Category: Articles (Page 188 of 258)

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

Writing Maintainable WordPress Themes

July 19, 2014 / Tom

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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.

Of Salaries and Software Development With WordPress

July 17, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the last couple of posts, I’ve been talking about the various things that contribute to WordPress developers having lower salaries than other traditional software developers. Specifically, I’ve talked about:

Three reasons I think salaries are lower,
And how the industry, applicant pool, and skill set play a role

To be clear (and as pointed out in the comments), this isn’t the case everywhere, but it’s apparently a common enough trend such that peers in the industry are noticing it, and it’s struck a chord with others to, ahem, write about it, and to continue a talking about it a little more in-depth.

Anyway, one of the things that’s undeniable is that WordPress can’t be compared directly to frameworks like Rails and .NET, libraries like jQuery, or straight up languages because it’s none of those things. In and of itself, WordPress is an application that can be installed on a web server and can be used for digital publishing.

It just so happens that it has a powerful API that allows it not only to be extended, but for other applications to be built upon it.

WordPress Developer Salary: Manage That Content!

July 16, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous post, I shared a few thoughts on the challenges of setting a WordPress developer salary. When I began writing out my opinion, I ended up writing a lot more than I had intended, so in order to keep posts at a shorter length (thus saving all of us time :) and sounding less monotonous, I’ve broken everything up into a handful of posts that I’m basically running as a series.

Yesterday, I laid it all out in that I shared three reasons as to why I think WordPress developer salaries are lower than that of the average software developer. There were some really good, thoughtful comments on the post, too.

And the whole point of doing that was to lay out a high-level view of my opinions before looking at the topic in more detail.

As much as I want to talk about more technical matters of WordPress, I think it’s worth noting that one reason that a WordPress developer salary is hard to set is that many still see WordPress as a content management system, if not just another blogging platform.

A WordPress Developer Salary Should Be…?

July 15, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, Ryan Sullivan – a twitter-friend of mine – sent out the following note:

Interesting. Add “WordPress” to almost any development job search and watch the salary magically drop 30%. Any thoughts why?

— Ryan Sullivan (@ryandonsullivan) July 14, 2014

An interesting observation, isn’t it? Especially for those who work on WordPress full time, work with WordPress full time, and/or those who have come to WordPress from other backgrounds. Specifically those in software development backgrounds.

Straight up, I’ll say that I don’t know why a WordPress developer salary is less than any other [insert whatever type of] developer salary is here, but I have my thoughts and speculations (as I’m sure you do, as well). And as I – and many others – have been talking more and more about trying to force a shift in the WordPress economy, this seemed like a timely thing to share.