Category: Articles (Page 220 of 255)

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

WordPress Views: Post Type and Page Templates

August 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I talked a little bit about design patterns – namely MVC and event-driven patterns – and WordPress, and how there’s the occasional effort to make the core application work in a way in which it isn’t designed.

Obviously, I still think that, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t borrow concepts from certain design patterns in order to help improve our conceptual model of how WordPress solutions are built.

Case in point: I think it’s acceptable to think of page templates and post type templates as views.

Planned Obsolescence in WordPress

August 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that we often see in the “offline marketplace” – for lack of a better term – is the idea of planned obsolescence.

Simply defined:

a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

This is something that we see in auto industry, in the electronics industry, and in the computer industry. Think of it this way: Remember the iPhone 3? Or remember the Chevrolet Monte Carlo?

These are but two examples of products that were widely used – some for decades – and then were replaced by another product either by one with a brand new version or by an entire new line.

This is one of those things we don’t necessarily consider or talk about in the context of software. But why? All other platforms and languages aside, would planned obsolescence in WordPress be so bad?

On Fragmentation, Distraction, and Liberation

August 23, 2013 / Tom

I think that when a major life change happens or a major shift in responsibilities happens in your life, it’s natural to get a bit introspective on all of things that you have going on and determine what really matters and what really doesn’t.

I mean, at the end of the day, I’d love to believe that all of us want to do good work, put something good into the world, and give as much of ourselves to our families, friends, and others as possible. It may be a bit idealistic, but that’s a discussion for another time.

The thing is, it’s easier than ever to get distracted with so many things around us.

To be clear, this isn’t a post about how we’re losing touch with reality by looking at our phones and our computers all of the time – there’s plenty of other articles out their filled with op-ed, psychobabble, true psychiatric studies, and so on about all of the above – and I actually think a lot of good has come from this technology. So I digress.

But simply put, this is more of a personal post looking at all of the things that I’ve had that place some type of burden of responsibility on me and ask myself if it’s something that I really need at this point in time.

My Day-To-Day: Hero Academy

August 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Almost everything I share on this blog has something to do with WordPress, JavaScript, some general programming, or “how I get stuff done” content. I rarely talk about anything else other than that.

But, like the rest of you guys, there are other things that I do with my day other than everything listed above.

And one of those things is video games – and as of late (read: the past few months), that game has been Hero Academy.

WordPress and MVC (Gloves Aren’t Made for Feet)

August 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the topics that periodically crops up in discussions as it relates to WordPress is the idea of WordPress and MVC.

That is, developers wants to take an MVC approach to building WordPress applications. And I get it – I love MVC. It’s why I used to work with Rails, it’s why I was really excited when Microsoft released .NET MVC years ago (when I was working in .NET).

But the thing is that MVC is not the silver bullet of web development that we try to make it out to be. Yes, it’s an awesome design pattern, and I personally think that it fits the web application model like a glove, but not every framework or platform implements that design pattern.

Case in point: WordPress is not MVC.

And that’s okay. I think we need to leave the desire of trying to shoehorn it into our projects aside especially when the pattern WordPress provides is not only sufficient, but works well when leveraged correctly.