Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Social Media Breaks Are Good for the Soul (I Think)

Not too long ago, I took a break from social media for two reasons (one no more important than the other):

  1. to try to break the habit of compulsively checking social networks whenever I was stuck on a problem,
  2. to cut back on “chatter” during the day.

(I looked through my previous posts to see if I talked about it at length but couldn’t find it.)

https://twitter.com/tommcfarlin/status/880912831922753536

Anyway, it’s something I’ve decided to do again, although this time I have a few different reasons. Maybe it’s social media breaks are something I’ll do a more on the regular, maybe not. I can’t know that right now.

We’ll see in a month.

Nonetheless, this time I thought it worth sharing a little bit more behind the reasons why if for no other reason to make sure I have it documented more so than I did last time.

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A Few More Spotify Playlists for Work

Towards the end of last year, I shared a list of Spotify playlists for work that seemed to garner a good response if for no other reason than offering up some additional things to check out on my own 😇).

Since a few months have past and I’ve had a chance to listen, evaluate, and come up with a few more playlists to share I thought why not share another list?

Spotify Playlists for Work, Volume 2

So just as I shared towards the end of last year, here’s a list of the ambient music or the soundtracks I’ve been listening to as of late.

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Adding Featured Mobile Images via CMB2

The other day, I shared how to add your WordPress plugin to Packagist. In the post, I mention that I did this with a recent project though I didn’t go into any detail about it. In short, the purpose of the plugin is to make it easy to add featured mobile images to WordPress.

For those who are familiar with CMB2, then you know it’s often used as a way (if not the way) for many developers to incorporate custom meta boxes into WordPress. And for the requirements on a project, I needed to introduce the ability to have a mobile featured imaged.

So to gain experience with creating a CMB2-based plugin and to learn how to use Packagist, I thought I’d use the project as an opportunity to do both.

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Adding Your WordPress Plugin To Packagist

When you start adding your WordPress plugins to GitHub, one of the next things you’re likely going to want to do is make it easy for other developers to begin incorporating those packages into their composer.json file.

That is, they don’t have to download your plugin, include it in your project, watch for updates, or anything like that. Instead, they add the file then run:

$ composer update

…whenever they are ready to get the latest version of your work.

But simply contributing your work to GitHub is not enough. You have to submit your WordPress plugin to Packagist (of course, this works with other projects, too, but that’s outside the scope of this blog, really).

And here’s how to do it.

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WordPress Plugins I Use (As Of 2017)

A couple of weeks ago, an international WordPress-friend of mine, Thorsten Frommnen, tweeted the following asking what WordPress plugins I use (and others use) right now:

https://twitter.com/thorstenfrommen/status/873711220611846144

You’d have to click-through to see the whole thread. I’ve wanted to follow-up with the post for a little while now and just now have the chance.

For what it’s worth, I don’t know if it’s all that interesting to cover all the plugins that I have running. Admittedly, it’s not many (and no, it’s not because I get into the too-many-plugins-slow-down-a-site-debate), but it’s because I just don’t use that many to run this site.

With that said, here’s a rundown of the WordPress plugins I use, why, and where you can get ’em.

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