Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Tipsy Social Icons Plugin For WordPress

August 2, 2012 /

This version is a major update but if you're interested in skipping most of the information, jump down to what's new in this version.

Tipsy Social Icons In January 2011, Atlanta was hit with a major snow storm that had many of us hanging out inside of our homes for days at a time. To say that I had cabin fever would be an understatement.

During that time, I wrote a really simple social icons plugin for WordPress. Because I used Jason Frame’s excellent jQuery plugin called Tipsy, I aptly named the plugin Tipsy Social Icons.

Since it was first released, I’ve done much more WordPress development and this plugin wasn’t up to par with my usual standards, so I’m updating it and am officially releasing Tipsy Social Icons 3.0.

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Organize Your WordPress Installation For Subversion-Based Development

August 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

If you’ve done any development on themes, plugins, or the core application itself, then you know that the team uses Subversion for WordPress development. This means that when you checkout the project, you’re either pulling down at least three directories, or you’re pulling down the trunk.

The challenge is figuring out a way to organize your local development environment so that it resembles the staging and production environment rather than what the repository looks like.

But this can be tough if you’re used to working with the trunk, with copying files, or with whatever crazy ways you’ve come up with managing version controlled files.

Here’s the most effective way that I’ve found to organize my installation when using Subversion for WordPress development:

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Building Single Post Message For WordPress

July 31, 2012 / / 0 Comments

As a developer, one of the things that I love to do is read how others created their work. Sure, we’re all a different type of programmer but that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the work that others are doing.

In fact, I find that I often learn new things from seeing how other people face the technical challenges of their particular platform.

So, to that end, I thought I’d share the work that went into and that tools that I used to create Single Post Message.

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You’re Not a Computer Programmer

July 30, 2012 / / 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.

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