Category: Articles (Page 187 of 258)

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

Disrespecting the WordPress Customer, Damaging the WordPress Customizer

July 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that one of the things that I love most about the most recent versions of WordPress is the Theme Customizer (which is soon to be called the Customizer). I’ve talked about it in a number of different articles, some of which include:

Further, I’ve been clear in stating that I think that as much as I like the Customizer, we’re beginning to see the same problems, but in a different place.

Simply put, I think that we’re disrespecting our customers and damaging the WordPress customizer.

And over the past few weeks, I’ve seen this manifesting itself more and more through various themes I’ve seen, various screenshots I’ve seen, and various other discussions I’ve seen.

Granted, I’m not really one in a position to say what a person opts to do with their own projects, and I’m not particularly interested in getting up on a soapbox (but this is probably going to read like that, so there’s that, I guess) and telling everyone how or why to do something, but I do have strong opinions on the WordPress philosophy and how it directly contributes to developing themes.

As it stands now right now, I think that we’re doing a terrible job of respecting the WordPress philosophy, putting it to work for us, creating happy customers, and leveraging the WordPress customizer for the betterment of the WordPress economy.

An Attempt to Improve JavaScript in WordPress

July 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s always been somewhat of a point of pain in both theme and plugin development is how to handle JavaScript in WordPress.

By this, I’m not talking about third-party dependencies such as jQuery, FitVids, or whatever libraries Bootstrap, Foundation, or what’s contained within the frontend framework you opt to use when building your theme – instead, I’m talking specifically about code that we write in order to get things done within the context of our work.

When it comes to procedural programming in WordPress – think working in functions.php – it’s expected that we’re going to be naming our functions with a unique prefix in order to prevent conflicts with other functions that may exist within plugins, third-party libraries, or even in WordPress itself.

For anyone who is just getting started in working in WordPress, this can be a hard lesson learned depending on if you’re one of the “read-the-documentation-first” type of people or not, but the thing is that the global nature of PHP mixed with the wide array of functions included in WordPress, PHP, and third-party code can lead to naming collisions that will either break the overall application or cause erratic behavior.

Most likely the former, but whatever.

But look at that: I spent the entire first part of this article talking specifically about naming PHP functions – but this is exactly the point I’m trying to make: We spend a lot of time talking about doing this in PHP, but not a lot of time talking about doing it in JavaScript.

WordPress Developers: The Programmer and the Implementer

July 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Throughout the last few posts, I’ve been talking a little bit about WordPress Developer Salaries, but have also done so by taking a look at exactly what it means to be a WordPress developer.

If you’re just catching up, the previous posts are:

There have been a lot of awesome comments and I’ve enjoyed hearing the different perspectives and opinions that everyone has brought to each post. There’s one more aspect of WordPress development that I want to look at before ending the series.

I’ve already mentioned this throughout several of the previous articles (and it’s been bought up in the comments, as well), but I thought it’d be worth outlining it here not only to share my concrete opinions on the matter but hopefully as an attempt to provide a reference or even maybe some food for thought for those who are looking for WordPress-related jobs, and those who are looking to staff WordPress-related jobs.

Specifically, it’s about looking at the term “WordPress Developers” and trying to give an explanation as what that really means.

After all, we’ve already said that the term developer is overused to the point of having no meaning, right?

Writing Maintainable WordPress Themes

July 19, 2014 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Please leave your feedback on the series' respective article.

One of the most difficult aspects of building any type of software is the amount of work that’s required to maintain the project after its release.

Sure, shipping an initial version is challenging and this is not to understate the amount of planning, feedback, iterating, and general work that goes into a project; however, once it’s out in the wild and more and more people begin to use it, discover bugs, hammer on it, and so on, and additional ideas for features are developed, it becomes an entirely different challenge to keep the project rolling.

And though people would argue whether or not WordPress themes (or plugins or any script-based utility, for that matter) constitutes actual software, the truth is that it’s still subject to the same rules and methodologies as different software projects.

As such, one of the challenges of theming is actually writing maintainable WordPress themes such that they can continue to be improved over time. So in my latest series for Envato, I’m writing exactly on that topic.

The Roles of WordPress Development

July 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the last three posts, I’ve spoken a bit about the salaries of WordPress developers, why they may be lower than traditional software developers, and some of the expectations that come with what a WordPress developer may be (depending on their role).

I’ve shared:

In the last post, I talked a bit about the responsibilities and expectations of a traditional software developer and how that may relate to WordPress. And earlier, I briefly talked about the terms a “developer” and an “implementer” both of which I think are applicable in the WordPress space.

But first, it’s worth noting that many WordPress developers are people who are building themes and/or plugins. At this point in WordPress’ history, people still aren’t seeing it as something that can be used to build web applications (let alone mobile applications) so it’s seen more as something that bloggers, frontend developers, and maybe some middle-ware developers are used to doing.

And all of that is correct – but there is more to it than what’s listed above.