Category: Articles (Page 244 of 258)

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

Tips For Beginning WordPress Development

January 8, 2013 / Tom

The web is filled with a variety of questions and answers, tutorials, and demonstrations of how to accomplish certain tasks with WordPress. Sometimes, the code is really good; other times, the code is not so good.

This can be dangerous primarily because some developer-types are more concerned with copying and pasting code just to get something working rather than truly understanding and learning the application.

In my latest post on Envato, Practical Tips For Aspiring WordPress Developers, I try to provide some advice for those who are serious about beginning WordPress development.

My Thoughts on Leading Development in a Startup

January 7, 2013 / Tom

As most of you know, I also spend a significant portion of my time working on Standard, Hello Dolly as well as some other internal projects with my team at 8BIT.

At this point, it’s been several years since we’ve been working together, and as with anything new, there are plenty of lessons learned – some things that work, some things that don’t, and some things that started as experiments and ended up being things that we’ve consistently implemented.

From the perspective of being the developer on the team, one of the biggest hurdles in moving from a typical 9-to-5 to a startup is the responsibility of leading development in a startup.

On today’s post on the 8BIT blog, I share a bit about it. Continue reading

How Do You Vet Your Ideas?

January 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges of working in the development space is being able to separate your good ideas from your bad ideas.

By that, I mean that most of us who enjoy doing what we do probably have a ton of ideas and pet projects that we’d love to get started on, but there always seems to be several hurdles that crop up.

We’re either sidetracked by client work which is good because we need to pay the bills
By existing projects which generally require maintenance
Or by the time that we actually get to work on what we want to do, we’ve convinced ourselves that it isn’t worth doing or we’ve lost the motivation to do it. What is that?

Then again, maybe this is just me – but I doubt it.

How To Customize WordPress Emails

December 17, 2012 / Tom

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.

Writing Quality Code in WordPress

December 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

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

Tips For Beginning WordPress Development

My Thoughts on Leading Development in a Startup

How Do You Vet Your Ideas?

How To Customize WordPress Emails

Writing Quality Code in WordPress

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