Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 217 of 255)

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

My Day-To-Day: Path

Earlier this year, I talked a little bit about how I deal with social media during the day-to-day. In that article, I shared that I’m a big fan of Path. In fact, I said this:

Yep – I actually use Path. I know, I know, few do, right? But the thing about Path is that my immediate family and my closest friends all use it so I’m actually able to get the benefit of using that particular application more so than any other.

Months later, I’ve continued to scale back my social media involvement to the point where I’ve killed my Facebook account, I don’t use Instagram or any other social service, but have continued to use Path as they’ve continued to grow their service, and I’ve enjoyed every feature – and the frequency thereof – that they’ve rolled out throughout the year.

At this point, the only two social networks that I’m currently using are Twitter and Path.

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WordPress Theme Updates and Semantic Versioning

Maybe I’m more observant than I used to be, or maybe there is a trend that’s actually happening, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that more and more WordPress developers are beginning to take interest in semantic versioning.

In short (and straight from the website), semantic versioning works like this:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
  2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
  3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Easy enough to remember, right?

One of the things that sticks out, however, is that certain parts are meant to be updated and changed when there are “incompatible API changes”, when there are backwards-compatibility changes, and when there re bug fixes (and, in which I include, hot fixes).

This clearly makes sense in the context of a larger application such as, you know, WordPress itself, but Themes?

Let’s be honest: most WordPress Theme Updates don’t necessary fall under these same changes because they don’t have an API. Even more so, it raises the question of what would be considered a backwards-compatible change?

Or do they?

The more I’ve given this some thought, the more I think semantic versioning works just fine for WordPress theme updates, and it’s something that I’d love to see continued to be implemented.

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The WordPress Theme Customizer: When Live Preview Doesn’t Work

I’m currently working on a lengthy set of articles that are intended to provide an in-depth look at the WordPress Theme Customizer. Yes, there has been a lot of material already written on this subject.

Some of the best articles are:

And though I’ve done work with the Theme Customizer in the past, there have been a few gotchas that I’ve found when trying to work with the customer starting from the ground up.

I don’t plan to document them all here, but if you happen to be working with the Theme Customizer and you’re specifically trying to get the “Live Preview” function working and it’s not, perhaps this will help.

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Blogging is Narcissistic (Except When It’s Not)

One of the things that’s becoming more and more common is that certain critics are claiming that we’re becoming more and more of a narcissistic society with our constant sharing of things on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, and so on.

I don’t know if I observation really holds water or not – rarely are things black and white, so I’m sure it’s true in some cases – but I’ve never really considered blogging in and of itself of be narcissistic.

This isn’t to say it can’t be, but I don’t think that it – as a medium – is meant to feed that particular aspect of the human condition.

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Please Stop Using doing_it_wrong

I’ll be the first to admit that I love memes and that I love picking on some of my closest developer buddies – some of them live a few miles down the road, some of them live hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away.

We all work in a variety of different technologies in a variety of different cultures. Some of us are self-employed, some of us work for non-profits, some of us work for small businesses, and some of us work for large corporations.

But the one thing that we all have in common is that we love to code.

Applications Love Code

Give it to ’em. Give it to ’em good.

And, honestly, the majority of the people with whom I interact with on Twitter are programmers, too. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t have read half the stuff I’ve read online were it not for someone else sharing a link to their – or someone else’s – stuff.

The Internet is awesome like that, you know.

With all of that said, one thing that I can’t stand seeing is someone telling someone is that they are `doing_it_wrong` outside of talking with their personal friends, or their friends that they chat with online.

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