Page 256 of 428

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate: Testing 1, 2, 3

August 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In 2011, I released the first version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and have been maintaining it (along with contributions from other programmers) ever since.

Over the last couple of years, the Boilerplate became quite active – as far as very small projects are concerned – with issues, pull requests, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to maintain, and it’s been really neat to receive so much feedback from other developers in terms of making the Boilerplate more resilient and from those who were just getting started with plugin development.

Earlier this year, I shared that I – along with a small group of other people – began working on the next iteration of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. That is, we were initiating a complete rewrite of the project.

As of today, I’m officially launching a beta of sorts of 3.0.0 of the Boilerplate. This is a major rewrite and refactoring of the Boilerplate in the state that its had for the past few years, and there’s a lot of change coming not only to the Boilerplate itself, but to new site, documentation, forks, and so on.

JavaScript and WordPress Page Performance

August 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I was having a conversation with a fellow WordPress developer about improving page performance as it relates to JavaScript. Specifically, we were talking about if it makes sense to load JavaScript sources at the bottom of the page.

If you’ve done any client-side development for a moderate length of time, odds are strong that you’re well-aware that it’s considered a best practice to include JavaScript sources before the closing body tag rather than in the head element.

This is because it allows the browser to render the page more quickly without waiting for larger files to download (and JavaScript files are normally heavier than HTML documents because of their file size and the processing they do on the DOM).

There’s a lot that could be said with respect to this in terms of general web development, but in terms of WordPress, opting to enqueue your scripts at the bottom of the page versus the top of the page may require a bit more consideration.

The Beginner’s Guide to Type Coercion

August 16, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This week, I started a new series on Tuts+ Code that walks readers through understanding type coercion.

Type Coercion

Generally speaking, the series of articles starts at the most basic level by discussing strongly typed and weakly typed languages, data types and how they work in different environments, and then begins to branch out more into how data types work within dynamically typed languages.

The main motivation for this is because people who are coming from a strongly-typed background, or those who are just getting into programming may end up finding themselves making a few mistakes especially as it relates to comparisons, conditionals, and other similar evaluations.

This series aims to mitigate that.

Why You Should Write Meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

August 15, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re someone who’s building solutions with WordPress regardless of if they are themes, plugins, or applications, then odds are you’ve had to deal with saving some type of information to the database.

Granted, anytime you create a post, a page, or anything that stores data, you’re entering information into the database.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Instead, I’m talking about times when you’re having to work with the Options API, the Theme Customizer API, or one of the meta APIs (like the Post Meta API). In this case, you’re working with the core application to save and retrieve information from the database.

When doing this – especially in development and possibly in staging – it’s likely that you’re having to write the code, run a test (automated or not), and then take a look at the way the record is stored in the database to make sure it saved as expected.

In my experience, there are a handful of things that can be done to make this process a little bit easier and make your code a little bit cleaner and one of these has to do with writing meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

Aim for a Single Way to Achieve a Single Task

August 14, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to user interface design and user experience, I’m no expert (nor have I ever claimed to be). I’m barely an intermediate. if even that. I’m fortunate enough people to have peers who are willing to review certain projects in order to help tighten up certain aspects of my work.

I don’t think we should ever be afraid or ashamed to ask people who are more skilled than us in a certain area to help us out (or to pay them, even!). After all, we have nothing but to benefit from it.

This doesn’t mean that a couple of ideas, rules, and general practices haven’t come up over the years.

For example, one of the rules of thumb that I have whenever I am working on a user interface is to try to make sure the user only has one way of achieving something.

In other words, I don’t like it when there are multiple ways to do the same thing. I think that it confuses the user, it complicates the code, and it makes it more difficult to maintain over time. The code aspect of this is enough content for another post.

For now, it’s just about finding a single way to achieve one task.

Tom McFarlin

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate: Testing 1, 2, 3

JavaScript and WordPress Page Performance

The Beginner’s Guide to Type Coercion

Why You Should Write Meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

Aim for a Single Way to Achieve a Single Task