Author: Tom (Page 65 of 427)

WordPress Widgets: Starting with Standards

November 21, 2018 / Tom

The purpose of this series is to start doing a deeper dive into working with object-oriented programming in the context of WordPress.

And since the WordPress Widgets API is one of the APIs that does use object-oriented practices, it’s a logical place to start. Further, it will give us some foundational techniques that we can use to apply to future work as we see how to build more object-oriented projects on WordPress in future series.

So far, we’ve covered the following:

WordPress Widgets: An Object-Oriented Approach. The Widgets API provides a solid litmus test and example of how to get started with object-oriented programming in WordPress.
WordPress Widgets: How to Detect Object-Oriented Programming. The goal is to arm you with everything you need to detect object-oriented practices.

If you’re not caught up, now’s a great time to do so. And if you have, then you’ll recall from the last post, we ended with the following note:

That is, we’ll revisit the WordPress Widget Boilerplate and I’m going to be refactoring it in its current state to adopt more modern PHP standards.

To begin updating the WordPress Widget Boilerplate to follow said standards, we need to do a few things:

create a branch from the existing boilerplate,
install code quality tools,
ensure our IDE is properly set up,
and begin refactoring the code to said standards.

And that’s what we’re going to start doing with this post.

Simply Refactoring WordPress-Based Code

November 20, 2018 / Tom

Back in 2011, I was doing a lot of reading on working with legacy code, code quality, and refactoring.

Refactoring WordPress-Based Code

There’s a quote by Martin Fowler (who literally wrote the book on refactoring) attributed to Uncle Bob that’s stuck with me – and I’m sure many, many programmers – ever since:

always leave the code behind in a better state than you found it

The thing about this particular idea is that I think it might sound a bit more idealistic until you really start to try to practice it in everything that you do.

That is, if you take it at face value it sounds like anytime you need to work on a codebase, then you need to leave the entire codebase better than when you found it. But the more I’ve tried to apply this rule in my day-to-day work, the more practical, the cleaner, and the more maintainable WordPress-specific code has become.

So when it comes to refactoring WordPress-based code, what does that look like?

Blogging Plugins: A Survey For Bloggers

November 16, 2018 / Tom

Earlier this year, I talked about launching a project to help improve the blogging process in WordPress aptly named Blogging Plugins.

Looking for a TL;DR?

I’m going to be sending out a survey to potential users very, very soon and I need you to be on the mailing list even if you’re the least bit interested.

Blogging Plugins: For a Better Blogging Experience

To join the list, you can do so on the homepage. But if you want more information, please read on!

A Note About Editors

At the time of this writing, we’re in the middle of a lot of conversations around the Classic Editor, Gutenberg, and so on.

This has nothing to do with that. If you’re coming into this reading with that mentality, relax and set it aside 🙂. This has nothing to do with what I’m going to share.

Now back to the project.

What Happened?

I’ll keep this short: Pressware had a busy year (which is not a bad thing). I wasn’t able to devote the time I thought I was going to have to this project.

But I’ve now reorganized by schedule, developed a few foundational libraries for the sake of reuse and am planning – and have already started, really – on building out plugins.

That’s not enough, though, and – if you’re reading – this is where I need your help.

Release Early: A Case for a Strong 1.0

November 15, 2018 / Tom

I am not a fan of the “move fast and break things” mantra that Facebook used to hold and I don’t think there’s a reason to have to justify my opinion on that. I’m glad they’ve sense moved away from it (or appear to have – I don’t know what they do internally).

I am, however, a fan of the “Release Early” idea. Sometimes this is also coupled with “Release Often” so we get the near-infamous “Release Early, Release Often” phrase in the software development nomenclature.

I don’t necessarily think they have to go together.

But when it comes to the idea of “Release Early,” it seems that no matter what you release, if it’s not up to a customer’s expectation, then it’s no good.

And I get it. At least from that perspective.

But what if you’re a fellow software developer and have some insight on to how this kind of stuff works?

WordPress Widgets: How to Detect Object-Oriented Programming

November 14, 2018 / Tom

If you’ve not read the first post in this series, I recommend it, as we’re starting to get into writing object-oriented code for WordPress through the use of the Widgets API.

The series is going to capture a few things:

show you the basic skeleton of a widget and why it’s object-oriented,
discuss what things you should be able to notice and why
update the Widget Boilerplate directly on this site first and then push it out to GitHub,
build a widget using the API with the boilerplate as the foundation for our work.

But before doing that, I want to make sure that everyone reading this is caught up on the core principles of object-oriented programming and has everything needed to build out an object-oriented solution for WordPress.

To that end, I recommend the following:

If you’ve read all of that content, great. You’re going to be well-prepared for this post and the upcoming posts. If not, there may be some holes in the rest of what you’re about to read, but the gist of the post should be clear enough.

What’s The Deal, Exactly?

Here’s the thing: Last week, I shared a bit of code along with some information about the Widgets API. I’m going to be revisiting that a little bit more in this post before we get into the more coding intensive part for two reasons:

I want everyone reading this to be on the same page as it relates to writing object-oriented code (at the very least, in this context),
I recognize that people are coming from different backgrounds and I want to make sure we’re all on the same page as much as possible before proceeding.

If you have experience with writing object-oriented code, especially in an advanced capacity, this may seem simpler to you; otherwise, I hope this is going to arm you with everything you need to detect object-oriented practices not only concerning this API but when reading others’ code, too.