Category: Articles (Page 168 of 258)

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

On WordPress Theme Innovation

February 4, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As I mentioned last week, there are a few things that are coming with regards to how Pressware‘s theme (with more in the pipeline) to be treated with the nature of open source.

But in preparing for this shift, I’ve also been giving a lot of thought about a number of different things with regard to how we go about building plugins, themes, extensions, tools, and so on for WordPress. I think that we intrinsically know that we should be focused on our users, but I think there’s also something inside of us that wants to impress our peers.

I mean, surely it’s not just me, right?

A Limited Feature Set of WordPress Themes

February 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges that comes with building WordPress themes is that there’s this disposition that we have to want to make sure that for every option in the backend, we have a corresponding option for the feature in the front end.

For example, does the WordPress dashboard support multi-level menus? Yes. We look at that and think that our themes need to support multi-level menus. Same goes for several other options. But why is that?

WordPress is a content management system and not all content is made the same.

The Best Developer Tools Are Your Favorites

January 29, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the past few years, I – like pretty much every other developer ever – have given my tools a fair shake to determine what it is that I like working with the most.

But what’s funny is that “what I like working with the most,” is a phrase that carries a different connotation with different people.

For example, for some, it means that the tool could be completely ugly but if it gets the job done then it’s good enough. For others, it means that it needs to look good and function well in order to help them feel productive about getting their work done.

Case in point: Look at some of the build tools that we have available. We have Bower, Grunt, CodeKit, and more all of which essentially offer much of the same thing, but how they go about offering said functionality is different.

For some, one way is great; for others, it’s not so great. So what’s a developer to do?

The Timeless WordPress Theme Design

January 28, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As a disclaimer, this entire post is written purely from the perspective of a developer. I’m not a designer, I’ve never claimed to be, I never will claim to be, and any type of design that I do is usually based around principles and foundations and guidelines that I’ve read and followed elsewhere on the web.

With that said, there’s been interesting conversations around some of the more popular design types as of late – some that are already retired, some that are still around, and some that are still beginning to emerge.

This includes trends such as Skeumorphic Design, Flat Design, and Material Design. And the reason I bring them up is because, at some point or another, we’ve seen these take their place (or beginning to take place) within the context of WordPress themes.

Why I Back Post Status

January 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve been around the WordPress journalism / blogosphere / whatever-you-want-to-call-it enough, then you’ve likely seen the rise and fall of several news sites. Some of them were great and then went completely dark; others have been slowly going on the up and up.

Right now, I can definitively say that my two favorite journalism sites for WordPress are WP Tavern and Post Status. I’ve gotta give props to the Tavern because they’ve been around for quite a while, and just before we thought they were going to have to close their doors, they ended up receiving corporate backing.

The WordPress Tavern

Good news for us, right? One thing that makes me a little skeptical about that is that it can occasionally influence how stories are written but, to be fair, that doesn’t seem to be the case with The Tavern.

But then this past week, Brian Krogsgard introduced the new premium subscription service for Post Status. I’m a fan and I think this is something that many of us need to think critically about before joining.