Category: Articles (Page 135 of 258)

If you follow the WordPress economy via your RSS reader, favorite podcast application, and Twitter, then there’s a chance you develop a level of cynicism around the idea of another WordPress business starting up.

By that, I mean that it seems like there’s something new every single week: It could be a plugin, a new service, a new site, a new theme, or whatever. And there is!

I know that some like to talk all about the low barrier to entry that WordPress offers (which I call into question), and you may say that because of that, it gives people this sense of confidence that they can start a business built around WordPress and then find success.

First, all of these things that we see so frequently are signs of a vibrant and healthy economy. Secondly, what’s wrong with so many people trying to start something new?

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Back in the day (as if that was really that long ago for me ;), “rapid application development” used to be a phrase that was used to describe the amount of time we could take an idea and get it into a functional prototype in order to evaluate its utility.

That reads terribly, terribly boring.

Think of it this way:

How fast can you take an idea, turn it into a functional prototype, and determine if it sucks or not?

Or maybe:

In general, RAD approaches to software development put less emphasis on planning tasks and more emphasis on development.

Maybe that fits with more of the cultural norm than, say, 15 years. ago. Anyway, there were tools like Visual Basic that made this easy.

Admittedly, I was a little young to grok what all of this was about, but I read a lot, and I tinkered with Visual Basic from 3.0 up to .NET so I was pretty familiar with the language and how the whole system worked.

But enough of that kind of talk. Here’s the question: How can we apply rapid application development within the context of WordPress?

Furthermore, is it possible to apply it in a way that allows us also to iterate on a product (free or not being irrelevant) without only evaluating its value to our users?

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When you need to update user profiles with code in WordPress, there are two hooks available:

• personal_options_update
• edit_user_profile_update

And there’s a subtle difference between the two. If you don’t use the proper hook for the task at hand, then you may not end up with the result you’re expecting.

The idea for this post is coming based on some work I’ve done on a recent project, and I thought it’d be worth sharing how the two hooks work and when one is preferable over the other (or when you may want to use both).

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When it comes to what it means to learn WordPress, and depending on who you talk to, you’re going to find one of two answers:

• WordPress has a steep learning curve.
• WordPress has a  small learning curve.

You know what’s true about both of those statements? They are both true but they are only true within the context of the implied assumptions they make. And if you’re new to WordPress and you make the wrong assumption, then you’re going to feel as if you’re at a loss.

So here’s my take on  if it’s really is easy to learn WordPress (or not).

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