Category: Articles (Page 204 of 258)

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

The Hate and Vitriol of WordPress

February 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone who has worked with it or worked on it long enough, you are likely familiar with the criticism, the hate and vitriol of WordPress.

Straight up, people despise WordPress, its codebase, the fact that people not only work on it, but also write about it, build for it, and make any argument for using it outside of its primary use case of being a blog and/or a content management system.

And as a developer – especially one not only new to WordPress, but one who is new to programming in general – this can become really discouraging.

In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that it can make you question not only your ability as a programmer, but your ability to learn the tools, methodologies, and practices of software engineers who work with other languages, tools, frameworks, and so on.

My Workflows For WordPress: Self-Hosted Projects

February 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous article, I shared a bit about how I try to streamline my workflow based on where my WordPress project is hosted.

Specifically, I talked about having the codebase hosted in a Subversion repository, using the provided support forum solution, and how I manage tickets. I also talked about how all of the decisions for how I manage the project stem from where and how the source code is managed.

To that end, whenever I’m working on a self-hosted project (or, rather, one that is not included in the WordPress plugin repository), then I end up going with a slightly different workflow.

My Workflows For WordPress: Hosted Projects

February 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re like me, then there’s a part of you that’s obsessed highly motivated to make sure that you’re streamlining your workflow as much as possible.

When it comes to the process of working on WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, and how to manage everything via source control, support forums, and managing bugs and their associated tickets, all the while making sure that you’re not duplicating repositories in order to make sure you’ve got the leanest workflow possible can be a bit of a chore.

Even writing (and possibly reading that last sentence) is just as indicative as to how tedious it can be.

So, with that said, I thought I’d share my workflow for how I divide up my codebases based on if they are hosted in the WordPress plugin repository and/or the WordPress theme repository, and how I deal with support, as well as how I manage self-hosted projects and their associated support forums, as well.

In this first post, we’ll cover the former.

Outsource WordPress Support (I Don’t, But What About You?)

February 17, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently received a comment on my article on WordPress plugin support (that is, How Much is Too Much?).

Specifically, the comment asked:

So why not just outsource the support e.g. use a service that provides support to plugin end users on behalf of the plugin developers? Seems like that would save the developer a ton of time.

I thought that this was a great question, but as I began to respond, I thought that it may work better as a full post rather than a comment if for no other reason than to more easily share my own thoughts on the matter (but also to gauge other people’s opinions, as well :).

Developer Distractions: The Available Tools

February 14, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

“A computer on every desk in every home”

When it comes to computing, development, and related technologies, it’s really easy to be inspired by individuals such as Steve Jobs – and many people in our industry are.

I certainly am.

But I also remember, back in the 90’s, reading a lot about Bill Gates, his mission to have a computer on “every desk in every home,” the things they were working on at Microsoft, and certain things about programming that I was too young to really understand (but found interesting, nonetheless).

Recently, I came a cross a really neat interview with Gates from 1986 in which he talks about a number of things – his experience in programming, Microsoft, where computing was headed, and so on.