Category: Articles (Page 184 of 258)

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

WordPress Theme Updates Are New Themes

August 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I know that there are different ways that people approach building WordPress themes and I’m not one to argue that there’s a single right way to do it. Sure, some ways are better than others, but that’s true of a lot of things.

Personally, I approach building themes, plugins, and so on as I would as if I was building some type of software. That has to do with my background. Similarly, someone who has a background in design and in front-end development will conceptualize what they are building in a different way.

Like I said, all of that’s fine (in fact, I think it’d be interested to see how different people view building themes, but I digress), but I do know that one common thing we always have to think about as it relates to updated our WordPress themes is the actual front-end design.

Specifically, does it make sense to completely change the design of a theme for a different version of the theme?

Design Patterns for Refactoring: The Facade Pattern

August 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For some time now, one of the things that I’ve been considering writing about is the idea of refactoring.

Not necessarily in an incredibly specific sense – because each project is different – but in the sense of using some strategies that can help to take an existing project that’s running in a production server and slowly begin to refactor it so that its architecture changes but the functionality remains the same.

Anyone who’s worked in the software world knows just how nasty a codebase can get, and WordPress is no different. And I’m not talking about WordPress core – I’m talking about plugins, themes, apps, or whatever else it is that you may be building on top of WordPress.

For the most part, we start our projects with the idea that it’s going to have a great architecture, a pristine design, and that it’s going to basically be the best thing that we’ve ever worked with.

At some point, usually due to external factors, the thing devolves into a pile that we no longer want to touch, and we hope that it holds together to continue solving the problem at hand.

But it doesn’t have to be that way and even if the code you end up working with – be it your own, or someone else’s – has devolved into a big ball of mud, there’s still a strategy (probably multiple strategies) that you can use in order to refactor it into something far more elegant.

Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good

August 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s becoming more and more common place regarding front end frameworks, utilities, or applications is the use of the phrase “it’s bloated” followed by an argument as to why we should dismiss it.

No, this isn’t something that’s new, but it’s something that’s becoming appears to be becoming more mainstream – at least as far as I can tell – in how people describe the tools, apps, frameworks, libraries, and other tools that they work with today, or have worked with at some point in the past.

Obviously, this isn’t to say that nothing is bloated – I mean, I’ve written enough articles on the idea on “decisions, not options” and on how things should be more focused on a single niche – but sometimes I think that we often write off certain utilities as being “bloated” when that’s not exactly the case.

Just because something has a number of features that you don’t use doesn’t make it bloated.

JavaScript and WordPress Page Performance

August 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I was having a conversation with a fellow WordPress developer about improving page performance as it relates to JavaScript. Specifically, we were talking about if it makes sense to load JavaScript sources at the bottom of the page.

If you’ve done any client-side development for a moderate length of time, odds are strong that you’re well-aware that it’s considered a best practice to include JavaScript sources before the closing body tag rather than in the head element.

This is because it allows the browser to render the page more quickly without waiting for larger files to download (and JavaScript files are normally heavier than HTML documents because of their file size and the processing they do on the DOM).

There’s a lot that could be said with respect to this in terms of general web development, but in terms of WordPress, opting to enqueue your scripts at the bottom of the page versus the top of the page may require a bit more consideration.

The Beginner’s Guide to Type Coercion

August 16, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This week, I started a new series on Tuts+ Code that walks readers through understanding type coercion.

Type Coercion

Generally speaking, the series of articles starts at the most basic level by discussing strongly typed and weakly typed languages, data types and how they work in different environments, and then begins to branch out more into how data types work within dynamically typed languages.

The main motivation for this is because people who are coming from a strongly-typed background, or those who are just getting into programming may end up finding themselves making a few mistakes especially as it relates to comparisons, conditionals, and other similar evaluations.

This series aims to mitigate that.