Category: Articles (Page 237 of 258)

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

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

Offering WordPress Support on Twitter? No Thanks.

March 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I shared my problems with the WordPress plugins repository. Above all else, I’ve really enjoyed the comments that people have shared – it’s full of good ideas, I’ve had my opinions changed a bit from the initial post, and the conversation is generally respectful.

For those who have been following along, you know that all of this is being shared as I’m slowly working towards the process of restructuring how I build, maintain, and support my plugins.

As such, I’m trying to be as open as I possibly can be about what I like, what I dislike, and what I’m planning to do as this particular restructuring comes into fruition.

One of the things that’s becoming common among businesses – especially larger businesses – is to offer support via Twitter. The more I’ve begun thinking about how to offer support, the more I’m deciding against offering WordPress support on Twitter.

An Introduction To How To Enqueue jQuery in WordPress

March 21, 2013 / Tom

One of the most common problems that plagues professional theme, plugin, and application developers in WordPress is when libraries such as jQuery are improperly dequeued, deregistered, or simply moved to load else where in the page.

Not only can this drastically impact the site on which the code is running, it can adversely affect the performance of every other well-coded plugin or theme that a user may eventually use.

So in my latest article on WPTuts+, I attempt to provide a beginner’s to for how to enqueue jQuery in WordPress.

My Problems with The WordPress Plugin Repository

March 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ll be the first to admit that I think the WordPress Plugin Repository does some great things for WordPress and for its user base. When they rolled out the updated forums and the some of the new features, I was really excited about it.

But as time has passed, I’ve come to believe that the repository is more user-centric than developer-centric. Don’t read me wrong: I’m not claiming that this is an either/or situation. Ideally, both should be elevated to the same level.

On one hand, this makes perfect sense. After all, you have thousands of plugins all of which are available for users to search and download not only from the web, but from within the WordPress dashboard.

But plugins are created by developers – often times for free, obviously – but I don’t think that the repository does such a good job of supporting the work of the developers.

Sure, I agree that free hosting of your plugins is great and the ability to generate a landing page with several rich features based solely on a README is impressive, but each of these things also results in a number of issues that simply make it difficult to stay motivated to continue contributing plugins to the economy.

All that to say, I think the repository is a fantastic resource where users are the first class citizens. To that point, I want to outline several issues that I’ve experienced while using the WordPress plugins repository as a developer.

And for those of you who have read this blog, you know that I dislike when people offer problems without proposed solutions, so I’m aiming to provide those, as well.

What is The WordPress Community?

March 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you hang around WordPress long enough, you begin to notice that people involved with it – in whatever capacity – often refer to “the WordPress community.”

And maybe I’m alone in this, but if you hang around even longer you begin to ask yourself what is the WordPress community?

Here’s the thing: When I first began focusing the majority of my efforts on working with WordPress, I stumbled into the community of people who are involved with the application.

But doesn’t that sound generic? I mean, what does it mean to be “involved with WordPress,” anyway? And the more time that I’ve spent working with WordPress – or that anyone spends working with WordPress – the more I’ve – and they – will notice that the community is actually made up of smaller sub-cultures, microcosms, or whatever you want to call them.

And this raises a number of different issues. Continue reading