Category: Articles (Page 229 of 258)

A few months ago, I wrote about Finding The Right WordPress Support System in which I laid out my points for what I’d look for in a support system. The post ended up generating a lot of really good feedback, and – as of last week – I officially chose Help Scout as my WordPress support system.

Obviously, it’s been about three months since I originally published that post so I clearly took my time (read: evaluated services after the responsibilities of my day job) deliberating on which service I to use.

As with any more decision, there were a number of factors that contributed to this decision.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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