Category: Articles (Page 229 of 258)

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

The Truth About Building Premium WordPress Plugins

June 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I was talking with a fellow developer about building premium WordPress plugins (though this is true for any premium WordPress product) and he simply remarked:

It is amazing how much work goes into a single premium plugin.

Nothing profound, sure, but there’s a lot of truth to it, and I periodically get emails asking what all should one expect when it comes to building and releasing free and/or premium WordPress products.

With that said, here are some of my thoughts on all of the above.

The Great Expectations of Modifying WordPress Themes

June 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I was talking with Chris – our product midwife at 8BIT – about the differences in expectations between engineers, developers, designers, tweakers, and end users when it comes to modifying WordPress themes.

I started my career in software engineering – specifically, I used to work in .NET followed by Ruby on Rails – as well as object-oriented programming before moving into fulltime WordPress development.

And you know what they say: Old habits die hard.

Did someone say “die hard?”

Case in point: ask my team what I did when I first became the lead developer of Standard. I spent more time yanking out template code, abstracting it into `functions.php` and a collection of other files all of which would make sense to someone comes from a different background, but not WordPress.

And here I am, years later, where I’m significantly more familiar with “the WordPress-way” (even writing blog posts on Coding Standards and various APIs even) and there are still issues to be solved around this very issue.

My Second Post on Medium: Do For One

June 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few years ago, one of the most profound and influential pieces of advice that I’ve heard is the following:

Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.

The thing about hearing things like this is that it always lands in different places with different people. Like I said, for me, it’s ended up being something that’s profoundly influenced certain things in my life; however, for others, statements like that don’t land anywhere near a point of significance.

And that’s okay – if we were all influenced and persuaded by the same things, we’d all be doing the same things and that’d make for a boring world.

But for those of you who have been following this blog, read some of my other contributing articles, or seeing what we’re currently working on at 8BIT you know that education is a big interest, and is important to me.

So in my second post on Medium, I attempt to explain something that I’m currently working on that jives with the statement above.

Improve WordPress Code: PHP Code Readability – Strings

June 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

On of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most about working through the live workshop on WordPress plugin development is the conversation that’s ensued around writing WordPress code and PHP code readability in our Basecamp discussions.

For those of you who have been around a while, you know that I’m opinionated when it comes to writing WordPress code. Specifically, I believe that just because WordPress is written in PHP does not mean that we should forgo the APIs and use PHP functions just because we’re either more familiar with them or because we find them easier to use.

That said, there are times in which the native PHP functions are the way to go.

For example, string comparison.

All About The Trailing Slash in WordPress

June 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I wrote a post discussing why I think it’s important to use a trailing slash in WordPress.

The point of the post was to state that when you’re working with URLs and you’re looking for the last index of the array, the only way to guarantee the it’s always at the final position is if there’s a trailing slash so that you can `explode` on the ‘/’ character.

This post lead to some good discussion about why or why not to use `trailingslashit`, it brought to light to some other important and useful functions, and actually reminded me that there are times when trailing slashes should be used and when they shouldn’t.

To that end, I thought I’d thought I’d do a more thorough explanation as to each of the “trailing slash” functions WordPress offers, their purpose, and why trailing slashes are even important in the context of URLs.