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The Right Hook To Initialize WordPress Plugins

February 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I first started working on WordPress plugin development, I used to obsess over the right hook to initialize WordPress plugins. That is, I thought there was one hook that would sit above all other hooks and prevent me from needing to go looking through the Codex or other source code to find the right one.

But that’s not the case.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that there aren’t some strategies and some hooks that work better than others in many, many cases, but there are times where whatever you’re used to using isn’t going to work. This depends on how you’re structuring your plugin, and I’ll talk more about that in a moment, but there’s isn’t one hook to rule them all when you want to initialize your WordPress plugins.

By now, you likely know the whole deal about the one ring, right?

Instead, you’ve got to find the one that suits your needs best for the functionality you’re introducing.

Running Nginx on OS X for WordPress Development

February 26, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Running Nginx on OS X is becoming a more attractive alternative to running some of the standard stacks that developers use to set up their environments.

That is, I think many of us are used to running something like this following:

Apache
MySQL
PHP
WordPress

That works because the majority of our hosts have these configurations, and it’s a good practice to have our development environment mirror our staging and production environments.

But Nginx is becoming a popular alternative to Apache and other web servers, so we need to update our local machines accordingly.Getting it set up on OS X takes a little more work.

Getting it set up on OS X takes a little work.

Building Quality into WordPress Projects: A Practical Example

February 25, 2016 / Tom

Building quality into WordPress projects is a topic that sounds a little subjective or maybe even a bit esoteric.

To be honest, I think it certainly helps to have a level of experience in general software development as well as with the way WordPress does things, but it’s something that anyone can learn.

I’d go as far as to say that many people who care about building quality into WordPress projects are people who are consistently learning new ways to go about doing so.

Anyway, in a recent article for Envato, I cover exactly this.

Quality Code and Bloat in WordPress Projects

February 24, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Quality Code and Bloat are two topics that I see a lot of developers either discussing and/or mentioning on the landing pages of their project pages.

I think the conversation around quality code is something that should always be happening. We should always be aiming to get better at what we’re doing, there is always someone who can help us, and there is always someone we can help.

It’s not that I think bloat is something we should accept, nor is it something that I think we should settle for in our projects (or those to which we contribute for that matter). But does it have as an objective definition as quality code?

It’s important to define clearly quality code and bloat as it relates to you, your team, and the solutions you’re providing for others. And I think this is true if you’re working for yourself, in a shop, for an agency, or even as a hobby and you’re building solutions for other people.

Loading WordPress Tries to Download a File

February 23, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a few clients contact me saying that their website won’t load. Instead, their current installation of WordPress tries to download a file whenever they access their site.

This doesn’t matter if you try to access wp-login.php, /wp-admin, or any of the usual directories. Further, if you look at the permissions on each of the files, everything looks in order.

WordPress File Permission Scheme

On top of that, there are no suspicious (read: malicious) files in place that would be redirecting a user’s request or anything like that.

So what gives?

Tom McFarlin

The Right Hook To Initialize WordPress Plugins

Running Nginx on OS X for WordPress Development

Building Quality into WordPress Projects: A Practical Example

Quality Code and Bloat in WordPress Projects

Loading WordPress Tries to Download a File