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Developer Distractions: The Available Tools

February 14, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

“A computer on every desk in every home”

When it comes to computing, development, and related technologies, it’s really easy to be inspired by individuals such as Steve Jobs – and many people in our industry are.

I certainly am.

But I also remember, back in the 90’s, reading a lot about Bill Gates, his mission to have a computer on “every desk in every home,” the things they were working on at Microsoft, and certain things about programming that I was too young to really understand (but found interesting, nonetheless).

Recently, I came a cross a really neat interview with Gates from 1986 in which he talks about a number of things – his experience in programming, Microsoft, where computing was headed, and so on.

Mayer For WordPress – Now Available at WordPress.com

February 13, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Mayer is officially for sale on WordPress.com.

This particular release has been a long time coming, so much so that I’ve discussed it a number of times on the blog already:

Of course, after several rounds of beta, code reviews, feature changes, and so on, things are bound to change over the course of development.

But today, Mayer is officially at `1.0` and is ready for purchase.

Separation of Concerns with Queries and Helper Functions

February 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous post, I shared a little bit about the idea of separation of concerns – a concept that’s usually isolated to software development – and one way in which it can be achieved as it relates to working with WordPress templates.

But there’s always more work that can be done to help make our code as modular, reusable, maintainable, and readable (and any other buzzwords that I forgot ;) as it relates to programming projects.

One of the challenges of working in a system like WordPress is that it doesn’t necessarily promote practices that are typically seen in more classical programming environments, but – the way that I see it – we’re doing many of the same things:

Solving problems through the use of code,
Abstracting reusable components,
Querying for information from a database through the use of provided APIs,
Keeping areas of the code modular and related to the areas of the application and their best related,
…and more.

So why should we avoid trying to apply better programming practices to our code regardless of if it’s a high-end object-oriented application, or – say – a theme with a number of different templates, JavaScript, styles, and queries (and even more things such as post types and taxonomies depending on the nature of your project)?

After all, it’s all code, right?

Separation of Concerns with WordPress Templates

February 11, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the biggest pain points in working with WordPress templates – or, really, any PHP and HTML in general – is how we end up jumping from language to language within the context of a single file.

Obviously, this is unavoidable. I mean, the same thing even happens in other frameworks like .NET and Rails, but one of the things that I’ve seen that continually sets WordPress apart (and I don’t mean that in a good way) is that developers often don’t bother to spend time separating their concerns as it relates to the work being done in any given template.

A Vanilla Template File

For those who have been working in WordPress for several years likely know this, and know the frustration this causes.

For those who have recently hopped into WordPress development, there’s a strong chance you’ve likely been overwhelmed with some of what you’ve seen.

It’s a bummer, I know.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Should Products Have Landing Page Consistency?

February 10, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I did a “soft launch” for the upcoming release of Mayer. “Soft launch” may even be more of an overstatement. Honestly, it was nothing more than a tweet to the landing page that I setup to prepare for the launch.

By landing page, I’m not talking about the type of pages that basically announce that a product is coming and that [may] attempt to collect an email address for when its ready.

Instead, I’m referring to product landing pages that detail the product and provide calls to action for purchasing the product, how to find more information, and/or that details features, and all of that fun stuff.

But as I’ve been thinking of additional projects that I hope to release throughout the year, I’ve been thinking about landing page consistency for products across a given brand, and how much it matters.

Tom McFarlin