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Adding a Custom Post Type To An Existing Menu

April 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Up until this point, I’ve never worked on a project or done any type of work that required a custom post type to be added to an existing menu in the WordPress dashboard.

For the most part, I’m generally of the mindset that custom post types should:

Exist as top level menus
Should be added at the bottom of the WordPress dashboard menu

This mentality is primarily motivated by the fact that I see the core WordPress menu options as first-class citizens in the dashboard, custom post types as being second-class citizens.

That’s just a rule of thumb, though. There are always exceptions.

But there are also times where custom post types could be treated as, say, third-class citizens where they should be integrated with an existing menu be it a core menu or another custom post type menu.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to add a custom post type as a menu item to an existing menu.

But Seriously, WordPress as an Application Platform?

April 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve spent more than enough time talking about my position on using WordPress as a platform for writing web applications, but there’s one aspect of doing so that I don’t think that I’ve actually bothered discussing very much.

Namely, if WordPress is suitable as a platform for application development, then does it make sense to use it when another framework, set of libraries, or core tools may also fit the bill?

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone (So Don’t!)

April 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of months ago, my team and I received an email from a film crew who were shooting a documentary on the The Legend of Zelda franchise and were interviewing people all over the country who had grown up playing the franchise and were open to discussing the impact that the game had on their lives.

Yesterday, It’s Dangerous To Go Alone – the official site and trailer – went live.

Though I rarely deviate from talking about development especially with WordPress on this blog, there’s a point that I made during the course of our interview that was mentioned on the website that I felt worth discussing here.

The Technical Qualities of WordPress (Or Lack Thereof)

April 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I asked if those of us who are involved in the WordPress community if we are really open source pragmatists. This came from a quote that’s been posted, shared, discussed, and so on for the last couple of weeks or so.

There’s one sentence included in the quote that people don’t seem to be discussing and that is are odds with the reputation WordPress has.

The quote (emphasis mine):

The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.

But few can argue that the application has a reputation having a less-than-stellar codebase which can easily call into question the technical qualities of WordPress.

In fact, some believe that it’s “developed wholly by monkeys randomly hitting keys on the keyboard,” and there are discussions that crop up on various communities – like Hacker News – about the poor quality of the codebase.

The purpose of this post is not to belittle the codebase of WordPress. For what it’s worth, I think that it has its good parts and that it has its bad parts, and – like all software – can be compared to a living organism where it’s always changing, and, ideally, the bad parts will mature over time.

But what I’m more concerned with right now is has WordPress taught us standards of technical quality that “very little closed software can meet?”

The Identity Crisis of WordPress Plugin Icons

April 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the coolest things to be introduced to the WordPress Plugin Repository over the past couple of years was the addition of the header images – this one little addition made it possible to easily have your plugin stand out in the larger context of the entire repository.

This also got me thinking a bit about WordPress plugin icons.

The majority of our devices – either desktops / laptops, tables, phablets, and phones – all use icons to represent the application. Of course, this is nothing knew – we’ve been doing this since the GUI was introduced to computing, right?

But is this something that we should be considering for our WordPress plugins (or our themes)?

Tom McFarlin

Adding a Custom Post Type To An Existing Menu

But Seriously, WordPress as an Application Platform?

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone (So Don’t!)

The Technical Qualities of WordPress (Or Lack Thereof)

The Identity Crisis of WordPress Plugin Icons