Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Go Ahead and Admit Your Mistakes

Arguably, one of the easiest observations to make about the development community is that we’re not exactly the best at admitting our mistakes. Admitting our mistakes is akin to admitting that we were wrong or that we didn’t know what we were doing and no one likes to do that.

Naturally, right?

It’s human nature to want to showcase our successes and mask our failures, but the truth is that no one has any success without actually failing (and likely several times over at that).

Lame.

Unfortunately, I think that developers may be more notorious than others for this. We’re good at criticism, trolling, and flat out demeaning other people’s work, but we’re not so good at accepting it when it comes back around to us.

Although this is may be a bit idealistic, it shouldn’t be that way.

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My Day-To-Day: Inbox Zero, Revisited

A couple of months ago, I shared my strategy for trying to get to inbox zero. In short, I mentioned the following points:

  • I think that trying to get to inbox zero is a myth at worst, and a slippery slope at best
  • I outlined my strategy for dealing with email on a daily basis
  • I talk about the software I use as well as various things such as newsletters, after hours, etc.

Since that post, I’ve changed up my strategy a little bit and since email seems to be a common issue for everyone with – well, y’know – an inbox, I thought I’d share what I’m currently doing to manage my inbox.

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Using Help Scout For WordPress Support

A few months ago, I wrote about Finding The Right WordPress Support System in which I laid out my points for what I’d look for in a support system. The post ended up generating a lot of really good feedback, and – as of last week – I officially chose Help Scout as my WordPress support system.

Obviously, it’s been about three months since I originally published that post so I clearly took my time (read: evaluated services after the responsibilities of my day job) deliberating on which service I to use.

As with any more decision, there were a number of factors that contributed to this decision.

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The Truth About Building Premium WordPress Plugins

Earlier this week, I was talking with a fellow developer about building premium WordPress plugins (though this is true for any premium WordPress product) and he simply remarked:

It is amazing how much work goes into a single premium plugin.

Nothing profound, sure, but there’s a lot of truth to it, and I periodically get emails asking what all should one expect when it comes to building and releasing free and/or premium WordPress products.

With that said, here are some of my thoughts on all of the above.

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Preprocessing Comments in WordPress

For a recent project, I needed to inspect the data incoming comments before any of the other filtering on the data took place. Sounds like a big snore-fest, right? In WordPress, preprocess comment filtering is something that’s actually really easy to do, but the thing is that the documentation was lacking.

Anyway, I did actually find a hook that allowed me to do what I needed to do, though there was no official Codex page explaining exactly how to use the filter.

As such, here’s a break down of exactly what I was trying to do, and then a link to the of the Codex article I drafted after I ended up getting familiar with the hook.

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