Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 226 of 257)

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

A Look at the WordPress HTTP API

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When it comes to working with WordPress, one of the lesser discussed aspects of the platform is the WordPress HTTP API.

This isn’t to say that people don’t use it – they obviously do – and this isn’t to say that people don’t actually understand it – because I’m sure they do – but I don’t think it’s evangelized or discuss enough.

In fact, it looks as if there’s very few tutorials about the API available on the web. So, to that end, I’ve opted to do a bit of a practical crash course in the API on WPTuts+ over the next few weeks.

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Were It Not For The Fear of Criticism

Over the past few months, I’ve published several articles about handling negativity and criticism on the Internet. I hesitate to even share another one because I hate to not only beat a dead horse, but to even address something that, y’know, will never go away.

Specifically, I’ve shared:

But in my recent post on WP Explorer, there were a couple of comments that came in at the same time a friend of mine shared a timely article with me.

So for those of you who are beginners, looking to get into WordPress development in any capacity, or who are even the least bit timid about releasing anything to the public for a fear of criticism, know that you’re in good company.

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The High Price of Free Plugins

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Recently, I had a chance to guest post over at WP Explorer and opted to discuss the high price of free WordPress plugins.

For the most part, the article is aimed at anyone who is looking to get into WordPress plugin development, but isn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, it’s one of those “if I knew then what I knew now” kind of scenarios.

Ultimately, I cover a handful of topics – both pros and cons – about what to expect when getting into the game.

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Whatever You Do: Keep Calm and Code On

A couple of weeks ago, I shared an very simple open source plugin for WordPress called Markdown Code For WordPress.

The purpose of the plugin is simple:

I include a variety of snippets in my posts for which I get tired of adding markup every. single. time.

Over time, I’ve added support for just a few more tokens, but the bottom line is that the plugin is written to help make what I do just a little bit easier in my day-to-day.

Markdown Code For WordPress

If others find it useful, great! If not, no big deal, either. It’s available for free and I’ll even take a look at pull requests to see if it fits in the vision for what I want.

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On Missions and Visions: Your Brand, Your Company, Yourself

With my recent sharing of my upcoming rebrand and the sharing of some of the things like premium plugins and my choice of support software, I’ve also been giving thoughts to things like mission statements, vision statements, and more.

Truth be told, I’ve almost always considered that kind of stuff to be related more to larger companies or organizations.

But why?

Why is it not applicable to a freelancer, a small team or a small business?

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