Category: Articles (Page 234 of 258)

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

The Technical Qualities of WordPress (Or Lack Thereof)

April 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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?”

The Identity Crisis of WordPress Plugin Icons

April 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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)?

The Challenges of Building a Distributed Team

April 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

Working with a Distributed Team and WordPress

April 17, 2013 / Tom

In my most recent article on WPTuts+, I discuss what it’s like working with a distributed team and WordPress.

The point of the article was to give a short summary as to how it’s possible and what’s required to do good work.

The primary reason that I wanted to write this article was two fold:

I’ve spent the better half of my self-employment working wit 8BIT in a distributed environment
I’ve recently completed a plugin with two other WordPress developers who I’ve never met face-to-face

I wanted to share that it’s completely possible, but there are some key things that are necessary to make sure that good work actually gets done.

Are You An Open Source Pragmatist, Really?

April 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as I’m convinced, one of the things that will forever exist within the WordPress development community is the various degrees to which we align ourselves with the principles of open source software.

Perhaps a simpler way of putting it is that the development community is forever going to be debating over the “spirit of the law,” or the “letter of the law” of the GPL, and will be deriving their actions and choices based on their interpretation.

But this post isn’t so much about my particular stance on the GPL. Instead, it’s more about something that I’ve seen being shared throughout the rest of the WordPress development community since late last week. Continue reading