Author: Tom (Page 94 of 428)

Musings on a Decade of WordPress: Themes, Plugins, News, Hosting, and More

November 21, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve been sitting on the idea of this post for some time because I’ve not been sure how to best articulate it. Some of us are better with words than others and all that.

But I thought since it’s been a while since I’ve written anything beyond a technical post, that maybe I’d use this time (you know, during the whole upcoming holiday season and all that), to share some thoughts, opinions, and observations on all things WordPress.

For those who live and die by hit pieces or the “…you’ll never believe what happens next” stuff we’re used to seeing on so many social media outlets, this is not that post.

Instead, this is one person who has been working with WordPress in a professional capacity for close to a decade in a technical way who’s simply sharing observations.

There’s a lyric I like:

Opinions are immunity from being told you’re wrong.

Maybe that works here, maybe not. I don’t know. But I’m going to open comments on this post, and although I may not respond to them, I’m genuinely interested in other people’s take on their experience with WordPress.

5 Ideas for an Enhanced GitHub Workflow

November 20, 2017 / Tom

Depending on your history with working source control, the way in which you go about working with a codebase, making commits, etc., varies.

Further, depending on if you’re using Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and so on also dictate how you manage your code.

But if you’re someone who’s working with Git (which I know many people in WordPress are starting to use more and more almost on a daily basis), there are some small things that I recommend doing to help make managing changes espcially with a team more manageable.

Object-Oriented Programming in WordPress: Understanding Customer Expectations

November 16, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

As we continue to move forward discussion object-oriented programming in WordPress, it’s important that we make sure we’re not jumping ahead of ourselves when it comes to building a product for someone else.

So often, it’s easy to:

hear what a customer says,
build something out based on what we’ve heard,
turn it over to said customer.

But there is so much more to it than that. I’ve danced around it a bit in previous posts in this series; however, I want to start drilling down into what it means to hear:

What a customer says,
Develop a set of requirements,
And then create feedback loops around that.

Ultimately, we want to make sure the people for whom we’re working the and solutions that we’re building truly are solutions and not hindrances or hurdles over which they have to jump.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s enough that a customer simply enjoys the experience of their final product, but with working with the one (or the ones) building the solution, as well.

With that said, let’s take a look at what it means to listen what they say and go from there.

Creating jQuery Components in WordPress

November 15, 2017 / Tom

Front-end development has taken great strides in the last couple of years (and continues to do so) through the use of CSS pre-processors and various JavaScript-based technologies.

The nice thing is that all of these can still be used within the context of WordPress development; however since WordPress includes jQuery, it’s not uncommon to continue writing jQuery-based JavaScript.

Despite all of the various technologies (such as Angular, Vue, React, etc.), I still find myself using jQuery and ES6 more than other libraries and tools.

For simple tasks, it’s not a problem, but when needing to, say, build more advanced components based on the response of an API call, using jQuery can be a bit heavy-handed.

This doesn’t mean it can’t be used – and I’ll walk through how to use it to build components momentarily dynamically – but I think it presents a case as to when other options are more variable.

But more on that at the end of the post.

WordPress-Related Resources: Staying Up to Date

November 14, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Arguably, the single constant that exists in our industry is that we always have to keep learning. I consider that a good thing (who doesn’t?), though I know it also becomes a bit tedious (and even lead to burnout depending on the nature of your job).

And I’d say that’s true now more than ever, especially given the speed at which languages and related tools are moving.

But if you’re working in the world of WordPress and you’re looking to stay up to date with some of the technologies that are used to build products on top of it, I thought I’d share a list of some things I recommend checking out.