Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a course that walks beginners through how to learn to write WordPress plugins. Specifically, the course is available via Envato and is called an Introduction To WordPress Development.
So what all does the course cover? Continue reading
There’s a lot that can be said – both good and bad – as it relates to those who work within the confines of WordPress.
Sure, there are those who spend our days building things for others and who don’t generally converse with the rest of us via whatever social network we prefer, but there’s also a lot of us that do chat daily.
And though the conversations aren’t always as pleasant as they could be (but what conversations are?), one thing that WordPressers (is that what they’re called?) are exceptionally good at doing is coming together for a common cause to help someone go further in their career.
Case in point: Follow along with what’s recently happened with Julie Kuehl and her desire to become a better WordPress contributor.
When working on custom solutions for others – be it for themes, plugins, or some other extension for WordPress – one of the things I think is important is to make sure the Dashboard has the same look and feel as the rest of the native components of WordPress.
That is, I dislike and I disagree when developers and designers deviate from the core WordPress look and feel.
But even for those who try to adhere to using the right elements in the right place and for those who try to stick with laying out dashboard pages using the natural patterns as defined by WordPress, is our best place of reference actually using other pages that exist throughout the dashboard?
Yesterday, I was chatting with a fellow WordPress developer and, as we were reviewing some code, we came across the use of maybe_unserialize. You can read more about it in the Codex, but the short of it is this:
Unserialize value only if it was serialized.
Seems a little odd, doesn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t we know if a value has been serialized?
As programmers, one of the things that we often hear is how we need to expose ourselves to other languages and environments in order to become more diversified in our experience. Or maybe it’s presented in a way that says we need to get to know other environments so we don’t get stale in the areas in which we currently work.
Whatever the case – whatever you’ve heard, or however you’ve heard it – I don’t necessarily disagree with it.
I do think it’s important that we stay up to date on a lot of the new technology that’s available and I do think that it’s important that we learn some of the ways other languages do things. It helps us to become better thinkers.
And by becoming better thinkers, we can become better programmers and we can bring all of that experience back to the place where we started – in the environment in which we work best or in that we like most.
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