Category: Articles (Page 130 of 258)

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

A WordPress Plugin Bootstrap File

April 19, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

The longer I work with building custom solutions for others in the form of WordPress plugins, the more I am a fan of having a WordPress plugin bootstrap file.

Honestly, this isn’t anything new, but it’s something I like to discuss periodically because the methods in which we build plugins, the ways posts can become outdated, and the strategies that we employ as we get better at what we do for a living change over time.

At least I hope they do. If you’re doing the same thing now that you were three or four years ago, then you’re a stellar developer. Or you haven’t grown that much. :)

But that’s content for another post.

When it comes to the work I do for others, the work is primarily in the creating plugins (which I enjoy building). So it’s only natural that I’d have things to add continually to this topic, right?

We Need to Be Writing Good Changelogs

April 18, 2016 / Tom

Writing good changelogs seems to be one of those things that many of us talk about doing talk about wanting to see, but often don’t do it.

Or maybe it’s better to say that we often complain about the types of changelogs that we see, but don’t offer any advice of updates them ourselves.

And maybe that’s not the right thing to say. I mean, we do offer advice on how to update them. But does that stop us from writing better changelogs ourselves?

Installing WP-CLI with MAMP

April 13, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

About four years ago, I shared a post about WP-CLI. It wasn’t exactly a new project at the time, but it was far less developed than it is now.

The WP-CLI Homepage

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, one of the things that we’re doing with is making sure that all of our work is unit tested from the initial version.

And when it comes to unit testing in PHP, many of us are familiar with PHPUnit; however, when it comes to unit testing plugins that are integrated with WordPress, it helps to have a test environment set up.

Sure, it’s possible to set aside a test database, test content, and then defined mock objects based on interfaces (and I’m not here to dissuade anyone from doing that). But WP-CLI offers a much easier way to go about doing just that in a more automated manner.

But first, it’s important to make sure that it’s correctly installed on your system.

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.

A WordPress Plugin Bootstrap File

We Need to Be Writing Good Changelogs

Installing WP-CLI with MAMP

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

How to Work with WordPress Metadata

Current Projects