Category: Articles (Page 219 of 257)

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

Deep and Wide: The Tension of Software Development

September 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things I talk a lot about both with small groups of friends and during speaking events is the idea of going deep rather than wide.

In the context of software, I’m typically referring to the idea of going extremely deep within the languages and tools that you’re using on a daily basis so that you may become the best developer that you can possibly be in that area.

But there’s a tension that I think most programmers feel and it’s that there are so many neat things out there to learn. Couple that with the fact that others can sometimes make us feel inferior if we don’t know what they know, the tension grows even stronger.

I’m not sure if I’m making much sense.

A Guide To The WordPress Theme Customizer

September 24, 2013 / Tom

Comments on are closed on this post so we can keep the discussion on the original articles.

One of the neatest, and nicest features of WordPress (since 3.4) has been the WordPress theme customizer.

In fact, I’m such a fan of it that I think that it has the potential for us to decrease or even remove our theme options pages by giving users all of the tools they need straight in the Theme Customizer.

But as with any new feature or API, there’s a lot to learn and things to understand about how it works, how to implement it in our day-to-day work, and how to use it in place of APIs we previously used.

So in my latest series on WPTuts+, I’m looking at doing exactly that.

My Day-To-Day: Path

September 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

WordPress Theme Updates and Semantic Versioning

September 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,

MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and

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.

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

September 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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:

Otto’s guide to the WordPress Theme Customizer
The comprehensive Codex article on the Theme Customization API
And an open source example of how to use the Theme Customizer

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.