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Using Tap WordPress Hosting (and a Giveaway!)

February 3, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to running this blog, I’m not nearly as technical as some of my peers.

In fact, I try to keep the hosting environment has much of a black box as possible. I want to be able to focus on blogging – not tweaking servers, configuring settings, dealing with staging environments, caching, CDNs, and all that normally comes with major projects.

That isn’t to say I don’t do that for the projects on which I work – there’s a time and a place for everything – but my goal for this site is to focus on blogging. To that end, when it comes to hosting, I don’t look for something that offers the greatest feature set with all of the fancy knobs to turn and tweaks to make.

Instead, I look for something that works well, that performs quickly out-of-the-box, that has great support (when needed), that grants me S/FTP access to my files, and then let’s me get on with blogging with minimal hassle.

Tap WordPress Hosting

For the past few months, I’ve been trying out Tap WordPress Hosting and, generally speaking, I’ve been really impressed.

A Limited Feature Set of WordPress Themes

February 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges that comes with building WordPress themes is that there’s this disposition that we have to want to make sure that for every option in the backend, we have a corresponding option for the feature in the front end.

For example, does the WordPress dashboard support multi-level menus? Yes. We look at that and think that our themes need to support multi-level menus. Same goes for several other options. But why is that?

WordPress is a content management system and not all content is made the same.

Decisions on Documentation for the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

January 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I first launched the landing page for the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate last year, the main idea was to grow a site around the single landing page that offered code examples, how to’s, and other forms of documentation.

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Homepage

But I’ve spent the last month working on some special material for the Boilerplate (that I’ll talk about in an upcoming post) which got me thinking more about what I wanted to offer in terms of documentation for the project.

And I’ve changed my mind.

The Best Developer Tools Are Your Favorites

January 29, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the past few years, I – like pretty much every other developer ever – have given my tools a fair shake to determine what it is that I like working with the most.

But what’s funny is that “what I like working with the most,” is a phrase that carries a different connotation with different people.

For example, for some, it means that the tool could be completely ugly but if it gets the job done then it’s good enough. For others, it means that it needs to look good and function well in order to help them feel productive about getting their work done.

Case in point: Look at some of the build tools that we have available. We have Bower, Grunt, CodeKit, and more all of which essentially offer much of the same thing, but how they go about offering said functionality is different.

For some, one way is great; for others, it’s not so great. So what’s a developer to do?

The Timeless WordPress Theme Design

January 28, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As a disclaimer, this entire post is written purely from the perspective of a developer. I’m not a designer, I’ve never claimed to be, I never will claim to be, and any type of design that I do is usually based around principles and foundations and guidelines that I’ve read and followed elsewhere on the web.

With that said, there’s been interesting conversations around some of the more popular design types as of late – some that are already retired, some that are still around, and some that are still beginning to emerge.

This includes trends such as Skeumorphic Design, Flat Design, and Material Design. And the reason I bring them up is because, at some point or another, we’ve seen these take their place (or beginning to take place) within the context of WordPress themes.

Tom McFarlin

Using Tap WordPress Hosting (and a Giveaway!)

A Limited Feature Set of WordPress Themes

Decisions on Documentation for the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

The Best Developer Tools Are Your Favorites

The Timeless WordPress Theme Design