Last week, I gave my presentation at WordCamp Atlanta on Namespaces and Autoloading. (the full title was Namespaces, Autoloading, and Improving Plugin Architecture but that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?)

Because of the nature of the talk, I’ve opted to write a post to accompany the post, share the slides, and share an example plugin GitHub to help support the talk.

So if you were in attendance, thank you(!) and here’s the post, I promised. And for those of you who didn’t attend, I hope this post still helps to demonstrate the concepts and topics I discussed at WordCamp.

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Though I have a suite of tools I prefer to use on projects that I work on from the ground-up, the nature of contract work is that you’re not always able to use those tools.

Instead, you have to work using the tools provided by the client which usually come into play whenever you inherit a project from a previous developer.

To be clear, this isn’t knocking anyone’s choice of tools. I don’t have a position here or there on that. Instead, I think it’s import to know how to get up and running with some of those tools easily.

For example, we’ve been working on a project that requires Gulp which in turn requires Node which can be installed easily using Homebrew. It’s a lot of steps to work backward, right?

To get started with Homebrew, Node, and Gulp in WordPress development is pretty easy. I’ve outlined the steps below and done what I can to explain what each package does so you know what you’re installing and what you’re doing if or when you encounter a project like this.
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If you got back through any of the posts I’ve written in the last, say, two years, you’re likely to find me advocating using available APIs over directory database queries nearly every single time.

And the truth is that I still lean in that direction. That is, if there’s an abstraction or an API that’s available for doing something specific, then I try to use it.

But in a couple of recent projects, I’ve been working with some relatively large datasets (large in comparison to non-enterprise level datasets). And in doing so, I have tried to make sure the updates to the data are as fast as possible.

In situations like this, though the WordPress Coding Standards don’t like it, I find direct database queries occasionally to be the best option for doing so under certain conditions.

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