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Writing Good Git Commit Messages

July 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Git commit messages – actually, any commit messages – are one of those things that I believe start off with the best of intentions.

That is, we tell ourselves that from the outset of a project that this time is going to be different than the last time. Whereas, the last time, our commit messages started off well but, by the end, we’re writing things like:

Fixed some things
Removed stuff
Refactored the function

Sure, this is a bit facetious, but the point is that if you look at commit messages for a lot of projects, they start off far more detailed in the beginning than by the end of the project.

I’m guilty of this, too. How, then, do we stick with good commit messages (and specifically, good Git commit messages, since so many open source developers use that service)?

Object-Oriented Partials in WordPress

June 30, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Partials in WordPress, regardless of if they are part of a plugin or part of a theme, can help maintaining a project much easier (let alone building a project).

But if you’re working with them to help drive your settings pages or your WordPress administration pages, part of working with them is making sure they are adequately represented on the server-side, too.

Generally speaking, this is usually referred to as the domain logic or may even be thought of as part of the “model” or “controller” code when thinking regarding MVC. Of course, this isn’t MVC, and I’m no fan of trying to apply patterns where they don’t fit.

My point, though, is that I’m talking about object-oriented classes that are responsible for managing data and handling coordinating information rendered in the partials and how the user interacts with it.

Partials and Templates in WordPress

June 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Templates in WordPress is a topic that seems to come up for discussion every now and again. There are plugins aiming to make it possible, too. And though I’m intrigued by the idea, I’ve yet to go all in on it.

Timber for Templates in WordPress

That’s a topic of discussion for another post, though.

Over the last few years of writing plugins for others, one of the things I’ve found to be one of the easiest things to do is to separate our views into partials.

Installing PHP CodeSniffer with WordPress

June 28, 2016 / Tom

In previous posts, I’ve talked about using PHP CodeSniffer with WordPress, how to install it (in a variety of ways), and why I think it’s important.

In continuing the series on code smells and writing higher quality code for WordPress (by avoiding code smells), I followed-up the initial article with two other pieces. The first article covers a high-level definition of code smells.

The second article, which I outline below, talks about how to install PHP CodeSniffer with WordPress starting from ground zero.

The Clean Architecture and WordPress

June 27, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past couple of weeks, I (along with others in the comments) have been talking about things such as testing, namespaces, and more. When building well-architected, testable, and scalable software, these are all relevant topics.

But they only scratch the surface of some of the many ways in which we can manage project architecture.

Developers have been experimenting (and using) WordPress with a variety of different tooling such as different web servers (like IIS – good luck :) and with different database servers.

And when it comes to dealing with various types of third-party dependencies like database servers, creating a proper architecture is key to making sure your code is portable between environments and for other reasons, such as testing.

Tom McFarlin

Writing Good Git Commit Messages

Object-Oriented Partials in WordPress

Partials and Templates in WordPress

Installing PHP CodeSniffer with WordPress

The Clean Architecture and WordPress