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WordPress Theme Updates Are New Themes

August 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I know that there are different ways that people approach building WordPress themes and I’m not one to argue that there’s a single right way to do it. Sure, some ways are better than others, but that’s true of a lot of things.

Personally, I approach building themes, plugins, and so on as I would as if I was building some type of software. That has to do with my background. Similarly, someone who has a background in design and in front-end development will conceptualize what they are building in a different way.

Like I said, all of that’s fine (in fact, I think it’d be interested to see how different people view building themes, but I digress), but I do know that one common thing we always have to think about as it relates to updated our WordPress themes is the actual front-end design.

Specifically, does it make sense to completely change the design of a theme for a different version of the theme?

How Do You Blog? (Wanna Have an Event?)

August 23, 2014 / Tom

For those of you who blog regularly, you likely get a fair share of feedback and it probably comes in many forms.

Praises
Critique
Donations
Profanity
Love
Hate
…and anything and everything in between

You name, it’s been said either in comments, emails, and tweets. But yet, we still write and a bunch of people – perhaps more than ever – are interested in digital publishing in some capacity.

Keyboard

This may be writing a personal blog, this may be writing a business blog, this may be writing a technical blog, or this may be writing a blog about anything and everything. Whatever the case, there are a lot of resources out there that tell you how to be successful at what you do.

That is, they offer prescriptive solutions on what you should do in order to be successful in blogging, but I’d venture to say that if you asked 10 people what it means to be successful in blogging, you’d get 5, 8, maybe even 10 answers.

So where does that leave us, and where does that leave the people espousing all of the information on how to be successful doing it? Continue reading

Single Page Tabbed Navigation in WordPress

August 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In a couple of recent projects, I’ve been tasked with adding tabbed navigation to various WordPress templates. The thing is, these tabs work in such a way that all of the information is loaded on the page so when the user clicks on the tab, the contents of the page appear without having to do a page refresh.

In some cases, it may be best to load pages via Ajax, in some cases, it’s better to load things up all in the first page load. This particular post is about the best strategies for that (that’s a debate for another post).

Design Patterns for Refactoring: The Facade Pattern

August 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For some time now, one of the things that I’ve been considering writing about is the idea of refactoring.

Not necessarily in an incredibly specific sense – because each project is different – but in the sense of using some strategies that can help to take an existing project that’s running in a production server and slowly begin to refactor it so that its architecture changes but the functionality remains the same.

Anyone who’s worked in the software world knows just how nasty a codebase can get, and WordPress is no different. And I’m not talking about WordPress core – I’m talking about plugins, themes, apps, or whatever else it is that you may be building on top of WordPress.

For the most part, we start our projects with the idea that it’s going to have a great architecture, a pristine design, and that it’s going to basically be the best thing that we’ve ever worked with.

At some point, usually due to external factors, the thing devolves into a pile that we no longer want to touch, and we hope that it holds together to continue solving the problem at hand.

But it doesn’t have to be that way and even if the code you end up working with – be it your own, or someone else’s – has devolved into a big ball of mud, there’s still a strategy (probably multiple strategies) that you can use in order to refactor it into something far more elegant.

Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good

August 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s becoming more and more common place regarding front end frameworks, utilities, or applications is the use of the phrase “it’s bloated” followed by an argument as to why we should dismiss it.

No, this isn’t something that’s new, but it’s something that’s becoming appears to be becoming more mainstream – at least as far as I can tell – in how people describe the tools, apps, frameworks, libraries, and other tools that they work with today, or have worked with at some point in the past.

Obviously, this isn’t to say that nothing is bloated – I mean, I’ve written enough articles on the idea on “decisions, not options” and on how things should be more focused on a single niche – but sometimes I think that we often write off certain utilities as being “bloated” when that’s not exactly the case.

Just because something has a number of features that you don’t use doesn’t make it bloated.

Tom McFarlin

WordPress Theme Updates Are New Themes

How Do You Blog? (Wanna Have an Event?)

Single Page Tabbed Navigation in WordPress

Design Patterns for Refactoring: The Facade Pattern

Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good