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How To Setup a Custom Grunt Task For WordPress

November 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Now that WordPress 3.8 is in development, now is a good time to look into contributing a patch.

But seriously, if you’re looking into contributing to the codebase, then it’s important to be familiar with two things:

Where to grab the source code for the current release
How to use Grunt on your local machine to kick off the build process

Once you’ve gotten those two things setup, you can actually setup customized Grunt tasks (via your own options) that will help test the work that you’re doing without kicking off the entire process, a part of the process, or testing individual files.

The Paralyzing Fear of Committing To Open Source Code

November 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I think scares people off from committing to open source projects is the fear of “I don’t know where to start.”

Sure, there are other reasons as well:

“I can’t make the IRC/chat/AOL/whatever meetings.”
“I don’t understand half of what the others are talking about.”
“I only know how to work with [any given language].”
“I don’t think that I have enough experience.”
…and so on.

Honestly, you can rationalize your way out of anything that you’re afraid to do with a reason for which most people can’t fault you.

But if you’re even mildly interested in committing to an open source project – or, more specifically – helping out with WordPress, then I highly urge you do so.

Setting Up Grunt For WordPress

November 14, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

With the WordPress 3.8 development cycle underway, I thought it might be worth sharing how you can go about setting up Grunt for WordPress development on your local machine.

The reason for this is because WordPress is now using Grunt, JSHint, and a number of other utilities to help automate tasks, and if you’re looking to contribute to certain parts (not all, mind you) core, then these are the tools that you’re going to need – especially if you’re working on any tickets under the Build Tools component.

Magic Quotes and PHP: Parsing Automagically Escaped Data

November 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as building projects on or for WordPress is concerned, one of the things that we have to keep in mind is the minimum version of PHP required to run WordPress itself. And at the time of this writing, the minimum required version of 5.2.4.

Of course, if you know your project is going to run on a newer version of PHP, and you have control over that environment, then obviously you have the freedom to write code against that version; however, if you’re building something that’s going to be used across the board for any of the many hosting environments, then you’ve got to take that into consideration.

I mention this, because there have been a number of times when I’ve been working on a particular feature of a project, and I’ve had to reference the PHP manual to see if the given feature of the language is supported by the minimum current version.

Productize Your Service (or “Charge For The Work You’ve Already Done, Again.”)

November 12, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I often hear people talking about is whether or not they want to work on products or if they want to work on services.

Or, more specifically, they’ll ask:

Do I want to be a product company, or do I want to be a service company?

The truth is, I’ve done this myself.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a team of other guys at 8BIT where we built Standard – a product by a product company – as well as for myself under the freshly re-branded Pressware – which is a service company.

And to be honest, I teeter back and forth between both: I enjoy working on products, and I enjoy working on services.

Each comes with their own advantages and disadvantages, and there’s a lot to be said about both, but the purpose of this post isn’t really about that.

Tom McFarlin

How To Setup a Custom Grunt Task For WordPress

The Paralyzing Fear of Committing To Open Source Code

Setting Up Grunt For WordPress

Magic Quotes and PHP: Parsing Automagically Escaped Data

Productize Your Service (or “Charge For The Work You’ve Already Done, Again.”)