Category: Articles (Page 117 of 258)

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

Finding Optimal Development Tools

August 22, 2016 / Tom

I have a tendency to talk about the importance of finding optimal development tools that work best for you, that fit your workflow, and that improve your productivity.

Cornerstone is the Subversion client that I prefer to use.

And I stand by those statements.

But sometimes I wonder if the things that I’ve said don’t come across as mutually exclusive (or even sometimes partially exclusive, if that’s a thing). This is true especially when I talk about things like why I switched from an IDE to a text editor to handle my development tasks.

Anything other than that is never my intent (though I can completely see how someone may interpret my perspective that way).

What I mean is this:

Whenever I share information about what I opt to use, I do so in a way where I mean to give information as to why it works for me.

Admittedly, sometimes I’m better at doing that than others.

How (And Why) to Create a Repository Archive

August 18, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re someone who regularly develops software, sites, or anything with any code, you’re going to start using source code control at some point.

And when a project ends, you’ve got options when it comes to maintaining the source code:

Perhaps you’ll hand the code over to the client, and you will retire it,
Or maybe you’ll continue to maintain it for the client as part of an ongoing relationship,
Or there’s a chance you’ll be done with the project but still want to hang on to the source code.

For me, I’m partial to the latter option primarily because I like to have an archive of the things I’ve worked on throughout my career (no matter how trivial they may be) and because I’m a bit of a packrat when it comes to things like this.

Because if a client ever comes back for future work on a project, then I want to be able to spin up a copy of the development environment so I can get back to work. This assumes that I have an archive of the source, though.

But this assumes I have a repository archive.

Late Escape WordPress Data

August 17, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working with themes and plugins, it’s a common practice to escape WordPress data. Honestly, this is a standard practice in all web development:

Whenever you’re retrieving information from the database to display to the user, it should be validated and escaped so that nothing but clean, readable text is rendered to the user.

In WordPress, you’re likely to see this in one of two ways (or maybe both ways depending on your setup):

You’re retrieving information from the database via get_option and then displaying it to the user.
You’re retrieving information from the cache and displaying it to the user.

There may be other ways that you’re grabbing the information, but the specifics beyond what’s above are outside the purpose and scope of this post.

Instead, the point I’m working towards is that we should escape WordPress data in the context of a template file or a view rather than in the context of a function.

Why I Changed From Coda To Atom

August 16, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Not long ago, I made the change from Coda to Atom though I never actually talked about the reasons behind this decision. Then, Bjarni sent me the following tweet a few weeks ago:

Interested to hear why you moved away from MAMP to @pressmaticwp and are you still using coda @tommcfarlin

— Bjarni Wark (@Bjarni) July 26, 2016

I’ll talk about the transition from MAMP to Pressmatic in a future post. In this post, I’m going to focus on the reasons and my thoughts on changing from Coda to Atom as it stands right now.

And for those who love a good software holy war, this is not the post fo rit.

Humbling Experiences as a Developer

August 15, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working to improve yourself, one of the most humbling experiences as a developer is when you have a breakthrough on a concept with which you’ve been struggling only to find out just how much more other people know and just how much more you have to learn.

This isn’t something that’s limited to WordPress, of course. This is something that isn’t even limited to programming. It transcends a variety of disciplines, hobbies, and so on (remember, say, when you were first learning to play barre chords on the guitar?)

Acoustic Guitar

But I don’t focus on other disciplines when writing on this blog (the zoomed in picture of the guitar not-withstanding).