Category: Articles (Page 193 of 258)

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

We Need to Make WordPress Plugin Settings More Intuitive

June 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

As I’ve been working through a number of different plugins both for myself and for client projects, one of the things that has started to become glaringly apparent over the last few projects is just how unintuitive WordPress plugin settings can be.

I know, isn’t a new idea, but bear with me because I’m not talking about your standard run-of-the-mill plugins that have a settings page or that may add some type of shortcode functionality to the editor (though that’s unintuitive unto itself).

Instead, I’m talking about plugins that include a little bit of both: settings pages, additions to custom post types, perhaps the additions of shortcodes or buttons to the editor, and so on.

Don’t Write Code Every Day (What I Should, What I Have, What I Want)

June 11, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s becoming more and more prevalent in programming culture is that everyone should learn to code, and even that some people should aim to try to write code every day.

And don’t get me wrong: I think educating others who are interested is extremely important.

I’ve written about the former topic before, but the latter is something with which I wrestle. On one hand, I really like the idea – that is, in theory. I mean, it’s a great argument for how to get better at what it is that you’re doing on a daily basis, right?

It’s a way to help you become world class.

Brand Loyalty of WordPress Theme Companies

June 9, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about themes and their place within the WordPress community. Generally speaking, I think that this is a good thing as it’s finally forcing theme designers and developers to thing more strategically about the products that they’re creating, releasing, and to think more critically about their target audience, marketing efforts, and so on.

There are some who believe the market has been saturated, and though I follow that train of thought, I don’t agree with it. Just because there are more product options, more companies, and so on producing themes does not necessarily negatively detract from the industry.

I think it makes it more competitive which, in turn, can make it more innovative (though it can also create more products that should never be on the market, but that’s the nature of an economy and I’d rather keep the post optimistic).

With that said, I don’t think that there’s any reason to be discouraged from entering the theme development space, creating a new theme company, or anything like that.

In fact, I think on the contrary.

The Best Developer Tools (According to You)

June 6, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that developers love to discuss is the tools that we use. And why not, right? It’s fun to talk about what IDEs, minifiers, compressors, build tools, deployment utilities, and so on that we incorporate into our daily workflow.

It’s also fun to see what other people use to see if there isn’t something to be learned and gained from the way that other people do work.

But sometimes I think that we do cross a line: I think that many of us have a disposition such that we think “if they aren’t using what I’m using then they aren’t being as productive (read: they are as proficient) as I am.”

Overly Manly Man: Breathmints

And this mentality is lame primarily because there are a number of factors that contribute to the tools that a developer opts to use when he or she is getting his or her work done.

How to Display Error Messages in WordPress

June 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Regardless of your level of experience with WordPress, everyone is familiar with seeing the messages that display whenever an action has completed within the dashboard:

We have success messages for when something has completed, ahem, successfully,
We have notification messages which are neutral pieces of information that give a heads up something has happened,
And we have error messages that let us know that something has gone wrong.

For anyone that’s read past articles, you know that when it comes to introducing functionality into the WordPress dashboard, I firmly believe that the work we do should look as native as possible. That is to say that I am not a fan of custom styles, custom controls, or extraordinary styles to give your theme or plugin that “extra edge.”

And for those who are familiar with the Settings API and/or the Options API, then you’re likely familiar with introducing new sections, settings, controls, and options, but what about error messages?

Display Error Messages in WordPress

Generally speaking, success messages and notification messages are reasonably easy to come by, but let’s say that you need to validate some piece of information that’s coming into the server and return an error if it fails.