Category: Articles (Page 104 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

What Is Development? Building and Constantly Learning

December 16, 2016 / Tom

For a given project, you’ve likely heard that whole spiel about you have:

Time
Budget
Performance

Then you tell a person to pick two. In my experience, this tends to be true, especially when working with tight constraints or smaller budgets. And that’s okay! It’s not a complaint and that doesn’t mean we can’t still do a job well done given said constraints.

But this post is not about that (although it might be fun to discuss). Instead, it’s about a follow-up question that I’ll occasionally get around this same topic:

Once you’ve landed the project, what is development? How do you know how to solve problems for different people?

And I think, at first, it’s an interesting question. I mean, if we all went into a project not knowing what we were doing – regardless of the industry – then that’s a little scary.

In programming it’s its own beast, isn’t it?

What is Development?: It's its own beast.

Anyone remember The Neverending Story?

I mean, we know what the client wants and we know we can build it, but how do we express that we don’t necessarily yet know the code we’re going to write or how we’re going to write it?

WordPress Plugins For Development (As Of Today)

December 14, 2016 / Tom

In the previous post, I shared the 10 (well, 11 if you count Slack., but I think that’s debatable) tools I currently use for WordPress development. But I also said that I’d cover the tools I use within WordPress – or WordPress plugins for development – that I use when working on a project.

WordPress Plugins For Development

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, then you’ve likely heard me talk about some of these at one point or another, but having them all captured in a single post can be useful especially when I want to refer others to them.

So this is the short list of plugins that I’ve found to be useful when building projects both for myself and for others.

WordPress Development Tools (As Of Today)

December 13, 2016 / Tom

Like anyone who reads this blog, I’m periodically asked what WordPress development tools I use. Though I realize I share things that I use now and then, I’ve never really collected everything into one place.

WordPress Development Tools: Tower

And, truth be told, this is a blog, so things change as time moves forward.

So I’m going to be dividing this post into two parts:

Today, I’m going to cover the actual software I use to get work done.
Tomorrow, I’ll share what it is I use regarding WordPress plugins and related web-
specific software.

With that said, here’s the list of software and some minor commentary I use to get work done when building things both for others and for myself.

Customizing WooCommerce Emails with These Hooks

December 13, 2016 / Tom

Customizing WooCommerce emails isn’t something that’s terribly difficult assuming that you’re familiar with how the WordPress hook system works. And that you’re familiar with what hooks WooCommerce provides.

Customizing WooCommerce Emails

The former is pretty easy to find as there a solid reference and I, along other with others, have talked about it in-depth. Once you have that understanding, though, trying to track down all of the hooks for the latter is the challenge.

There are a few references I’ll share at the end of this post, as well as some various tips I recommend for customizing WooCommerce emails, but I always appreciate a practical example more than anything else so I’ll start with that first.

WooCommerce Integrations with WordPress Namespaces

December 7, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

WooCommerce Integrations, which I’ll talk at length about a bit more in the moment, is a neat way to provide your custom set of options into the native WooCommerce platform.

But if you’re using namespaces, WooCommerce, WordPress, and more then it can get bit cumbersome when trying to make all of it work together.

Luckily, thanks to the nature of open source and people involved, we don’t have to operate by ourselves, and there’s plenty of people and resources available to help us get our questions answered and get our work done.

I’ll talk a bit more about these particular individuals later in the post, but first I want to cover WooCommerce integrations and how to make them work with namespaced code.