Category: Articles (Page 240 of 258)

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

My Day-To-Day: Getting Things Done

February 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For me, Twitter’s utility has changed a bit over the last few years. What once was used as a way for my friends and I to share what we were up to, where we were, and so on has more or less morphed into a way for me to chat with other people who share similar interests regardless of where we are.

In fact, I’ve seen that each of my friends use Twitter in their own respective ways.

For people that I know personally, Path – yep, I actually use it – has worked out pretty well. But I’ve met a lot of really cool, interesting, and smart people on Twitter that I interact with on a daily basis many of which I would’ve never met otherwise.

Case in point: Jason Resnick is a fellow developer and tweep that I’ve known for a little over a year via Twitter. Yesterday, he asked me this question:

https://twitter.com/rezzz/status/306412898425651200

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been asked this question, and although this isn’t strictly related to development, I figure that it’s close enough to how I actually get development done that I’d share my response here.

Support Doesn’t Scale (or “Avoid Free WordPress Support”)

February 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recently, I’ve been talking quite a bit about profiting from open source software, strategies for supporting WordPress plugins, and debating just how much to support to offer.

To say that I’ve been exploring business models and support offerings for my plugins would be a bit of an understatement. Clearly, this has been something that’s been on my mind for the last few months.

The thing is, this won’t be the first time that I’ve ventured into this territory. In fact, I’ve done this for two plugins – WP Social Icons and Author Admin – that I retired some time ago. Ultimately, I want to make sure that if I do this again, I do this right.

But while I’m still working on the logistics of everything, I thought it’d be worth sharing why I’m even doing this.

Quite simply: Support doesn’t scale.

Introduction To WordPress Theme Development

February 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to my local WordPress Developer Meetup group on an introduction to WordPress theme development.

Ultimately, the goal was to give a foundational talk so that more advanced topics in theme development could be shared throughout the rest of the year all of which I’d love to continue to share here, should it pan out. Continue reading

Object-Oriented WordPress Plugin Development

February 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to writing plugins – specifically those that are object-oriented in nature – many of us do so because we’re obviously fans of writing object-oriented code.

Personally, I’m a fan of it because it helps to separate the responsibilities and concerns of a requirement into its own logical unit.

Sure, this can be done with several function files as well, but I come from an object-oriented background, so when I approach a problem, I automatically begin thinking in terms of classes and their relationship to one another.

And I know that other developers do the same.

The thing is, I think some of us – myself included – have gotten lazy or we only half-bake our object-oriented-based plugins. That is to say that we may be using classes in writing our plugins, but we don’t do such a good job of taking advantage of other object-oriented principles and features.

Should I Do This in a WordPress Theme or Plugin?

February 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, a fellow WordPress developer and I were having a conversation about a particular feature that he’s been contracted to implement for an existing site.

In short, he was trying to decide between introducing the new feature in the form of a child theme or in the form of a plugin.

It’s a question that I see raised more often than not, but I think there’s a series of questions that we can ask ourselves before jumping into writing any code.

Generally, it has to do with the true definition of a theme and the true definition of a plugin. Of course, there’s room for deliberation, but here’s how I normally see it.