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My Interview with WP Engine

June 24, 2013 / Tom

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Last week, I had the pleasure of being featured on the WP Engine blog for their “Finely-Tuned Consultants” series.

If you’ve been following them on Twitter or their blog for any time now, you know they’ve interviewed some really neat people doing some really cool things with WordPress, so I consider it an honor to be able to be featured with the other consultants.

In the interview, I talk a little bit about how I got into computers, how I got into WordPress, and then answer a series of questions provided by Austin Gunter.

Two Months of Free Flywheel Hosting!

June 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Today, I’m happy to share that I’ve recently partnered with the guys at Flywheel to offer you guys two months of free Flywheel Hosting.

As much as I enjoy talking about development and related topics on this blog, one of the things that I dig the most is being able to do giveaways primarily because I appreciate the time you guys take to read and comment on various articles.

But enough of all this emo stuff – let’s talk about Flywheel, the service, and how you can take advantage of the giveaway.

The Great Expectations of Modifying WordPress Themes

June 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I was talking with Chris – our product midwife at 8BIT – about the differences in expectations between engineers, developers, designers, tweakers, and end users when it comes to modifying WordPress themes.

I started my career in software engineering – specifically, I used to work in .NET followed by Ruby on Rails – as well as object-oriented programming before moving into fulltime WordPress development.

And you know what they say: Old habits die hard.

Did someone say “die hard?”

Case in point: ask my team what I did when I first became the lead developer of Standard. I spent more time yanking out template code, abstracting it into `functions.php` and a collection of other files all of which would make sense to someone comes from a different background, but not WordPress.

And here I am, years later, where I’m significantly more familiar with “the WordPress-way” (even writing blog posts on Coding Standards and various APIs even) and there are still issues to be solved around this very issue.

Markdown Code For WordPress 0.2.0

June 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I released an extremely simple plugin for easily using markdown code syntax within the WordPress post editor.

I receive a lot of great suggestions in the comments (many of which I’m still planning to get around to working on); however, I had a few minutes to introduce one more feature: markdown code for comments.

My Second Post on Medium: Do For One

June 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few years ago, one of the most profound and influential pieces of advice that I’ve heard is the following:

Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.

The thing about hearing things like this is that it always lands in different places with different people. Like I said, for me, it’s ended up being something that’s profoundly influenced certain things in my life; however, for others, statements like that don’t land anywhere near a point of significance.

And that’s okay – if we were all influenced and persuaded by the same things, we’d all be doing the same things and that’d make for a boring world.

But for those of you who have been following this blog, read some of my other contributing articles, or seeing what we’re currently working on at 8BIT you know that education is a big interest, and is important to me.

So in my second post on Medium, I attempt to explain something that I’m currently working on that jives with the statement above.

Tom McFarlin

My Interview with WP Engine

Two Months of Free Flywheel Hosting!

The Great Expectations of Modifying WordPress Themes

Markdown Code For WordPress 0.2.0

My Second Post on Medium: Do For One