Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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The High Price of Free Plugins

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Recently, I had a chance to guest post over at WP Explorer and opted to discuss the high price of free WordPress plugins.

For the most part, the article is aimed at anyone who is looking to get into WordPress plugin development, but isn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, it’s one of those “if I knew then what I knew now” kind of scenarios.

Ultimately, I cover a handful of topics – both pros and cons – about what to expect when getting into the game.

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Whatever You Do: Keep Calm and Code On

A couple of weeks ago, I shared an very simple open source plugin for WordPress called Markdown Code For WordPress.

The purpose of the plugin is simple:

I include a variety of snippets in my posts for which I get tired of adding markup every. single. time.

Over time, I’ve added support for just a few more tokens, but the bottom line is that the plugin is written to help make what I do just a little bit easier in my day-to-day.

Markdown Code For WordPress

If others find it useful, great! If not, no big deal, either. It’s available for free and I’ll even take a look at pull requests to see if it fits in the vision for what I want.

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A Status Update on WP Audio Player

A few months ago, I released WP Audio Player and it has it has since received a decent number of downloads, feature requests, and other feedback.

WP Audio Player

In fact, it’s rare that a week goes by where someone doesn’t shoot me an email asking about how to do something with the plugin, how to introduce their own features, and so on.

To that end, I wanted to provide a short update to those of you who are fans of the plugin and who are looking for the next version, but who are wondering about its status. Continue reading

On Missions and Visions: Your Brand, Your Company, Yourself

With my recent sharing of my upcoming rebrand and the sharing of some of the things like premium plugins and my choice of support software, I’ve also been giving thoughts to things like mission statements, vision statements, and more.

Truth be told, I’ve almost always considered that kind of stuff to be related more to larger companies or organizations.

But why?

Why is it not applicable to a freelancer, a small team or a small business?

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Dev Docs: API Docs For HTML5, CSS3, DOM, JavaScript, and jQuery

Years (or decades? – yikes!) it was relatively easy to get up to speed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; however, the web is moving forward and it’s moving forward faster than ever.

The problem with this is that, as developers who stay heads-down busy on stuff, it can be tough to keep up to date with all of the new technologies that are available, what the new APIs are, or how to use them.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across Dev Docs – I spent a few minutes looking at it – but as time has passed, I’ve spent more and more time using it for reference so much so that it has a permanent spot in my bookmarks bar (and that’s sacred space for me). Continue reading

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