Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
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Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being featured on the ManageWP blog with some other fantastic writers, developers, designers, and bloggers all of whom opted to share their favorite WordPress shortcuts, tools, and tricks for getting their work done faster.
Overall, there were 28 people who were featured all of whom had some great things to say.
A few months ago, I did a series of articles on Design Patterns in WordPress that was meant to provide an introduction to object-oriented design patterns, and how they can be used when developing projects on top of WordPress.
When it comes to working with WordPress, code is normally written one of two ways:
For procedural programming, think of `functions.php` in theme development, and for object-oriented think of plugins. This isn’t to say that procedural programming isn’t used in plugins – it often is (case in point: Markdown Code For WordPress) – but so are object-oriented techniques (see the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate).
In short, decide patterns exist for a reason: They are proven solutions to common problems that appear in software development.
Yes, they may have to be tweaked a bit for a given situation, but the definition, structure, and so on remains the same. The thing is, I don’t often see many design patterns used throughout WordPress product development.
To be clear, I’m not talking about WordPress core, I’m talking about products built on top of WordPress. Perhaps I’ve just not done enough digging or paid enough attention to some of the work that’s out there, but I think if we – as developers – spent time working on implementing design patterns in our work, projects could have much more longevity rather than devolving into spaghetti code that’s so often found in WordPress work.
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As someone who clearly loves to blog (as well as read what others have to say and build things for others to use), one of the things that I enjoy the most is hearing from others – specifically, family and friends – who want to get into blogging but aren’t sure where to start.
Blogging is a lot like Loch Ness: It’s a deep and wide sea that’s full of myths that can detract you from the actual site if you’re not careful.
Nessie isn’t a myth. She’s real. Okay? Okay.
Cheesy example, I know, but the truth is that there are several blogging myths all of which can seriously keep people at bay from pressing the publish button, and that’s a real shame especially if it’s an interest that they have.
For those who have been into computer science for any amount of time, you’re likely familiar with Joel Spolsky, his blog Joel on Software, and/or perhaps any of his books.
A couple of years ago, I read an article called The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).
I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, it wasn’t very applicable to me. Yes, it was interesting, yes, I cared, but I didn’t have a practical way to implement it simply because there was nothing that I was working that warranted the information in the article.
But here was one of my biggest takeaways:
If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.
Fast forward a couple of years and I was working at a place where every piece of application code that we rolled out had to be internationalized because it was accessible by a variety of countries all across the world – now it was more practical (and it’s not much different than WordPress, huh?).
And now, I’m finding myself working more with unicode characters in WordPress more than I ever have before.
Here’s the thing that few people talk about: Sites, themes, or HTML in general will specify a character set that can drastically affect how the content in your page is rendered.
A few months ago, a number of companies – ours included – began to suspend or completely end their WordPress affiliate programs.
Naturally, this created a bit of a backlash.
In all fairness, not all customers were particularly upset. Some were disappointed, sure, and rightly so but moved on with their blogs; others were far more upset about the apparent injustice that was served by companies opting to pull the plugin on the program.
Since news in WordPress opts to ebb and flow week to week, this has been something that’s passed, but I’ve begun to see some comments beginning to crop up again specifically around affiliate programs in the WordPress space.
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