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Tab Management in Chrome with Toby

December 9, 2016 / Tom

Tab management is one of those problems that’s kind of funny.

Remember back in the day when we had browsers and we opened multiple windows so we could track all of the various sites on which we were browsing or on which we were working or whatever?

The browser everyone loved to hate.

Yeah. Those days.

Then remember when Firefox came along (or one of the open source alternatives), it was kind of nice to be able to install an extension or add-on that added tab management.

But now we’ve just kind of increased the problem exponentially. At least I have. Because I have multiple windows each with multiple tabs.

And yeah, the Merge Windows extension is nice because it helps bring everything together. But then we’ve gotta deal with saving our session (which there are some nice extensions for that) or keeping track of where we were.

That’s where tab management starts to get a little bit rougher.

View WordPress Page Templates in the Admin

December 8, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Three years ago, I published a small plugin both on GitHub and in the plugin repository that made it possible view WordPress page templates in the admin.

I called it Page Template Dashboard – naming things isn’t easy, and even when you do, it’s obviously not great – but WordPress has changed a lot in three years.

View WordPress Page Templates with Page Template Dashboard

Remember when WordPress looked like this?

In three years, a lot can change in your personal life too, and this makes it hard to work on personal projects. But when you can steal a few hours – usually late at night – it makes it possible to revisit and update projects like this.

So last night, I release the latest version of Page Template Dashboard.

WooCommerce Integrations with WordPress Namespaces

December 7, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

WooCommerce Integrations, which I’ll talk at length about a bit more in the moment, is a neat way to provide your custom set of options into the native WooCommerce platform.

But if you’re using namespaces, WooCommerce, WordPress, and more then it can get bit cumbersome when trying to make all of it work together.

Luckily, thanks to the nature of open source and people involved, we don’t have to operate by ourselves, and there’s plenty of people and resources available to help us get our questions answered and get our work done.

I’ll talk a bit more about these particular individuals later in the post, but first I want to cover WooCommerce integrations and how to make them work with namespaced code.

Setting Up MailCatcher for MAMP and WordPress

December 6, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though it’s been around longer than Local (or previously Pressmatic), MailCatcher was brought to the attention of many WordPress developers.

MailCatcher, MAMP, and WordPress: MailCatcher

In short, it makes it easy to start monitoring local development emails sent from WordPress. And if you’re someone dealing with templates, email customization, and more then you know how tiring it can be to tweak, send, tweak, send, and repeat.

If you’re not using Local, it’s still possible – and easy – to set up MailCatcher. And if you do a lot of work with anything that deals with WordPress emails (especially in eCommerce), then I think it’s worth setting up.
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Reasons For Not Writing Unit Tests

December 5, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I had my first internship, I was tasked with maintaining a legacy ASP application. This included everything on the front-end, through the application layer, using Visual Basic and VBScript, as well as the database that was primarily used as a datastore for XML.

What are interns for, though, right?

I’m kidding: I actually like the idea of having junior programmers work on maintenance tasks or bugs at first to get a feel for where things are (or were) before jumping into where they are headed.

At the same time, I was also learning and reading a good bit about unit testing. It was past the time when it was “the hot new thing,” but it had hit a point where a lot of people were talking about it.

It was finding its way into day-to-day conversations. It was becoming part of the curriculum of any software engineering course or material that any software engineer should know. It was coming up in interviews, conversations, blog posts, books, and so on.

In short:

It was becoming impossible to escape.

Either you knew how to unit test, you knew TDD, or you didn’t.

if you didn’t, then you might get an SMH from a potential employer,
you might get a condescending comment from a peer,
or you might get roped into a conversation covered in sheer excitement from that guy over in the cube over who’s been aiming for 100% code coverage since the company rolled out the testing infrastructure.

I’m not bashing testing (because I think it has its place and I think we need to know how to write them) and I’m not downplaying having a significant level of code coverage in a given application (because it is important).

But the amount of testing can be done is also related to a handful of others things that programmers don’t often seem to discuss: time, budget, and [optionally] pragmatism.

This post is already getting longer than what some of us like to read (are you reading this sentence, even?), so I don’t wax poetic about this for too long but if you have the time, entertain me.

If not:

The point that I’m ultimately working towards is that I don’t think it’s always as simple as basically “just write the damn unit tests.”

There are other things at work beyond just that each of which influences what we’re doing.

Tom McFarlin

Tab Management in Chrome with Toby

View WordPress Page Templates in the Admin

WooCommerce Integrations with WordPress Namespaces

Setting Up MailCatcher for MAMP and WordPress

Reasons For Not Writing Unit Tests