Category: Articles (Page 242 of 258)

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

Why (And How!) To Use A WordPress Boilerplate

January 30, 2013 / Tom

For those of who you have been reading this blog for a while (thanks, by the way), you know that I work to maintain the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and the WordPress Widget Boilerplate along with a growing community of developers.

Despite the fact that I’ve promoted them here on the blog, called for others to get involved, and so on, I’ve never actually given a proper tutorial on how to use them to get started in your projects.

So in my lastest series on Envato, I’m making a case for why the matter and how to use them.

Software Craftsmanship: Why This Matters For WordPress

January 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I had a fun discussion with Dave Donaldson of Max Foundry about software craftsmanship.

I think it’s worth reading the quick Twitter discussion, but I want to be clear that I mention Dave because the respect him as a developer, and he was being a bit facetious in his comments.

Bottom line, Twitter’s not the point of this post – it’s simply setting the stage.

I’ve written before about WordPress Craftsmanship which generally covers my thoughts on the entire process, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my thoughts on software craftsmanship as a whole and why I think it matters in WordPress.

As such, I thought this may be a good opportunity to do so.

Delivering Products as Self-Employed Software Developer

January 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Delivering software is … fun!

When it comes to build a products under contract, one of the most challenging things that developers have to manage – specifically if they’re also serving as project management – is client expectations.

To be clear: outside of 8BIT, I’m also self-employed and spend a portion of my time building WordPress-based products for others. Generally, I build custom plugins and web applications.

Anyway, like anyone that makes the jump to self-employment, it wasn’t with out its share of learning curves.

It’s one thing to talk to people who are somewhat familiar with the web, with software, or with how similar projects work, but it’s a completely different situation to work with people who know what they want but aren’t exactly sure what all it entails.

For what it’s worth, here are three things that I’ve found useful in setting expectations, planning projects, and delivering products as a self-employed software developer.

Do One Thing and Do It Well – But How?

January 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that we – that is, developers and designers – hear more often than not is that plugins should “do one thing and do it well.”

But what does that mean?

I think that it sounds good in theory but I’m not convinced that if you were to ask each developer and/or designer separately what that means, then you’d get a variety of answers.

I think that there’s a reason that we feel this way, but I’m not really sure that we know what it even means.

We Need Better Abstraction in WordPress Projects

January 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to programming – regardless of the platform, language, or system that you’re using – there’s a concept of abstraction that most programmers understand even if they don’t know that that’s what the concept is called.

Perhaps the clearest definition on abstraction in programming (straight from Wikipedia) explains:

Abstraction is the process by which data and programs are defined with a representation similar in form to its meaning (semantics), while hiding away the implementation details.

A simple, practical example of an abstraction would be the concept of functions: It completes a unit of work and optionally accepts parameters and returns data to the caller

The details are implemented – are abstracted – into the function so that other programmers (or even the original developer himself or herself) can simply make a single call to the function.

Easy enough, right? Especially since we’ve all written functions.

Of course, abstractions can be more complex. Starting from functions, moving up to classes, moving up to full API’s and so on. Everything in programming lives at some level of abstraction.

I bring all of this up because I’ve seen – and continue to see – huge opportunities for refactoring WordPress-based code (specifically in themes and plugins) into more abstract units in other code as well as my own.