Category: Articles (Page 12 of 257)

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

Thoughts on WordPress Certifications in 2023

January 13, 2023 / Tom

I’m trying to branch out a bit with the stuff about which I write this year. And given the the rise in discussions on WordPress Certifications, I see an opportunity to do just that.

This isn’t much of a well-researched or academic article. Instead, it’s an op-ed by someone who’s been in the space for over a decade sharing his perspective on the idea of WordPress certifications in 2023.

If you’re not interested in reading the whole thing, I’ll save you some time and simply state: I’m not completely for it, I’m not completely against it. I think it purely depends on the goals of the person and the needs of any given company who is hiring the individual. Above all else, it needs to be collaborative.

If you run a search for “WordPress certifications,” you get quite a few results back. The thing about these programs is that I have no idea how to determine what makes for a good certification.

Who has vetted the curriculum (let alone who comes up with it)?
Who evaluates the end result of achieving certification?
Who determines what is a satisfactory certification in the program?

To that end, I’m opting to use the article posted on the Make WordPress Training site, Exploring WordPress Certifications.

Over the years, there have been a few discussions about creating formalised certifications for WordPress, most notably in 2013 as seen on Torque and WP Tavern. While those discussions are nearly 10 years old, they are still relevant and, now that an open learning platform for WordPress exists, this is a good time to revisit those conversations.
Hugh Lashbrooke

The Most Useful (Or Popular) Articles From 2022

December 26, 2022 / Tom

I don’t normally do retrospectives for each year for products, posts, work, or anything.

Given that I didn’t write as much as I have in years passed, I thought I’d share what the most popular articles I’ve shared over the last year in hopes of both of surfacing some older content but also setting the tone for the coming year.

A Backend Engineer Learns to Build Block Editor Blocks, Part 5

December 22, 2022 / Tom

Now that we’ve got the basics of the block built, it’s time to introduce some of the features afforded to us by the WordPress API that allow us to make changes to the visuals of our block. Namely, we want to using block attributes for custom colors.

Sure, up to this point, we’ve bee building the blocks using the WordPress APIs for block creation, serialization, and displaying, but we’ve also hard-coded a lot of our our styling. And when it comes to building custom blocks, sometimes that’s exactly what we want to do.

But other times, we want the users to be able to change, say, the color of their text or the background of their blocks, or maybe both. And the APIs for the Block Editor make this possible. As with the rest of the content of this series, though, it’s not without understanding what’s available to us.

Since this series builds upon itself, I recommend reading and following the previous articles thus far especially if you’re just now stumbling across this content.

So far, these are the things we’ve discussed:

If you’re ready to continue, we’ll get started. Remember, now that we’re this far in the series, I’m working to keep the articles a bit shorter. This is because:

We’ve laid enough ground work so it’s easier to focus on one thing at a time,
I find it easier to digest one concept at a time especially when it comes to learning something new, like building blocks as a backend engineer 🙂.

So in this post, we’re going to focus on one new thing: Introducing color options for our block.

On Social Media, WordPress, and Software

December 6, 2022 / Tom

This year’s Thanksgiving Break was the first time that I didn’t write anything I was doing over the break. I’ve been doing so since 2012 so this would’ve been a decade of doing it.

Almost made it 🙃.

But there’s the thing:

As if it isn’t evident already, the frequency of my writing has decreased but the length of the articles has increased.
I’ve also changed the front-page of this site such that it displays more about what I’ve done in my career in software development and WordPress,
And it includes a list to my most recent articles.

Given a post this year would’ve been a consistent decade of writing a traditional holiday post and how that’s changed, I couldn’t help but think about how things have changed within the web development economy as well as the WordPress economy.

And no, this is not going to be a nostalgic, reflective post.

Working with Multiple User Metadata Queries

November 21, 2022 / Tom

In one of the most recent issues of The Repository (which is a worth a subscribe), I said that one of the Twitter account I recommend following is @mattmedeiros. And though he and I never see eye to eye on anything 😏, I said:

I really like what [Matt’s] doing with The WP Minute. I think his commentary, perspective on business and the WordPress economy, and the type of journalism he’s doing is different from many others.

And I meant it.

As he’s working to grow the type of news that he’s covering, he’s also getting back to something that I think that’s either been missing, fragmented, or missing because it’s fragmented too much across the various ways we’re sharing information: WordPress tutorials.