Category: Articles (Page 226 of 258)

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

My Experience with OAuth.io

July 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, a new service – OAuth.io – was announced that claimed it was going to make it much easier to work with a variety of providers who offer OAuth for their authentication mechanism.

During the announcements, they were doing the usual and taking emails for beta invites. I went ahead and registered – 8BIT had a small project in the pipeline that would be perfect for this should the time sync up for it – and looked forward to trying it out.

To be fair, I rarely get my hopes up with online services. They frequently over promise, under deliver, and are then bought out or eventually sold.

But hey, it was free, it was new, it sounded good, so why not, right?

Now that I’ve actually put it to work in a real world project, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

Why Themes Are Presentation, Plugins Are Applications

July 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently had a conversation with someone about why I tend to favor working on WordPress plugins over working with themes, and the short answer is that I enjoy working more on application-type functionality rather than working on a design layer, and, as such, I believe plugins are applications for WordPress.

I’ve talked a little bit about this in previous articles:

In short, I tend to strictly view themes as the presentation of data whereas I see plugins as something that should transcend themes and offer functionality to WordPress regardless of what the current blog looks like. This isn’t a revolutionary Idea. Most experienced WordPress developers and designers feel this way, but I figured I’d offer my two cents on the subject.

In a way, plugins are like apps for WordPress.

The Signal and Noise of Developer Maturity

July 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think that for many developers, it’s all too common for them to have heard or even to have said something along the lines: “That’s nice, but I could build that, too” or perhaps go even further and then say “that’s nice, but I could build it better.”

In fact, years ago, the classical example of this was:

I could’ve written Twitter in a weekend.

Surely some of you guys remember that.

Anyway, there’s another thing that’s interesting in the development community and that’s that we’re all taking advantage of the work of others who have come before us.

To use a cliche, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

And what I’m getting at has nothing to do with whether or not you could’ve written Twitter in a weekend, but that there are certain signals of developer maturity, and one of the first is recognizing that regardless of whether or not you know when to write it from the ground up, and when you know when to use the work of others.

A Look at the WordPress HTTP API

July 17, 2013 / Tom

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

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.

Were It Not For The Fear of Criticism

July 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.