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ManageWP.org For Community-Curated News

October 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the problems of trying to keep up with all of the various news outlets as it relates to WordPress is finding the right sources. I mean, there’s Twitter accounts, blog subscriptions, blog aggregators, podcasts, and so on.

Personally, one of the best blogs that I’ve found for curating content is Post Status – it has a healthy balance of links from around the community, and one person’s commentary on some of the larger issues. A good read for sure!

But one of the things that the WordPress community has been lacking for sometimes is a Hacker News-esque site where stories can be contributed, voted, commented, shared, and so on.

In short, a full on community-driven-and-curated site of WordPress-based content for those who are specifically interested in, well, WordPress.

Maintain The WordPress Admin Look and Feel (Except When You Don’t)

October 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to building custom WordPress applications, plugins, or themes, one of the things that I’m a big proponent of doing is maintaining the native WordPress admin look and feel.

That is to say that I am not a fan of introducing option pages or other elements that deviate from the styles that WordPress core provides.

Case in point: Theme settings pages should match the same theme as the rest of the settings pages in WordPress. There shouldn’t be any major deviation in color scheme, font, or the way certain elements function. By that, I mean tabs should work without any fancy animation, and so on.

But there are times when modifying core user interface components that enhance the experience and that do deviate slightly from the core native WordPress core styling.

In those cases, is deviating from WordPress core acceptable?

Not The WordPress Codex!

October 15, 2013 / Tom

In my previous post, I shared a few thoughts on how I think someone can become a better WordPress developer.

When it comes to talking with beginner – or intermediate – WordPress developers, one thing that I’ve noticed is that when you suggest the WordPress Codex as a resource, there’s beginning to be a somewhat-typical response that I’m beginning to hear:

Please don’t suggest the Codex.

Bummer, right?

Mastering WordPress: How Long Should It Take?

October 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recently, I received an email from a fellow developer who had finished reading a number of series of articles on WordPress, who had watched a number of WordPress tutorial videos, and was working towards mastering WordPress.

He went on to discuss his current skill set, his aspirations, and the type of projects he eventually wanted to take on as his career progressed.

Not bad, right?

Here, you’ve got a person that knows who he is, knows where he wants to be, and is looking for advice on how to get there.

Unfortunately, there was only so much advice I could give (I’d love to master WordPress, as well!), but the bottom is line I responded with a series of things that i think he – or anyone – can do in order to become a better WordPress developer.

So, Um, What is PSR (or PSR-0, PSR-1, PSR-2, and PSR-3)?

October 14, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Up until last year, I had been happily plugging along working on various projects – both Rails based and PHP-based – and trying to put more and more stuff into open source until some of the issues what were being opened on my PHP-based projects kept mentioning something about PSR-0.

What is PSR-0?

People kept referencing it, no one linked to it, and it more-or-less an assumed standard that I, along with other PHP-developers, should know. But I’m not afraid to admit that, at the time, I’d no idea what it was.

As I see more and more activity happening around WordPress, and I see about the same amount of code documentation happening for projects – that is, not so much – I thought it’d be worth answering “What is PSR?” as well as the other three variants.

After all, I’d been working in WordPress and with PHP for years prior to hearing about it, and I still had to look it up. Perhaps that’s a problem of my own, but I’m completely okay owning that.

But hopefully this post will save someone else from having to look more deeply into it.

Tom McFarlin