Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
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.
Single Post Message For WordPress is a plugin for easily adding short messages in the top of your posts and displaying them in both the browser and in RSS feeds.
I started working on this plugin a couple of weeks ago and have been dogfooding it throughout development – here’s an example of the plugin in action.
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.
There are a number of plugins for WordPress Developers that I consider to be must-have for any local development environment. These include:
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.
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:
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