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The Best of Times and Worst of Times of WordPress Development

April 29, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the greatest strengths that’s offered to designers and developers who work with WordPress is the ability to use just about any client-side technology that we’d like. That is to say that for anyone who is working on building themes has the ability to chose from a seemingly endless number of frameworks, libraries, tools, and so on.

Off the cuff and in no certain order, we have technologies like:

Bower
Bootstrap
Composer
LESS
Foundation
Sass
Grunt
Any number of jQuery plugins
Backbone.js
CodeKit
…and so on forever and ever.

The Dangers of Pricing in WordPress Business Models

April 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the business models that is common (although not as common as it used to be) in the economy of WordPress is the unlimited support for for a single purchase. That is, you buy a theme or a plugin, and you pay for the product and the purchase often includes a license for lifetime support.

For those of you who have made a similar purchase, then you’ve likely seen some type of pricing defined like this:

$X for the purchase of the product
Use the product on Y number of domains
Unlimited support and updates

And then the above scheme is tiered such that X and Y change based on the amount of money paid toward the product.

But, like I said, this is nothing new and it’s something that we see frequently see, but anyone who has worked with this particular business or who followed this through to its inevitable conclusion realizes that this is a completely unsustainable business model.

To that end, if more small businesses based on WordPress want to have a better shot of “making it” (where “making it” is defined as staying in business – not some arbitrary amount of money to be made), then this particular pricing model needs to die.

The Difference Between Principles and Advice in Leadership

April 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I read a post on LinkedIn which has since been taken down (though thanks Google cache!). Though you can read the entire post in the linked, cached version of the page, a portion of the content can be found here:

I know I fired this person, but I considered that merely a technical matter. I thought we agreed it was the best option for all involved, allowing him to grow professionally elsewhere. It never crossed my mind that he had been FIRED. We just reached the end of our partnership, for now. Time to move on for both of us.

Emphasis mine.

When it comes to topics about running a business, leadership, team dynamics, and all of that, I leave that stuff to be covered elsewhere – this is not the blog for it; however, there are a couple of aspects of leadership and running a business that keep cropping up and that are of interest to me.

And since there are a many people who work in the WordPress Development Community are freelancers, self-employed, or have some type of entrepreneurial venture – be it full-time or part-time – it seems like it’s worth covering even if it’s just in a single post.

To be clear, it’s not that I’m an expert or even an authority on the topic.

Hardly.

But I, like many, have thoughts on some of the material that I read, and figured it may be worth sharing from time-to-time.

Updating a WordPress Post in the Save Post Action

April 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those who have worked with WordPress long enough, you’re likely familiar and comfortable with how hooks works – that is, you’re familiar and comfortable with the event-driven design pattern.

Sure, it’s a bit different than many other frameworks and foundations that use MVC, MVVM, and some other remix of the model-view paradigm, but I don’t think that’s really here nor there in terms of which is better. This is what WordPress uses and it’s easy enough – and powerful enough – to work with once you’ve got it.

But that’s not to say it’s not without it’s nuances.

For example, one of the challenges of working with event-driven design is understanding how hooks work throughout the page lifecycle, how it’s possible to actually get stuck in an infinite loop if you’re not careful, and how to work with the various hooks to prevent this from happening.

Regarding Our Efforts at Pragmatic Programming

April 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of programming comes in something as seemingly trivial as how to best name and organize files. And by that, I mean the process of figuring out what to name directories and files all the way down to how to best name classes, variables, and functions.

If it doesn’t sound trivial, then maybe it just sounds silly especially to those who are more experienced programmers.

Interestingly enough, this is a bit more of a challenge for some, but not so much for others. After all, isn’t this is where standards come in to play? That is to say, isn’t this where they help us make decisions on how to avoid problems just like this?

Sure, in some ways, but there are times in which standards may not cover all cases or certain aspects of what we’re trying to do.

So what then?

Tom McFarlin

The Best of Times and Worst of Times of WordPress Development

The Dangers of Pricing in WordPress Business Models

The Difference Between Principles and Advice in Leadership

Updating a WordPress Post in the Save Post Action

Regarding Our Efforts at Pragmatic Programming