Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Apps For 2017: Everything I’ve Installed

During the holiday weekend, I spent some time going through some tools and software that I have installed and determining what I wanted to continue using in the coming year (and what I no longer needed).

Ultimately, it was about coming up with the apps for 2017.

I guess it’s part of the “fresh start in a new year” kind of thing. But the short of is that given the goals I’ve set for myself (and some upcoming things I’ll discuss), I did an audit and paired down my system to exactly what I needed.

Sure, we’re all going to be using different software. And I know many of us – myself included – have talked about the things we use at the WordPress level, but what about the tools we use each day?

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WordPress Messages via Custom Code

WordPress messages, especially custom messages, are becoming a bit of a sore spot for developers, bloggers, content managers and so on.

And with good reason: It seems like every plugin has this desire to display tooltips, messages, promotional content, and so on every single time it’s activated or updated.

WordPress Messages aren’t inherently bad, but they’re abused. Still, they serve a purpose and can (and arguably should) be used sparingly when the opportunity presents itself.

In a series I’ve been working on for Tuts+, I’ve been walking through the process of creating a custom system for implementing, displaying, and customizing WordPress messages.

And how to do so in a way that’s reusable across various projects.

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Control Activation of a WooCommerce Extension

When creating a WooCommerce extension, it’s important to consider that when the extension is activated, the user may not have WooCommerce installed or active.

And though an extension might activate, it won’t do anything. This can ultimately provide a level of confusion for the user.

WooCommerce Extension

In cases like this, I think it’s important to make sure an extension can only be activated if the core plugin is installed and active.

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PHP Autoloading: Object-Oriented Programming

PHP autoloading is a topic that, once you’ve begun to employ it in your projects, is hard to avoid doing so in any project moving forward.

The challenge with learning how to do it, though, is learning aspects of object-oriented programming and what facilities the PHP standard library has to offer. On top of that, there are other advanced tools like Composer that make it possible, as well.

You have to walk before you can run, as they say, so in a recent series on Tuts+, I walk through how to perform PHP autoloading using object-oriented programming in the context of WordPress.

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Merry Christmas!

It’s a couple of days early but given that Christmas is on a Sunday this year, it seems to make sense to say this today rather than sometime during the weekend.

Especially since most of us will be spending time elsewhere than on this blog, right? 😎

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