Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
When it comes to WordPress themes, one of the things that I used to think should be more common was the idea of style guides.
You know what I’m talking about: The documents that are either included with or ship with a theme that guide you on the typography, image sizes, video sizes, and other collateral to make sure that you use the theme exactly as it’s been designed to be used.
In other words, it prevents you from making the theme look ugly.
But are they really needed?
Obviously, the majority of the content that I write for the site deals with WordPress in someway, but there are times where I talk a bit about JavaScript, related libraries, and so on.
The Face of Anonymous Functions
Generally speaking, a lot of the JavaScript that’s written in the context of WordPress is done using jQuery because it’s the library that ships with the core applications, it’s tried and true, and its a good fit for a lot of the DOM manipulation that happens in themes and in plugins.
But one of the things that I’ve begun to notice over the past few years is that writing maintainable JavaScript (using jQuery or not) gets a bit more difficult when using anonymous functions.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Pods Framework, it’s a relatively simple concept that introduces some really neat, advanced features into WordPress.
Straight from the website:
The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs.
Neat, right? What’s even cooler is that the Pods development team is hosting their very first conference this October in DFW.
Some time ago, I began removing the HTML comment label from beneath the standard WordPress comment form (no, not the Jetpack-enabled form – the one that ships with a default WordPress theme).
Most of you are familiar with the form as it generally looks something like this:
HTML in Comments
Generally speaking I find that that block that usually sits between the textarea and the submit input to introduce complexity and likely cause more confusion than anything else.
One of the things that has been absolutely fantastic about the web is how much information we can publish and how much we can access it at any given time. I don’t know many who would disagree with that.
Even more so, for those who are interested in learning how to write software, there are various articles, podcasts, videos, tutorials, and so on all of which aim to teach a person the skills they need in order to actually get from not knowing how to write code, but knowing how to do so in a productive manner.
One of the downsides of this – and even more generally, open source – is that breeds this copy-and-paste mentality that completely undermines the very thing that it’s trying to teach: that is, how to write code.
Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large. Powered by Google Platform and strengthened by Cloudflare, they take performance to the next level. All hosting plans include 24/7/365 support from their team of WordPress engineers. Get started with a free migration today.
© 2026 Tom McFarlin
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑