Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Pressware Plugins is something that I’ve been talking about in a few different posts before this one. I’ve spoken of the project in the following posts:
And I’ve also talked about the first, free plugin we’ve launched: Easier Excerpts.
As of today, Eric and I have officially launched the Pressware Plugins storefront, so I thought it’d be a good idea to talk about what the purpose of the project is, what you can expect, and what’s in the pipeline of work.
This weekend, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Atlanta 2016. If you’re in town for the conference, then let’s aim to say hey or to hang out a bit at the conference.
There are a lot of great speakers and a lot of great sessions from which you get to choose. And, if you’re a beginner, don’t forget to check out the beginner’s workshop that will be later today (at the time of this writing).
This year, I’ll be talking on Sunday at 11:00 am so if you have a chance to fit it into your schedule, then I hope to see you there.
Specifically, I’ll be talking through a few things that aim to give people a primer on professional WordPress development practices.
Easier Excerpts for WordPress is a simple plugin, the first for Pressware Plugins actually, that we recently released.
When you think about combining the tediousness of blogging couple with the proverbial low-hanging fruit, this seemed like a natural choice for a first product. Plus, it falls in line with our goal of trying to help make a better blogging experience.
But if you’re like me, then you like reading some of the back-stories that go into projects like this. So here’s some more information on the plugin, specifically for you bloggers, and then a back-story as to why we chose it, how we chose it, and what’s up next.
I’m of the opinion that being able to debug code is one of the must-have skills of any professional developer so it stands to reason that I think if you’re working with WordPress in a professional capacity, you should be able to debug WordPress projects.
It doesn’t matter if you’re working on the server-side or the client-side; if you’re writing code, then you need to be able to:
Though debuggers are common place in practically every programming environment, I recently wrote a short tutorial and filmed a short video for Envato that walks users through how to debug WordPress projects.
Escaping strings for WordPress is something that developers should be doing at any place in which the user can be sending information across the wire to the database.
Core offers some nice API functions for this. But if you’re writing a raw database query using $wpdb (which is something that I recommend only when an API doesn’t offer what’s needed), then there are still options, but you may need to fall back to a native PHP function.
Case in point: mysqli_real_escape_string.
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