Category: Articles (Page 236 of 257)

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

How To Document WordPress Projects

April 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I wrote about the challenges of documenting WordPress projects regardless of if they are free or premium.

In the post, I mentioned that another challenge that comes with actually documenting a project is making sure that you’re catering to the various ways that people learn.

First, as a general rule, I think that projects should include:

Source Code Documentation. Free projects should have code comments, premium projects should have code comments, PHPDoc (or similar) style documentation, and API documentation if one is available.
A Manual. Free projects should have a README and potentially a web page, premium projets should have a manual that’s perhaps its own website complete with screenshots and/or videos.

But this raises a second question about WordPress documentation, specifically around premium projects: If people have different styles of learning, that is, some learn better by reading, others better by watching, are we obligated to provide both forms of documentation?

WordPress Documentation For Free and Premium Projects

April 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you spend time maintaining a WordPress project – be it a theme, plugin, or application, and regardless of if it’s free or premium – then you know the challenges that come with writing and maintaining documentation for your project.

Sure, I think many of us who build and maintain projects consider documentation a form of support, but when you ask a customer to define support, you’re more likely to hear about their ability to communicate with someone through a forum or a phone call (depending on your service).

I mean, case in point, when I think about support for my cellular service, I don’t think of documentation of Sprint’s network. I think of talking to a person.

Anyway, all that to say is that over the past few years of working with various types of projects – both on my own and with my team – the trend seems to be that documentation for free projects is expected, but ignored, whereas documentation for premium projects is not only expected, but also read.

But I write this to ask if this is something the rest of you guys have noticed, and, if so, if there isn’t something that can be done to improve this particular situation or it’s simply the nature of the economy. Continue reading

Handling The Fragmentation of WordPress Versions, Themes, and Plugins

March 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about the decision to migrate away from the WordPress Plugins Repository and move back to the premium model similar to what I once offered. The truth is, this is going to introduce a bit of WordPress fragmentation which may not be a good thing.

If you’re just catching up on this, here are a few articles about the migration:

I’ve enjoyed the discussion around all of this, but there’s one problem that is introduced when developers opt to move away from the central WordPress repository.

It introduces fragmentation into the market.

On Software Developer Arrogance

March 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a lot of things that are true about the software development community. Some of it good, some of it bad, but one of the thing that constantly rubs me the wrong what is software developer arrogance.

During my talk at WordCamp Atlanta, I stated the following:

When it comes to development, know that there is always someone better than you.

If you’ve been involved in any kind of development community for any amount of time, then you know that developers are opinionated people. In fact, the truth is that some are simply arrogant. They are more concerned with showing what they’ve done than hearing about you or learning form others.

Sure, everyone has their stereotypes and it sucks that we’re subjected to them, but acknowledging that someone is better than you – or that you’re better than someone else (in a certain area, that is) – doesn’t have to be an act of arrogance.

During the course of the talk, I tried to convey that acknowledging exactly this can be a very liberating thing. Continue reading

Maybe Worse is Better

March 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently read an interesting article about the concept that Worse is Better.

It’s a long article with a few outbound links that tell the story of a guy working with Lisp, AI technologies, and how his opinion ended up generating a lot of feedback so much so that he ended up writing rebuttals to his own work.

Funny, right?

But I couldn’t help but think about how we – as developers – would go back and do the same thing. It’s the whole “if i knew now what I knew then” situation.

This post is not about that article, per se, but there’s a quite at the beginning of the article that really struck a chord with me:

The concept known as “worse is better” holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this “piecemeal growth.”

You can read the article in its entirety, but I wanted to share some of the conflicting thoughts that I’ve had on this topic – at least on the quote above – as it relates not only to WordPress development, but to software development in general. Continue reading