Category: Articles (Page 241 of 258)

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

Strategies For For Supporting WordPress Plugins

Strategies For Supporting WordPress Plugins

February 18, 2013 / Tom

When it comes to writing, releasing, and maintaining WordPress plugins is figuring out how to actually support your work once it’s released.

After all, the majority of work on software is maintaining the codebase and responding from all of the feedback given by users or customers.

In my latest article on Envato, I talk specifically about strategies for supporting WordPress Plugins – I lay out some of the problems that currently exist, and also invite readers to share their experience, concerns, and suggestions with what’s available today.

The Ethics of WordPress Developer Responsibilities

February 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I shared a post on You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems. In the post, I shared a few reasons as to why it’s dangerous to expect and/or trust your customers to upgrade WordPress.

You can read the full article for my reasons why, but Mike brought up an interesting statement in the comment feed that got me thinking about the ethics of our responsibilities a developers for building projects for clients.

Though ethics are subjective and that you’ll rarely hear me talk about them on this particular blog, I think that there is room for discussion as to what constitutes the ethics of programmers in the case of building, releasing, and maintaing software for others, and, in this case, within the WordPress space.

WordPress For Application Development

February 7, 2013 / Tom

Several times now, I discussed the potential and feasability of building web using WordPress for Application Development.

For those of you who haven’t read, I’ve written:

And today, I’m continuing the discussion with a post on WP Daily.

You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems

February 6, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think one of the major characteristics of anyone who’s a digital native – that is, anyone who spends a vast amount of time on the Internet and that has a certain level of proficiency – has no problem upgrading their apps to the latest version and tinkering around with the new features and/or looking for new bugs.

I mean, we can always roll back, right?

And when it comes to WordPress – especially for those who build things for the platform – it’s not at all uncommon to see us urging our users and others to upgrade, as well.

I love updates as the next geek, but we can’t blame others for wanting to wait to upgrade WordPress immediately, nor can we expect everyone to upgrade WordPress as quickly as we do.

Startbox WordPress and View Page Templates

February 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I love about the open source community is not only how others can contribute to your work to create a better product, but how your work can be folded into someone else’s work.

Last week, Brian Richards (who works on Startbox WordPress) tweeted me:

@tommcfarlin I really want to appropriate this page template column idea (http://t.co/3ox9IcCv) directly into @wpstartbox. May I?

— Brian Richards (@rzen) January 31, 2013

And I was more than happy to oblige.

This whole short exchange brought up several aspects of open source software that I really appreciate.