Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Generally speaking, people often set out to try to set their plans, goals, and resolutions at the beginning of the year. I did though it’s not really something I typically do, and here we are at the beginning of March and I’ve really only done a portion of what I thought I was going to be doing.

I mean, I haven’t even touched Swift yet (and I don’t know if I will end up doing so).

Then again, Pressware has been growing and has resulted in the need for me to make some changes both to what I’m doing with some of my open source plugins and with what I’m planning to do with the business itself.

It’s both an exciting time, but it’s also a really weird time because it’s causing me to evaluate some changes that I’m making in a number of things that I’ve been working on for several years at this point.

When this happens, I can’t help but feel a little bit of tension – maybe even some fear – of letting certain things go. On top of that, I think that it can also breed a sense of relief as it may bring about a little bit of breathing room.

But does it really? I mean, when we wind down work on one thing, are we just making space to spin up something new?

For me personally, what I’m finding out – and it’s sort of a cliche – is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Though I may be winding down certain things, other things are starting up.

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Aesop Story Engine and WordPress (Why Do We Reject Our Own Innovation?)

For some time now, I’ve been a big fan of using WordPress for web application development, but I think that developers actually embracing the CMS (let alone seeing the CMS) as a foundation for something like that is still a couple of years off.

Sure, we’re going to see some people using it for things like that. I mean, we’re already seeing some out-of-the-box applications like AppPresser, but projects like that are the exceptio, not the rule. In my own experience, I’ve found that clients are very interested in using WordPress, but using it for more application-like capabilities.

This doesn’t mean that gigs for themes, plugins, and what not are slowing down, but that people are wanting web applications for themselves or their companies, but want to be able to administer it using the WordPress dashboard or using a some custom front-end work.

But that’s beside the point.

What I’m getting at is that as developers, designers, and other people end up seeing WordPress as potential foundation for web application development, the more innovative things we’re going to see entering the space.

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A Case For Dependency Management with WordPress

Yesterday, I came across a comment that was in the context of a larger post that I think does an excellent job of highlighting what we – as theme developers – should be doing with our projects rather than what we’re currently doing.

For those who know @Rarst, this wisdom will come as no surprise, but for those of you who are new to theme development, or WordPress development of any kind, then I think you’ll find this insightful:

We can chuckle and point fingers at bundled plugin monstrosities. But the reason those monstrosities exist include WordPress strategically for years disregarding need for third party infrastructure and dependency management. It’s telling that it has been priority so low, that even backwards compatibility was broken on related parts of core without a second thought.

So how does this translate, exactly? That is, what is it that we’re doing or that we can do in order to make theme development, plugin development, or both much stronger, resilient, and generally better than what we’re doing now?

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A Quick Tip For Reading Files with PHP

If you’re in the business of building plugins – regardless of if it’s for fun or profit – the odds that you’re eventually going to have to read the contents of a file are relatively high.

This could be for importing data from a file, this could be for parsing data out of something that a customer has provided, or this could just be used to help drive the user interface. Whatever the case, PHP offers a number of different functions for opening files and reading files.

This can be convenient, but in my experience, there’s one process that I’ve found to be more resilient than the other options when it comes to reading files and I thought I’d share the general process here.

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The Constraints of an API Are a Good Thing

Because WordPress is built using a number of languages none of which are compiled, it makes it completely possible to make things happen within your theme, plugin, or extension by circumventing the native APIs.

This means that if you wanted to, say, introduce some type of element on one of the dashboard screens or you wanted to introduce functionality into one of your templates that didn’t previously exist, there’s a strong chance that you’d be able to do so simply by “brute force.”

And by that, I mean that you’d be able to make something happen – and probably work correctly – without using the native set of APIs that are available.

But when you’re faced with that situation, I highly recommend taking a step back and determining if you’re approaching the problem in the best way possible given your set of constraints.

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