Category: Articles (Page 238 of 258)

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

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

An Introduction To Cross Site Scripting in WordPress

March 15, 2013 / Tom

When it comes to cross site scripting in WordPress, I think that there’s a lot of education that’s to be had.

I’m by no means an expert in this field, but I think that there’s either a lack of awareness or we take for granted what WordPress does for us.

Generally speaking, WordPress does an excellent job of providing sanitization and validation functions (assuming that we use them correctly), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential exploits.

In my latest series on Envato, I give a two part introduction to cross-site scripting in WordPress and practical tips for how we can test our themes and our plugins.

Open Source Ethics: Profiting From Contributions

March 14, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to turning a profit on open-source software, I’d like to think that the majority of developers follow the same set of ethics. I’m my experience, it’s true – though, as with anything, there are outliers.

As I continue to work to introduce a premium level of support for my WordPress-related work, one of the things that I’ve found myself wrestling with is turning a profit on work to which others have contributed.

But are open source ethics that complicated?

Finding The Right WordPress Support System

March 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the challenge of supporting free WordPress plugins. Though I’ve done this in the past, I’ve retired those projects, but am looking to get back into doing so all the while documenting the process here.

But first, for those who haven’t been reading the articles up to this point, I wanted to reference the previous posts just to let you know where I stand with regard to all of this:

The point is that I’m slowly working my way back into building a small business around building WordPress plugins, supporting them, offering documentation, manuals, and so on, but I want to make sure that I’m doing it right.

To that end, I’m enjoying the discussion with you guys via the comments as well as the challenge of finding the best tools possible not only for me but for potential customers, as well and this is what raises my next issue: Finding the right WordPress support system. Continue reading