Category: Articles (Page 130 of 258)

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

Document Your Practices and Procedures (For You and Your Team)

April 7, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

We do a good job of evangelizing the different tools, environments, and ways to tackle problems in our space (that is, within WordPress development), but I often wonder how well we do for actually documenting our practices, procedures, and so on for others.

10up - Document Your Practices

Sure, some companies open source their practices, and that’s great, but does every company? And should they?

Sometimes, I think people believe that if a company bases itself on open source, then they should have everything out in the open:

Their software,
Their practices,
Their financials,
And so on.

I don’t agree, but I do think there’s something to be said for documenting your practices within your team as this benefits both you, your teammates, and people you may end up bringing on to a project or on to your team for future work.

How to Work with WordPress Metadata

April 6, 2016 / Tom

One of the nicest APIs that the application offers is the WordPress Metadata API. It’s through this API that we’re able to take ideas such as posts, users, comments, terms, and more and store richer information that just the standard set of information.

Sure, there’s a lot to consider when taking advantages of these additional columns or fields as it relates to these concepts. But if you’re a beginner or someone who’s just starting to get deeper into the WordPress API, then I can’t recommend learning these APIs enough.

In two recent series for Envato, I cover these concepts in-depth.

Setting up PHP and Composer in MAMP

April 5, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Lately, I’ve been trying to write shorter, more focused on articles on particular topics, but there are times in which a longer article is warranted: Case in point: Using PHP and Composer in MAMP.

Before you get started reading this article, I’m assuming you have a couple of things:

MAMP installed on your machine (it’s compatible with Windows now!)
Time to read all that’s below
Willingness to use the Terminal
Coffee (or another drink, but seriously coffee) to read through all that’s below

It’s not that any of this is intimidating. I mean, if you’re completely inexperienced, there may be a bit of a learning curve, but I’m going to do what I can to break this down for you regardless of the level of experience you have.

Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for you to write more modular code using third-party dependencies and with keeping things well-organized on your system and in your projects.

Getting Started with Learning WordPress

March 30, 2016 / Tom

Learning WordPress is one of those things that many of us are doing almost every single day. However, once we reach a certain point, I think we stop thinking of it as “learning WordPress” and we start thinking of it as “how to do [any given task] with WordPress.”

When it comes to helping other people with WordPress, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be at the beginning stages and getting acquainted with all of the nuances required to get things set up on our computer and how it relates to releasing projects on the web.

To that end, I just wrapped up a series for Envato geared specifically towards beginners who want to get started with WordPress but aren’t sure where to start.

Name Your Staging Environment (It’s Fun!)

March 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I talk a lot about the significance of having a development environment, a staging environment, and a production environment whenever it comes to managing projects for yourself or your clients. Aside from previous blog posts I’ve written, this was a significant part of my talk at WordCamp Atlanta.

But at the end of the day, the talk about having three separate in which to manage, deploy, test, and release code can seem mundane especially if you’re working with the same codebase for an extended amount of time.

To help fight that boredom, one of the things I’ve always done is come up with a type of themes for my environments and then I’ve named them accordingly.

Case in point: The various environments we’re using for Pressware Plugins are all based in Star Wars (predominately those in The Force Awakens but not limited to that).