Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 244 of 258)

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

How To Customize WordPress Emails

Customize WordPress Emails

One of the lesser known features of the API is how to customize WordPress emails.

There are a number a pluggable and extensible functions that make this possible, but they don’t crop up that often in articles, documentation, or in discussion when building products built using WordPress.

In my latest series over on Envato, I attempt to provide more information on exactly this.

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Writing Quality Code in WordPress

Improving Your Code

I recently shared my thoughts on writing clean code within the context of WordPress, but I think there’s a whole other side to this – writing quality code.

Sounds easy enough, but the thing is that if it were easy then everyone would be doing it. And everyone isn’t. In fact, I’d argue that even those of us who try have room to improve.

In my latest article on Envato, I review a few practical tips for writing quality code specifically for WordPress. Continue reading

A Few Thoughts on WordPress Craftsmanship

One of the words that has begun to surface in the software development community in the last few years is craftsman. I attribute this to Uncle Bob Martin, his Clean Code book, and his whole Clean Coder movement (for lack of a better term).

I want to be clear: I love this idea. I’m a fan of Bob Martin and attribute much of the way that I approach software development to him (among a few others).

But a lot of his work is done in the context of the enterprise. That is, he speaks largely to people who are working on large-scale systems for large companies.

Good coding principles transcend their environment though, right?

On top of that, WordPress in an of itself could be considered an enterprise-level application not only considering how widely used it is, but how many large sites it actually powers.

With all of that said, I’ve been thinking a lot about WordPress craftsmanship as it relates to themes, plugins, and applications, and thought I’d share some of them here.

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A Case For WordPress Code Comments

Source code – let alone WordPress code comments – is one of those things that often divide developers:

  • Some developers believe that code should be the documentation
  • Some developers believe that we should document every single line
  • Other developers feel that only complicated areas of code should be documented

In my latest series on Envato, I discuss a case for WordPress code comments on both the server-side and the client side.

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Object Oriented and Procedural Code in WordPress Plugin Programming

WordPress Plugin Programming

One of the things that makes developing for WordPress so fun is the nature of its extensibility through plugins. When it comes to WordPress plugin programming, there are actually two ways that you can write your plugins:

  1. Object-Oriented Programming
  2. Procedural Programming

In the lastest series running on Envato, Stephen Harris and I provide an in-depth discussion on both of these strategies.

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