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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.

Why I Back Post Status

January 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve been around the WordPress journalism / blogosphere / whatever-you-want-to-call-it enough, then you’ve likely seen the rise and fall of several news sites. Some of them were great and then went completely dark; others have been slowly going on the up and up.

Right now, I can definitively say that my two favorite journalism sites for WordPress are WP Tavern and Post Status. I’ve gotta give props to the Tavern because they’ve been around for quite a while, and just before we thought they were going to have to close their doors, they ended up receiving corporate backing.

The WordPress Tavern

Good news for us, right? One thing that makes me a little skeptical about that is that it can occasionally influence how stories are written but, to be fair, that doesn’t seem to be the case with The Tavern.

But then this past week, Brian Krogsgard introduced the new premium subscription service for Post Status. I’m a fan and I think this is something that many of us need to think critically about before joining.

How To Find Posts Without Meta Data

January 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve been working on a very simple plugin lately – more of which I’ll talk about next month – that’s serving as a demo for a larger project that I’ve been working on.

In short, the plugin gives editors the ability to exclude posts from the main index feed of the WordPress blog. This means that the blog post is still accessible via direct URL, but it won’t show up in the main feed of the site.

This is achieved by the following process:

Introduce a meta box into the post editor dashboard
Add a check box that gives the user the ability to check whether or not to exclude the post
Use a hook to exclude those posts form the dashboard

It sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

My Suite of Apps: SimCity BuildIt

January 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Rarely do I talk about games on this blog, but considering I’ve been doing a few posts on the types of apps I have running on both my desktop and my laptop, it seemed fitting to share it.

To be honest, I don’t play many games. I have an obsessive personality and if I get into something too deep, then it can end up costing me far more than a few hours lost here or there (and that’s not a good thing when you’re trying to run a business, trying to raise to kids, and trying to generally be wise with the way that you’re spending your time).

Anyway, when I was young, I was completely enamored with SimCity 2000 (“reticulating splines“). Though I don’t know if I was really old enough to get all aspects of the game, I was pretty good about filling up a map with a city and then generating revenue.

Their tax dollars at work

But then I had to get out of it for a bit. The games continued to get more and more advanced and school, life, and so on became busier and busier.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, SimCity BuildIt was released.

Tom McFarlin