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If I Knew Then What I Know Now (About Code Reviews)

April 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I draft posts, I normally don’t aim to write to any particular age group, demographic, or personality type – I generally just share my opinions on certain WordPress-related topics and/or development-related material.

But everyone mixes it up a little bit every now and then, right?

And so if I had to define a specific type person to whom this post is most relevant, it would be any one of the following:

Those who are just getting into software and/or web development,
Those who have been into development for a while but have yet to share code online,
And those who spend time critiquing others who are working to get better by publicly sharing code.

Maybe this is geared more towards the usual audience, but whatever the case: this is more of a retrospective post that I would have like to have read prior to where I am now.

Title Capitalization for WordPress

April 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to drafting and editing posts, one of the things that I often have to refer to is how to properly capitalize certain headings. I’d figure after this long, I’d actually have all of the rules memorized, but apparently that’s not the case (no pun intended :).

Anyway, in order to help with this, I was using a third-party tool for double-checking proper capitalization of post titles and heading elements. But, over time, that became a bit tedious so I created a small plugin to automatically and properly capitalize post titles and the heading elements of post content.

Stretching myself as creatively as possible, I’ve opted to call the plugin Title Capitalization for WordPress.

Thoughts on WordPress Developers, Communities, and Products

April 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who are involved in working with building things for WordPress- specifically, premium plugins and themes – then you’re likely plugged closely into what many refer to as “the WordPress community.”

Granted, I’m not saying it’s not a community – it is – but it’s just part of the community, right? I mean, the word encompasses people who use WordPress to blog, people who are fans of the software, those who have contributed to it, those who build things with it, and so on.

All that to say, the community has a variety of facets.

And the challenge to this is that when we spend so much time with our subset of the community, it’s easy to accidentally develop a degree of tunnel vision such that we become at least partially focused on writing things, designing things, or buildings things with our part of the community in mind rather than our customers.

Two Solutions for “JavaScript Reference Error Is Not Defined”

April 17, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re working on any type of web site or web application that has any other dependencies either for its front-end framework – such as Bootstrap and Foundation – or from the site’s foundation – such as Rails or WordPress – there’s a chance that your own JavaScript sources may result in the following:

Reference Error [variable] is not defined.

In some cases, this can be simply referring to a variable that isn’t defined (perhaps the most popular is when jQuery’s $ function has been dereferenced and you’re trying to use $) and simply needs a definition.

But, in other cases, there are times where it may not be as simple.

A Dilemma: Hiding Elements with The WordPress Theme Customizer

April 16, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to working with the WordPress Theme Customizer, one of the options that you’re likely to see in other themes (or that you’re likely to introduce in your own themes) is an option that is responsible for toggling the visibility of an element.

For example, if a text box is empty, you may want to hide an element. Or, more simply, perhaps a user will need to click on an checkbox to toggle whether or not to display an element.

But this presents a dilemma: Either we can send all of the information to the browser and control its visibility using a class name, or we can send less code to the browser but lose a smooth user experience when using the Theme Customizer.

Tom McFarlin

If I Knew Then What I Know Now (About Code Reviews)

Title Capitalization for WordPress

Thoughts on WordPress Developers, Communities, and Products

Two Solutions for “JavaScript Reference Error Is Not Defined”

A Dilemma: Hiding Elements with The WordPress Theme Customizer