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Update Your WordPress Projects on GitHub with the GitHub Updater

December 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that many open source developers love GitHub – it’s an amazing service that makes sharing and working on open source projects really easy, both from a project management standpoint, and from a developer/contributor standpoint.

But if you’re in the business of building WordPress plugins, and you enjoy taking advantage of the services offered by the GitHub plugin repository, then one of the things that makes it difficult to keep your work on GitHub is the lack of ability to update your plugin.

Of course, projects have been released that allow you to sync both repositories, but if you’re interested in going 100% with GitHub, then check out the GitHub Updater Plugin.

The Dangers of Blogging (Or “Get a Thicker Skin”)

December 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Arguably, one of the most intimidating things about blogging is knowing that you’re constantly opening yourself up to critique.

For the most part, this isn’t something that’s really all that bad especially when you consider that that you’re offering information up to help others, or to ask others for help in a given situation.

More often than not, I’ve found that people are happy to oblige one way or the other through comments, emails, tweets, and so on.

Unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other.

By that, I mean that every positive comment, every reaffirmation, or every bit of advice offering ways to improve what you’re on saying, you’re likely going to be generating negative feedback and/or criticism from someone.

The thing is, positive feedback usually comes in the form of retweets, shares, and so on.

Negative feedback may be harder to detect unless it’s posted directly in a comment because – for whatever reason – others don’t always mention your handle in tweets, pingbacks, and so on.

On one hand, perhaps ignorance is bliss, but I’m of a different mindset: If you have something negative to say about a person or an idea that they’ve shared (after all, it’s not always personal), then why not bring it to their attention?

An Easy Way To Check if a Post is Paginated

December 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Out of the box, WordPress supports the ability to paginate individual posts.

For those who aren’t familiar, it means that you’re able to literally paginate your posts such that a post may consist of multiple pages (kind of a weird concept, huh?).

Some people may use this feature, some people may not; however, if you’re working on a theme, then you need to be prepared for this case and provide appropriate styling.

But the way if which you determine if a post is paginated or not can lead to a bit of cluttered code, so in order to keep the code as readable as possible (and to keep the logic separated from the template), here’s one way that you can check is a post is paginated.

On Using Helper Files in WordPress

December 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I appreciate about certain application development frameworks is their approach to convention over configuration.

By that, I mean that they tend to take the approach of “a place for everything, and everything in its place” rather than setting a ton of variables in a set of different files to tell the core system where everything is located.

In my opinion, WordPress is a little bit of hybrid of this kind of stuff, but I tend to look at it in the direction of modifying configuration files.

After all, we have both `wp-config.php` and we have `functions.php`. Both of these serve their purpose, but `functions.php` can get specifically cluttered as a theme or an application grows.

A Few Words About My Upcoming WordPress Theme

December 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Several weeks ago, I wrote an article about a theme that I’ve been working on that I’ll be using in place of Standard once development has actually been completed.

When it comes to working on project, I think it’s fair to say that sometimes we start off talking about certain things that we’re working on, get sidetracked on something new, and never end up coming back to it.

So in an effort to not only keep myself accountable, but also to continue to give a bit more information on the theme, I thought I’d provide additional updates as to its status, potential release date, how I’ll be rolling it out, and all that fun stuff.

Tom McFarlin