ott

Last night, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Atlanta WordPress Users Group where we talked all about plugins. I had a killer time hanging out, meeting everyone, and participating in the discussions we had after each talk.

To recap, here are all of the WordPress plugin resources that I discussed, shared, and used during the meetup:

Programmatically Set a WordPress Template

July 25, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're an advanced developer or just want the TL;DR version of this, skip to the code.

One of the nicest things about WordPress is the ability to customize the look and feel of pages by applying customized page templates.

Whenever I am working on an advanced theme or an application, I often treat my pages like views and my templates like layouts.

In cases like this, I often need to programmatically create posts, pages, and other data upon theme activation. Similarly, I’ve also needed to programmatically add a template to a page during activation, as well.

This is relatively easy to do.

Meetup: Introduction To and Advanced Topics on WordPress Plugins

July 24, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

This Wednesday, July 25th, I’ll be speaking to the Atlanta WordPress Users Group about WordPress plugins.

Specifically, I’ll be leading two discussions: