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Easily Install phpDocumentor Alongside MAMP Pro

June 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the WordPress Coding Standards, and the importance of documenting your code, but I’ve not actually spent a lot of time discussing how easy it is to actually generate documentation for your themes.

And by documentation, I mean an actual site that provides your DocBlocks such in a clean and organized fashion – you know, sites that are generated by tools like phpDocumentor.

An example of a site generated by phpDocumentor.

In other posts, I’ve mentioned that I use MAMP Pro for part of my development stack, so if you’re looking for steps to install phpDocumentor, it’s actually really easy to do.

Freelancing and Working With Others (Or “Do Not Be Forever Alone”)

June 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Every now and then, I’ll get questions via email, Twitter, or blog comments that I want to answer. The thing is, answer in and of itself would be longer than the original blog post itself so I try to keep it concise for the sake of not detracting too much from the initial post.

When that happens, I usually respond as much as I can without going over board, but I actually do keep a copy of the questions so that I can answer them later.

And that normally goes well on days like today.

Change the WordPress Database Schema?

June 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those developers who are coming to WordPress from other platforms such as .NET or other major database driven system where they are responsible for devising their own database schema, one of the problems that’s often seen in the WordPress-world is this desire to create sets of tables that may or may not interface with the existing WordPress tables.

Just as it takes time to learn the WordPress event-driven paradigm from, say, Model-View-Controller, or something else, it takes time to make sure you fully grok the stack on which you’re working.

And starting at the foundation of WordPress is the underlying database schema.

Including a Template in a WordPress Plugin (Well, a Template Part)

June 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last year, I wrote a post that provided a way on how to include a page template in a WordPress plugin. There’s an accompanying project on GitHub that’s been maintained and relatively-well updated since.

Although this post is similar in nature, it doesn’t exactly deal with templates, but parts of code that may be considered partials (or template parts, in WordPress).

Let’s say that you’ve got a single post and you want to append a template to the end of the content. The content can be a little more complicated that markup because that’s easy enough to do inline, isn’t it?

So, for all intents and purposes, let’s say that we have a partial that includes a form that can be used to submit some type of information.

A WordPress Theme Developer Introspective

June 17, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This past weekend, notable, highly respectable [and former] Automattician Philip Arthur Moore wrote a fantastic article that’s been making it’s way through the usual suspects and circles entitled We’re Ruining WordPress (This Needs To Stop).

But in the hopes that some of those of you who read this blog are fellow bloggers, publishers, readers, designers, developers, and so on, I wanted to link it here with you to make sure you didn’t miss it and because I hope it resonates with you.

In short: If you’ve yet to read it, I highly recommend it – it short, poignant, and will likely strike a chord with many of you who are looking to contribute to the WordPress economy, have a business within the WordPress economy, or who enjoy following the WordPress economy.

Many of the things that Philip outlines in his post is what we’ve seen happen in other economies, too: Just look at Google Play or the App Store and how little apps cost. Games that used to run us $30 – $50 on a given system now cost $4.99 to $9.99 and people still complain (and it’s not even worth talking about in-app purchases).

Anyway, as much as I enjoy writing about WordPress and the various facets that come with it, and as much as I enjoy doing so with the occasional meme and what not, this particular post hit home with me because I’ve been working in the WordPress economy for several years at this point, I’m getting ready to push forward with a new effort, and because I’ve been thinking about this for the last few months (and clearly more so over the last few days), I thought I’d write a WordPress theme developer introspective of sorts on how it feels to be a part of the WordPress theme developer economy, its challenges, what I want to see change, and what I plan to begin doing as soon as possible.

Tom McFarlin

Easily Install phpDocumentor Alongside MAMP Pro

Freelancing and Working With Others (Or “Do Not Be Forever Alone”)

Change the WordPress Database Schema?

Including a Template in a WordPress Plugin (Well, a Template Part)

A WordPress Theme Developer Introspective