Category: Articles (Page 131 of 258)

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

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).

What Were Your Watershed Moments?

March 28, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Watershed Moments, defined in multiple places the least of which not being Quora, is defined as:

A “watershed moment” is a point in time that marks an important, often historical change. The pertinent original usage of “watershed” is to describe a ridge of land separating waters that then flow into two different bodies.

This idea isn’t isolated to web development or software development, though since that’s the area in which many of us work I think it makes for good conversation.

This weekend, I saw my friend Justin (who, if you’re a WordPress developer, should be following) tweet out the following:

Software Developers: What are some “watershed” moments you’ve identified in your own growth?

— Justin Sainton (@JS_Zao) March 26, 2016

And each time I tried to respond using 140 characters, there wasn’t enough space (or tweets) to share my opinion on the topic (and no, this is not my advocating longer tweets ;).

But seriously, I thought it was a great question and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might serve better as a blog post.

Do You Even Bother with a Personal Blog?

March 24, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

So here’s a short digression from the usual run-of-the-mill WordPress development post for you:

Do you maintain any type of personal blog?

The reason I ask is because, as if it isn’t evident enough, I’m kind of a fan of this whole blogging thing. But the idea of managing any type of personal blog is something that comes with a set of choices. I’ll talk more about that more in a minute.

I think it gets a little more complicated when:

You have friends and/or a following who are also online.
You have kids you want to share things about but don’t want to share photos of them because of reasons.
You care about data ownership, so you’re not willing to necessarily share the information on other publishing platforms.
And other reasons (or maybe not depending on who you are).

Yes, I have a personal blog and no I don’t really use any other social networks (though I have accounts, they are basically placeholders). Furthermore, I don’t normally promote those posts anywhere else.

I publish, and it goes into the ether than is The Google.

Part of it because I ask myself: Who cares? After all, this site is the one I write for the most and that I enjoy writing for the most.

That’s just me, though.

But I’m specifically curious how you deal with aspects mentioned above when it comes to blogging that’s not directly related to some aspect of your profession and whether or not you’d like to do it or not.

The FUD of Working with WordPress

March 23, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve read the title of this post, then it probably comes off as no surprise. When it comes to working with WordPress, maybe it’s even obligatory for someone like me to cover.

I don’t know, but I hope that doesn’t dissuade anyone from ignoring the rest of the words in this post.

But I do know that I’ve seen a lot of other WordPress developers and those involved in the community in some regarding talking about the latest results of the Stack Overflow survey and where WordPress falls.

That is, it’s high up on the list of “most dreaded technologies.” Before I share my thoughts, there are a couple of articles (and they are quick) that are required reading before proceeding.

The reason I want you to read those two articles is because they provide some background and perspective on where I’m going with my own take regarding this topic.