Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Should Money Dictate WordPress Plugin Code Quality?

I don’t have many plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Repository anymore (and there are reasons for that), but I’ve been giving some thought to those plugins that I do have as well as the general level of code quality that goes into the first iteration of a plugin.

Plugin Code Quality: WordPress Plugin Repository

I mean, for some, plugins are merely small utilities that aim to do one thing and one thing well. Then, other plugins are much more advanced. I think these need a higher level of code quality to make them more maintainable.

But there’s one aspect of building plugins (or any software, really, but I’m specifically talking about WordPress plugins) that I find myself thinking about:

What level of plugin code quality of enough to ship the first version of a plugin?

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Building WordPress Administration Screens (Components, Design, etc.)

I don’t talk about user interface design much because it’s not my forté. I’m all for people working within their core strengths and then hiring them when needed on a project-by-project basis (if the designs aren’t already provided).

But when it comes to working with WordPress administration screens, there’s a difference, right?

I’m on the mindset that because the WordPress administration area has a consistent look and feel, then anything that’s built to work within the administration screen (such as a settings screen) should look as close to the core UI as possible.

Not everyone agrees, and it’s evident by the vast array of plugins that are available. But that’s my position on it.

Periodically, I’m asked how I structure the UIs of projects when they need administration screens and how I map them to files within the project.

So I thought I’d take a simple example and break it down in this short post.

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Getting Started with Gulp Starter Packages

Talking about CodeKit and the benefits it offers for front-end developers has also come just after a post and the benefits that something like Gulp offers, as well.

A post on the difference between the two, why you may want one over the other, and the advantages or disadvantages of either can be its post.

But for this, I’d like to take the starter packages I wrote about regarding Gulp and give a simple example of a starter Gulp file and how to use it in your WordPress projects.

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Quick Tip: Metadata and Inline Editing

If you have a custom meta box or are working with custom metadata at the post-level, then you may stumble across a problem with having data accidentally deleted when saving it from the Bulk Edit screen.

The setup for the problem is something like this:

  1. you have a collection of posts that need to be changed,
  2. you load all posts in the bulk edit screen (as shown above),
  3. you apply a change.

Once this happens, the change occurs, but it erases any custom post metadata that you may have.

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Object-Oriented Programming in WordPress: Statement of Work

Before we get into the topic of object-oriented analysis and design (which is when most of us get the most fun out of what we do aside from actually writing code), it’s important to follow-up a few more things regarding understanding customer requirements.

In the previous post, I mentioned:

If you take time to understand what they want from the beginning, then the requirements don’t have to be a 50-page document outlining how every single module has to work.

For example, whenever I put together requirements (or a Statement of Work) as I usually call them when I send them to clients, I rarely exceed ten pages, and it’s often less.

And though there are times when it’s longer, I think that part of the reason that developing a short set of requirements comes with the preliminary discussions to make sure you and the customer(s) have developed a common language with which you can work.

When you do that, the requirements and the statement of work – whatever you opt to call them – don’t have to be as long.

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