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.
I’ve spent more than enough time talking about my position on using WordPress as a platform for writing web applications, but there’s one aspect of doing so that I don’t think that I’ve actually bothered discussing very much.
Namely, if WordPress is suitable as a platform for application development, then does it make sense to use it when another framework, set of libraries, or core tools may also fit the bill?
A couple of months ago, my team and I received an email from a film crew who were shooting a documentary on the The Legend of Zelda franchise and were interviewing people all over the country who had grown up playing the franchise and were open to discussing the impact that the game had on their lives.
Yesterday, It’s Dangerous To Go Alone – the official site and trailer – went live.
Though I rarely deviate from talking about development especially with WordPress on this blog, there’s a point that I made during the course of our interview that was mentioned on the website that I felt worth discussing here.
Last week, I asked if those of us who are involved in the WordPress community if we are really open source pragmatists. This came from a quote that’s been posted, shared, discussed, and so on for the last couple of weeks or so.
There’s one sentence included in the quote that people don’t seem to be discussing and that is are odds with the reputation WordPress has.
The quote (emphasis mine):
The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.
But few can argue that the application has a reputation having a less-than-stellar codebase which can easily call into question the technical qualities of WordPress.
In fact, some believe that it’s “developed wholly by monkeys randomly hitting keys on the keyboard,” and there are discussions that crop up on various communities – like Hacker News – about the poor quality of the codebase.
The purpose of this post is not to belittle the codebase of WordPress. For what it’s worth, I think that it has its good parts and that it has its bad parts, and – like all software – can be compared to a living organism where it’s always changing, and, ideally, the bad parts will mature over time.
But what I’m more concerned with right now is has WordPress taught us standards of technical quality that “very little closed software can meet?”
One of the coolest things to be introduced to the WordPress Plugin Repository over the past couple of years was the addition of the header images – this one little addition made it possible to easily have your plugin stand out in the larger context of the entire repository.
This also got me thinking a bit about WordPress plugin icons.
The majority of our devices – either desktops / laptops, tables, phablets, and phones – all use icons to represent the application. Of course, this is nothing knew – we’ve been doing this since the GUI was introduced to computing, right?
But is this something that we should be considering for our WordPress plugins (or our themes)?
Earlier today, I shared a post on what I believe to be key strategies in working with a distributed team. As with anything, there’s always a flip side of the coin and, this case, there are definitely challenges of a distributed team.
The points that I’m about to make aren’t coming out of the void, either. In the Envato article, I received a comment that felt deserved a longer response than what normally goes into a comment.
I’ll post the entire comment here and then discuss the key points after:
I’d like to add one more thing as well. You have to find willing participants! No disrespect to anyone but you, pippin, and norcross are very well known WP developers. For an average joe, it’s not really that easy to say, “hey, I have a great idea for a plugin, let me ask some developers to build it with me.”
I think the first thing someone needs to do is network and build some relationships with plugin developers. And good relationships for that matter. Then those developers have to see if it’s worth it to them (do they have time, do they even want to do it, do they want to work with you).
Otherwise, it’ll be hard to work in the way you mentioned without hiring a developer out of pocket.
BUT, if you do build those relationships, or already have them, then the article is spot on =)
There are some valid and compelling points in this comment.
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