Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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WordPress Payments: Plasso, Array, EDD, or What?

December 22, 2016 /

Years ago, I started using this little service called Spacebox (and I briefly mentioned it about three years ago) to accept one-off payments from clients, family, and friends for different things.

Not long after that, Spacebox changed its name to Plasso, expanded its offering regarding what could be done with it, and I continued to use it for one-off payments.

Fast-forward to yesterday and the company comes out of the gate swinging with some different products for WordPress payments. These include a couple of themes, a plugin, and so on.

And I’m pretty stoked to see what all it has to offer especially with dealing with accepting self-hosted payments (well, as far as accepting things within the context of WordPress).

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Plans for 2017: WordPress, React, Pressware, and More

December 21, 2016 /

This is that time of year where people do all kinds of posts – from retrospectives to upcoming plans, from taking a break to writing more than they have all year.

Honestly, I’m a fan of reading it all.

And though I don’t normally do a retrospective post (though I’m thinking of going back and following-up on the developer fitness post from last year), I do have plans for what I’m aiming to do come the new year regarding general stuff online so I thought now would be the usual time to do that.

For starters, I’m going to move on from WordPress. Peace out. It’s been great, but it’s time to move on to new things! ✌️

That’s not true at all. There are some new things I’m looking to introduce, though.

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WooCommerce Menu, Part 2: A WooCommerce Page

December 20, 2016 /

In the previous post, I walked through the process of adding a custom WooCommerce menu to the My Accounts page. It’s straightforward enough, but if you’re creating a custom menu item, then you’re likely going to need a custom WooCommerce page.

That is, you’re going to want to have a page that corresponds to the menu item so that people who are logged into your store can view something related to the custom menu item that’s been added.

Adding a Custom WooCommerce Page

Granted this isn’t always the case, but if you’re adding a custom menu, the odds are you’re going to be adding a custom WooCommerce page. The thing is, WooCommerce expects these pages – which are actually templates – to reside in a specific location.

And if you’re distributing a plugin for others to use, making sure the template is in the right place should be done programmatically.

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WooCommerce Menu, Part 1: Adding a Menu

December 19, 2016 /

I’ve written a few posts about some of the work I’ve done with WooCommerce over the last couple of months, but one of the things I’ve yet to cover is how to add a custom WooCommerce menu.

WooCommerce Menu: Adding a custom menu.

Using Google or Stack Exchange or some other bloggers will yield some solid results, but my situation is two-fold:

  1. Introduce a new video menu item,
  2. Create and display a custom template for the menu.

The latter is a little more complicated, so I’ll cover it in a follow-up post, but the former is something to be covered in a post all its own.

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What Is Development? Building and Constantly Learning

December 16, 2016 /

For a given project, you’ve likely heard that whole spiel about you have:

  1. Time
  2. Budget
  3. Performance

Then you tell a person to pick two. In my experience, this tends to be true, especially when working with tight constraints or smaller budgets. And that’s okay! It’s not a complaint and that doesn’t mean we can’t still do a job well done given said constraints.

But this post is not about that (although it might be fun to discuss). Instead, it’s about a follow-up question that I’ll occasionally get around this same topic:

Once you’ve landed the project, what is development? How do you know how to solve problems for different people?

And I think, at first, it’s an interesting question. I mean, if we all went into a project not knowing what we were doing – regardless of the industry – then that’s a little scary.

In programming it’s its own beast, isn’t it?

What is Development?: It's its own beast.

Anyone remember The Neverending Story?

I mean, we know what the client wants and we know we can build it, but how do we express that we don’t necessarily yet know the code we’re going to write or how we’re going to write it?

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