Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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My Time On Week In WordPress

For those of you who know Matt Medeiros, you know that he’s the guy behind The Matt Report (which I was on a couple of of months ago) and also the guy behind a new show: This Week in WordPress.

Each Friday, he and a couple of guys in the WordPress community get together for a Google Hangout and talk all things WordPress – some news related, some design related, some development related, but ideally something for everyone who’s interested in WordPress.

This Friday, I’ve been invited to be a part of the show and I’m really looking forward to it.

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Properly Setting Up WordPress Cron Jobs

As it relates to scheduling events in WordPress, there’s a lot of articles that already exist on setting up a WordPress cron job, but – and for what I believe to be a number of reasons – there’s a surprising lack of clarity around the topic.

Of course, I could be wrong – maybe I’ve just been looking in all of the wrong places.

Whatever the case may be, this is something that I’ve been dealing with in a couple of projects, and I thought I’d capture my notes here if, for no other reason, than to reference in the future.

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A Look at the WordPress HTTP API

Comments on are closed on this post so we can keep the discussion on the original articles.

When it comes to working with WordPress, one of the lesser discussed aspects of the platform is the WordPress HTTP API.

This isn’t to say that people don’t use it – they obviously do – and this isn’t to say that people don’t actually understand it – because I’m sure they do – but I don’t think it’s evangelized or discuss enough.

In fact, it looks as if there’s very few tutorials about the API available on the web. So, to that end, I’ve opted to do a bit of a practical crash course in the API on WPTuts+ over the next few weeks.

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Were It Not For The Fear of Criticism

Over the past few months, I’ve published several articles about handling negativity and criticism on the Internet. I hesitate to even share another one because I hate to not only beat a dead horse, but to even address something that, y’know, will never go away.

Specifically, I’ve shared:

But in my recent post on WP Explorer, there were a couple of comments that came in at the same time a friend of mine shared a timely article with me.

So for those of you who are beginners, looking to get into WordPress development in any capacity, or who are even the least bit timid about releasing anything to the public for a fear of criticism, know that you’re in good company.

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Markdown Code For WordPress 0.3.0

When I first started working on Markdown Code For WordPress, the whole point of the plugin was to create an extremely simple solution for making it easy for me to replace `lines of code` without needing to hop into the visual editor, or to install a larger plugin with full markdown support.

Over the past couple of months, the plugin has received a little bit of refactoring, some good feedback of which I hope to implement (but it’s very low priority side project so, y’know..), and a pull request to simplify the code even more.

Love it.

However, I’ve gotten a bit used to the plugin (and markdown), so I’ve ended up adding support for two new markdown features into the plugin.

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