Category: Articles (Page 172 of 258)

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

How Would You Teach Yourself WordPress?

December 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

With tomorrow being arguably one of the largest holidays in the world, I thought that it might be a decent change of pace of the posts and offer up something a little bit shorter and a little more open ended in hopes of getting some feedback from the rest of you WordPress designers, developers, bloggers, and other users.

So here’s the deal: Back when you first became acquainted with WordPress, you started at ground zero. We all did.

Sure, there might have been a few things that we knew – like how blogging work, or how HTML and PHP worked together, but we weren’t necessarily familiar with WordPress templating nor the WordPress API (or any part of the API for that matter). Continue reading

Tabbed Navigation in WordPress Themes

December 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the neater trends that we’re seeing in WordPress themes is that we’re able to introduce tabbed content into a single page when leveraging front-end frameworks – like Bootstrap or Foundation – so you can load up all of the content in a single request and not have to use outdated elements like iframe.

For example, say that you have an index template like this:

The template includes the usual header information
There’s a content area that’s composed of tabbed navigation (where each tab is a menu item)
When the user clicks on a menu item, it brings the corresponding content to the activate state and hides the other content
It then includes whatever other widgetized areas and footer content necessary for completing the page

It’s pretty cool when it’s executed correctly. Though I’m not saying I have the definitive way to go about doing this in WordPress, here’s what I’ve found to be most effective.

On The Productivity of Distributed Teams

December 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past year or so, I’ve been working with Eric Dye on revamping a theme that he’s been selling for sometime. The gist of the theme is content for another post, but one of the things that has been the most important, in my opinion, in our collaboration is making sure that we’re balancing our discussions via text and chat with voice and/or video calls.

This is me “collaborating.”

This is also true for how I balance my time with Envato, and how I balance my time with my team at Pressware. Some of the time, we use tools like Slack to stay in touch, other times we use tools like Google Hangouts or Skype or conference calls via cell phones to have our voice chats.

The point that I’m trying to make is that for as much of a fan as I am of distributed teams, and as much as I believe that they can – and do – work (though I think it requires a certain personality type to make it work successfully), I think it’s important for those who are considering doing any kind of remote work to distinguish when it’s best to chat – which is using text – when it’s best to use voice which is obviously using the phone or something similar – and when it’s best to use a hybrid such as Hangouts or Skype.

Improving Time Management By Identifying What We Need vs. What We Want

December 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

No one would argue that for those of us who spend the majority of our working day on the Internet that there’s a proverbial firehose of information that we have to keep up with. Some of the things by necessity, some of the things are by desire, but I think that sometimes we convolute the two.

That is to say that sometimes we think we need to keep up with things when in reality we just want to keep up with them. This ends up creating a weird trend where we feel as if we’re missing out on something if we aren’t keeping up with everything.

This makes it tough to stay productive during the work day because we’re not particularly great at multitasking (at least not as good as we’d like to think we are), and our attention is pulled in n-different directions.

When To Start Contributing To WordPress

December 15, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the points of frustration – or even dismay – that people have when they have a passion for working with WordPress is the fact that they don’t have an opportunity to commit anything to core. Or, rather, they don’t have the time that they wish they had to contribute anything to core.

And it can make you feel a little guilty (though it shouldn’t).

Sure, there are a lot of open source projects that are available many of which will merge a pull request in the same day if you were to offer one, but if you’re someone who uses WordPress daily for blogging, design, and/or development, then you likely have a strong urge to commit a patch to core and to see your name show up in the credits screen.

And no, it’s not for the point of having your name listed as a core contributor or for pride or anything like that, it’s for giving something back to the software that’s given you the ability to make a living, to make a side income, or just to build cool things for cool people.

But the challenge is actually finding the time.

How do you find the time between your day-to-day schedule between work, family, projects, and so on to pour through Trac in order to find something that you’re able to work on, to patch, to submit, and then to hope it gets merged into core?

WordPress Trac

The easy answer: You make time.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

But, c’mon, is that really a fair answer to give to someone who really does want to give back or who feels a sense of dismay that they aren’t able to do so for whatever circumstances?