Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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I’m Not So Great at Multitasking

Remember when operating systems came out and the big feature that they touted was their ability to offer a “true multitasking experience” or something along those lines? I mean, this happened within the last 20 years, give-or-take, so it wasn’t that long ago.

But if you ever used a machine prior that did not allow for multitasking, then it really did introduce an entire change into your workflow.

What?! Multiple applications open at the same time and I can share (read: copy and paste) data between them?

Now we can’t really imagine not having that, right? Our phones even do it. But short of whatever the next big technological advancement that we have in the computing industry may be, I think we have hit a massive point on the curve of our ability to multitask.

I know there’s research that says that we – as humans – are not actually able to multitask that well – and I think there is some truth to that – but I also have peers be able to do a much better job of it than I am. That’s completely fine with me, but the point of me bringing it up is that, you know, what works for some doesn’t work for others.

We’re all very different in our abilities to take advantage of this, but I don’t think I’m actually that great at it.

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Expanding The Blog Into a Greater Resource

According to Jetpack, I officially started working on this site back in December 2012. To be clear, this is not my first blog nor is it my first attempt at this particular domain, but December 2012 marks when I first began to get really serious about blogging.

And by “serious about blogging” I mean having a distinct set of goals that I wanted to achieve, topics that I wanted to cover, and how I wanted to go about growing the blog over time. Granted, we all have different metrics of success. Some of us want hits, some of us want low bounce rates (or high time on site), some of us want comments, and some of us want all or some of what’s been mentioned.

To be honest, the main things I set out to do with this blog was to provide a resource on what it’s like to work as a professional WordPress developer (which is a discussion in its own right) and to share my experiences along the way. I have no plans of stopping, but I’d like to think I’ve done a fair job of that over the past couple of years (with the last year being the most notable).

But, just as we do with software projects, the time eventually comes in which you have to remove features, improve features, add new features, and so on in order to continue making whatever it is that you’re doing – be it a service, a product, or even a blog – better.

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How Others Find You (As a Developer)

If you’re working on starting a business – be it a side-income, freelance, agency, or whatever – and you want to build it on top of WordPress, one of the considerations that you have to make is how to actually attain clients.

To be clear, this is not a post on client acquisition, marketing, or anything like that. That’s not the type of stuff I discuss here (nor is it my forte). If you’re really interested in that, check out my friend Curtis McHale’s blog.

Helping you answer the hard questions about your business

Helping you answer the hard questions about your business

Instead, this is more about how you help others find you if you’re not entering the product space.

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WordPress Meta Data: Other Data (Not IDs)

Yesterday, I talked about some of the advantages of using IDs when working with various pieces of WordPress data and populating different input elements, saving it to the database, and more.

For certain types of data, this works well; however, this may not always be true especially as it relates to data types such as taxonomies. This is going to be most notable in WordPress 4.2.

Taxonomy Term Splitting

Taxonomy term splitting coming in WordPress 4.2

If you’re an experienced developer, then I recommend reading the blog post linked above; otherwise, suffice it to say that using IDs may not always be the best option depending on if you’re doing a database migration (and how that migration might be done).

So what else are we left to do?

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WordPress Meta Data: Use IDs (Not Titles)

One of the features that I’ve often found myself having to implement when building custom solutions for others is implementing some type of select box – be it multi-select or single select – or another similar input element that’s [naturally] populated with a list of option elements.

These options may consist of posts, pages, custom post types, categories, taxonomies, etc. It doesn’t really matter what type of information it includes, but it does matter how the information is populated.

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