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What Is a Developer, Anyway?

March 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the comments of a previous post, some commenters and myself began talking about the idea how the term “developer” is overloaded – that is to say, what is a developer, anyway?

Now, more than ever, when we have a culture that’s aiming to get more and more people learning to code than ever before, and when we have more technologies with which people can write code (and I do mean any kind of code – anything from HTML to assembly), we’re also paving the way for so many people to call themselves a developer [of sorts].

And you know how it goes: If everyone is a developer, then no one’s a developer. Yes, that’s a little trite. Perhaps a better way to say it that: if everyone is a developer, then everyone must develop the same type of things.

And those in technology know that that could not be further from the truth.

Should There Be Developer Documentation for WordPress Themes?

March 17, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone who has been involved with building and/or supporting WordPress themes, then it can’t be understated how important documentation for WordPress themes can be for customers.

Generally speaking, this type of documentation refers to a manual that walks users through how to use a theme, it’s various features, and so on. I think it’s hard to argue that this is something that should be made available for everyone, or, at the very least, for those who have purchased the theme (of course, having a freely available manual can also serve as a marketing resource, but I digress).

But one thing that I don’t think talked about very often is if there should be developer documentation for WordPress themes.

The Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming in WordPress

March 14, 2014 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Please keep the discussion on each article in the series.

When it comes to writing code for WordPress, I’ve been told that I come off as someone who espouses object-oriented programming as the way to write code for WordPress.

Within theme development, that definitely isn’t true, and when it comes to plugins, it’s true only when the plugin has more than than a few functions or few moving parts that are needed to get work to done.

But one of the things that I’ve noticed in speaking with other developers is that people those who aim to start out writing object-oriented code with WordPress are kind of figuring it out as they go.

Though doing this can yield some positive results, it may also end up preventing you from learning some more of that basic techniques – or even some of the more advanced techniques – that object-oriented developers users in their day to day work.

So in my latest series on Envato, I’m working on series targeting the absolute beginner who wishes to learn object-oriented programming, and to do so within the context of WordPress.

How to Sort an Array by Locale in PHP

March 13, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

As easy as it is to translate content within WordPress, there are times in which some of the content in the database may be different than the original locale of the site.

Say, for example, you’re running a site that includes a list of names in a flavor German when your server (or even perhaps your site) is based on an English locale. The goal is to read the names into a collection – rather, an array – and then sort them alphabetically.

Obviously, different locales have different alphabets so what works in, say, the United States won’t necessarily work in Germany.

There are a couple of ways to go about handling this, but the easiest way that I’ve found is to use PHP’s Collator class.

Passing Variables in WordPress: Loops

March 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Check out the first post on passing variables in WordPress using WP_Query.

In the previous post, I shared how I used to use the following rule of them when passing variables in WordPress (and other programming languages, really):

“Only if I need to use this value more than once, then I will store it in a variable.”

And though I still think it’s a fair rule to follow, there are exceptions.

The more time I’ve spent writing code and having to maintain codebases from both myself and others, the more I’ve appreciated having variables defined – even if they are used only once – that hold more complex information for the sake of readability, clarity, and maintainability.

In the last post, I looked at an example as it relates to `WP_Query` since it’s one of the more powerful aspects of the WordPress API, but I’ve found that the same is true in simpler complex such as loops.

Tom McFarlin

What Is a Developer, Anyway?

Should There Be Developer Documentation for WordPress Themes?

The Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming in WordPress

How to Sort an Array by Locale in PHP

Passing Variables in WordPress: Loops