Category: Articles (Page 166 of 258)

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

A Case For Dependency Management with WordPress

February 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I came across a comment that was in the context of a larger post that I think does an excellent job of highlighting what we – as theme developers – should be doing with our projects rather than what we’re currently doing.

For those who know @Rarst, this wisdom will come as no surprise, but for those of you who are new to theme development, or WordPress development of any kind, then I think you’ll find this insightful:

We can chuckle and point fingers at bundled plugin monstrosities. But the reason those monstrosities exist include WordPress strategically for years disregarding need for third party infrastructure and dependency management. It’s telling that it has been priority so low, that even backwards compatibility was broken on related parts of core without a second thought.

So how does this translate, exactly? That is, what is it that we’re doing or that we can do in order to make theme development, plugin development, or both much stronger, resilient, and generally better than what we’re doing now?

A Quick Tip For Reading Files with PHP

February 25, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re in the business of building plugins – regardless of if it’s for fun or profit – the odds that you’re eventually going to have to read the contents of a file are relatively high.

This could be for importing data from a file, this could be for parsing data out of something that a customer has provided, or this could just be used to help drive the user interface. Whatever the case, PHP offers a number of different functions for opening files and reading files.

This can be convenient, but in my experience, there’s one process that I’ve found to be more resilient than the other options when it comes to reading files and I thought I’d share the general process here.

The Constraints of an API Are a Good Thing

February 24, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Because WordPress is built using a number of languages none of which are compiled, it makes it completely possible to make things happen within your theme, plugin, or extension by circumventing the native APIs.

This means that if you wanted to, say, introduce some type of element on one of the dashboard screens or you wanted to introduce functionality into one of your templates that didn’t previously exist, there’s a strong chance that you’d be able to do so simply by “brute force.”

And by that, I mean that you’d be able to make something happen – and probably work correctly – without using the native set of APIs that are available.

But when you’re faced with that situation, I highly recommend taking a step back and determining if you’re approaching the problem in the best way possible given your set of constraints.

Let Go, Move On, and Focus

February 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

At some point, I think that many of us – if not all of us – have all been in a position where we feel like we have too much going on. Or, to use a cliché, we have too many irons in the fire.

Too Much Going On

In some ways, I think it’s a good thing. I mean, we’ve involved ourselves in a number of projects and activities all of which [hopefully] are contributing to something larger than ourselves for the betterment of the people around us, but, at the same time, we continue to add to this list of responsibilities that we have.

The thing is, those responsibilities may come in different forms. They don’t have to come in the form of projects that we’re working on on our computers or around the house, nor do they have to come in the form of something work related.

Perhaps your family changes in some way, perhaps you change in some way. Whatever the case, you find yourself looking for a little bit more margin – a little bit more breathing room so that you can either focus on all of the stuff that’s cropped up in your life, or so you can move on to higher priority projects.

The thing is, what are you supposed to remove that would ideally prevent the project from grinding to a halt all while making sure the right person takes the reigns to continue making sure that it stays in development (or whatever term works best here) and continues to benefit those who use it?

That’s the big question, right? Continue reading

Unsolicited Advice in WordPress (But Is It Really?)

February 17, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Obviously, I can only speak for as much of the culture that I’ve experienced both online and offline so I don’t mean this to be an overly general statement, but I think it’s fair we live in a highly polarized culture – if not offline, and if not in the west, then certainly online.

That is, we have no problem telling one another if their policy, their ideas, their implementations, or whatever sucks, or if it’s terrific. Unfortunately, it seems to be much more of the former than the latter.

I tend to be more on the pessimistic side – I know, probably not the most flattering personality trait, but I try to fight it :) – so I don’t know if it’s getting better, but I can definitively say that over the past few days, I’ve personally experienced some criticism – all constructive – that’s respectful and that has generated a lot of food for thought.