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Organize WordPress Terms in Alphabetical Order

March 7, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’d argue that, at this point in time, working with WordPress taxonomies has never been easier.

Sure, creating, tagging or categorized, and adding custom taxonomies to posts and custom post types has always been relatively easy, but when it comes to implementing a solution that utilizes custom post types and/or custom taxonomies, then constructing queries can sometimes be a bit of a pain.

But now, we have more API functions and features than ever before:

`tax_query` in WP_Query
`get_term` and `get_terms`
`get_term_children`
…and many more

Of course, there are still cases in which retrieving and organizing data still leaves something to be desired.

I don’t fault WordPress for this, though. It’s more of a function of how data is ordered within databases, applications, and in computers in general.

Everything is Important, Not Everything is Urgent

March 6, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

During one of my first jobs working in software, I was responsible for working on the functionality that allowed the front-end to talk to the middle-ware asynchronously.

That sounds way fancier than it really is, right?

Trying to write fancy words, like a sir.

Basically, I was doing a lot of Ajax. Of course, at the time, it was really cool stuff because it was while Ajax was become more mainstream, and the product on which I was working was using Prototype, and had a lot of neat stuff going on.

But whenever you end up using a new technology, and they are supported in a variety of ways in different browsers, then you’re bound to have edge cases that your users catch that are not caught by you or your testing department.

And if you deeply care about the stuff on which you’re working, getting support tickets for the things on which you’ve worked can sometimes be a major downer.

Should WordPress Editor Styles Be Required For Premium Themes?

March 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

At this point, there are a number of great content management-related features that are built directly into WordPress that are easy for theme developers to employ.

Some of these features include:

Enabling post formats
Automatic feed links
Setting the default content width
Opting to enable (or disable) featured images
…and so on.

And many of these features are widely used by a variety of different themes. Obviously not every theme uses all of the above functions but many use some of them.

But there’s one native feature that, for one reason or another, doesn’t seem to have taken off as much as other features: WordPress editor styles.

This is a bit odd to me, because I think it’s one of the features that can greatly enhance the experience with a theme, and I think it can contribute to create greater differentiation in premium-grade products.

Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog

March 4, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s incredibly popular right now – especially among bloggers – is writing a book, an eBook, or some type of paid digital good (and I’m all for it). Though I’ve no expectation of writing a book of my own anytime soon, I’ve had the pleasure of proof reading other people’s work, and offering feedback, critique, and reviews.

Early last year, I was invited to serve as one of the technical editors for the next edition of Smashing WordPress by Thord Daniel Hedengren.

I’m proud to say that the book hit shelves – both online and for the Kindle (or whatever your eReader of choice may be) – yesterday.

The Challenges of Feedback Loops in Software Development

March 3, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that development teams often talk about is the idea of feedback loops.

Though people may define this a little bit differently depending on their specific circumstance, one way of thinking about them is the amount of time it takes the service provider to request information from the client (or vice versa) and the amount of time as well as the amount of information included in the response.

When it comes to software projects, there are normally two ways in which people consider feedback loops to be valuables:

Small feedback loops
Large feedback loops

So novel, right?

But here’s the question: What do you do when the person to whom you’re providing a service, or the person to whom you’re working with values the opposite type of feedback loop than you do?

Tom McFarlin