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

December 21, 2016 / Tom

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.

WooCommerce Menu, Part 2: A WooCommerce Page

December 20, 2016 / Tom

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.

WooCommerce Menu, Part 1: Adding a Menu

December 19, 2016 / Tom

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.

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

Introduce a new video menu item,
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.

What Is Development? Building and Constantly Learning

December 16, 2016 / Tom

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

Time
Budget
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?

Versions App For WordPress Plugins

December 15, 2016 / Tom

Versions App is one of those Subversion clients that’s been around for years. In fact, when I moved to Mac, it might have been the first one I tried.

Versions App For WordPress Plugins

I liked it, too. It did what I needed it to do, it did it well, and it was simple. And that last part, simplicity, is something that I really want out of software these days.

Maybe I’m getting old. Or maybe I’m developing better taste. I’m going to go with the latter one for this.

Anyway, for some time I ended up using a slightly more advanced client that had a wider range of features, and that did some really good stuff as far as Subversion is concerned. But over time, I’ve migrated further and further away from Subversion.

And in doing so, I’ve begun to re-evaluate my tools (as one should do from time-to-time).

Tom McFarlin

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

WooCommerce Menu, Part 2: A WooCommerce Page

WooCommerce Menu, Part 1: Adding a Menu

What Is Development? Building and Constantly Learning

Versions App For WordPress Plugins