Category: Articles (Page 207 of 258)

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

The Challenges of Monetizing Open Source Software: Contributors

January 27, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

The very idea of monetizing open source software – especially projects that have a list of contributors – is something that I spend more time thinking about than I’d like to admit.

One of the many Dev Practices

And I bring this up because there are a number of things that I’m working on (and that I’ve seen my peers work on), that are directly impacted by this.

As with anything, I’ve my own opinions about this, but I’m curious as to what you guys think as it relates to monetizing open source software.

Why I Don’t Update Old Blog Posts with a New Theme

January 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Update Old Blog Posts

For those who actually read this blog in a browser (rather than in a feed reader), you know that I’ve been using a new theme for the past few weeks.

Whenever you – or someone else – changes themes, it raises the question as to if you should go back over your old content and update your old blog posts so that they look well-formatted within the context of the new presentation.

If your blog is in its infancy and/or only has a few dozen posts, I think that makes sense, but if you’ve been writing for a while and have, say, several hundred posts or several years worth of posts, I don’t think it’s worth it.

Programmatically Upload Files in WordPress (and Create Associated Meta Data)

January 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is post one of two on how to upload files in WordPress and created associated meta data.

In a recent project, I’ve been working on a plugin in which the user needs to upload a file to a custom post type by using an input element (of type file, obviously) rather than using the WordPress media uploader.

In addition to being able to upload the file, the user must also be able to view the file and remove the file (via Ajax) by an available anchor.

In order to do this, the plugin has to do the following:

Upload the file to the `uploads` directory
Save the file URL to the custom post type’s post meta data
Save the file path to the custom post type’s post meta data
Delete the file from the `uploads directory
Clear the post meta data referencing the file

The primary reason that you have to store the file’s location on disk is because you can’t rely on PHP to delete a file via remote requests.

To that end, you need to be able to store not only where the file is on disk (for the sake of being able to delete), but also the URL of the file so that visitors or viewers can access the file via their browser.

Over the next two articles, I’ll share how to programmatically upload files in WordPress and save their associated meta data, and then I’ll share how to programmatically delete the files in WordPress as well as their associated meta data.
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Developers Must Know Everything, Or I’m Out of a Job

January 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I was talking with a fellow developer recently about some of the more recent “tools of the trade,” so to speak.

That is, we were discussing some of the newer frameworks that have been made available, web server software, configuration management tools, and dependency management applications.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the truth is that for the past couple of years, my technology stack hasn’t changed all of that much: Everything from the database all the way up through the IDE that I use has remained the same.

This isn’t to say that learning new technologies isn’t important, but I think that there’s something in our culture – at least in the United States – that invites us to spend our time spreading ourselves very thin across a variety of technologies rather than becoming specialized in a smaller subset of tools.

Writing Open Source Code (Or “Here Be Dragons”)

January 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Here Be Dragons

I don’t know if this is something that every developer experiences – regardless of what level of the stack you work on – but I know that for those who truly care about getting better at what we do, there’s often this constant feeling of “I think this could be better.”

Or, perhaps another way of saying it, is that one of the challenges in writing open source code is the criticism that can come that infuse a level of self-doubt.

For example, how many times have those of you who have contributed to a larger project, built something of your own from the ground up, or simply tried to write a small add-on to an existing solution, ended up with something that works, but have this sinking feeling that this just isn’t as elegant – or, I dunno, optimal – as it should be.

I mean, surely it’s not just me, right?