Category: Articles (Page 104 of 258)

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

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.

Setting Up MailCatcher for MAMP and WordPress

December 6, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though it’s been around longer than Local (or previously Pressmatic), MailCatcher was brought to the attention of many WordPress developers.

MailCatcher, MAMP, and WordPress: MailCatcher

In short, it makes it easy to start monitoring local development emails sent from WordPress. And if you’re someone dealing with templates, email customization, and more then you know how tiring it can be to tweak, send, tweak, send, and repeat.

If you’re not using Local, it’s still possible – and easy – to set up MailCatcher. And if you do a lot of work with anything that deals with WordPress emails (especially in eCommerce), then I think it’s worth setting up.
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Reasons For Not Writing Unit Tests

December 5, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I had my first internship, I was tasked with maintaining a legacy ASP application. This included everything on the front-end, through the application layer, using Visual Basic and VBScript, as well as the database that was primarily used as a datastore for XML.

What are interns for, though, right?

I’m kidding: I actually like the idea of having junior programmers work on maintenance tasks or bugs at first to get a feel for where things are (or were) before jumping into where they are headed.

At the same time, I was also learning and reading a good bit about unit testing. It was past the time when it was “the hot new thing,” but it had hit a point where a lot of people were talking about it.

It was finding its way into day-to-day conversations. It was becoming part of the curriculum of any software engineering course or material that any software engineer should know. It was coming up in interviews, conversations, blog posts, books, and so on.

In short:

It was becoming impossible to escape.

Either you knew how to unit test, you knew TDD, or you didn’t.

if you didn’t, then you might get an SMH from a potential employer,
you might get a condescending comment from a peer,
or you might get roped into a conversation covered in sheer excitement from that guy over in the cube over who’s been aiming for 100% code coverage since the company rolled out the testing infrastructure.

I’m not bashing testing (because I think it has its place and I think we need to know how to write them) and I’m not downplaying having a significant level of code coverage in a given application (because it is important).

But the amount of testing can be done is also related to a handful of others things that programmers don’t often seem to discuss: time, budget, and [optionally] pragmatism.

This post is already getting longer than what some of us like to read (are you reading this sentence, even?), so I don’t wax poetic about this for too long but if you have the time, entertain me.

If not:

The point that I’m ultimately working towards is that I don’t think it’s always as simple as basically “just write the damn unit tests.”

There are other things at work beyond just that each of which influences what we’re doing.