Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
In light of yesterday’s post and some of the discussion in both comments and offering support for various WordPress projects, I’m curious as to what you guys consider to be etiquette when it comes to asking for WordPress donations.
As I mentioned yesterday, I personally think that we have a personal obligation to provide a level of support for free software that we released; however, at one point is it socially acceptable to ask for a donation.
On top of that, where do you even draw the line?
One of the nicest things about WordPress is how easy it is for developers to extend its functionality, and how easy it is for users to find plugins that help them enhance their blog.
All conversations about plugin quality and compatibility aside, WordPress plugin support is one area of development that often seems to be rarely discussed (unless I’m missing all the people talking about it!).
For as long as I’ve been on the Internet (well, the Internet as my generation knows it ;), developers and designers have usually maintained some type of display of their work and it’s generally consisted of a listing of projects that they’ve completed with outbound links to said project.
I’ve toyed with the idea of going into detail as to how I’ve built certain projects – you can see this in posts such as how I built Category Sticky Post and Tag Sticky Post – but I’ve never gone all in as I’ve never sold on if it was of any interest to others.
But yesterday, Smashing Magazine ran a bit of a motivational post on Retiring The Portfolio Screenshot and focusing more on “case study” type posts.
This got me thinking about beginning to introduce a case study on WordPress projects.
When it comes to discussing WordPress development, I think that one topic that’s hard to come by is how to begin taking on professional WordPress development gigs.
Specifically, I think that we could do a better job of communicating what to expect when another developer opts to make the move to become a professional WordPress developer. And by that, I mean doing something part-time or full-time for pay.
For roughly the past two years, I’ve divided my time between self-employment and two startups the latter two using WordPress as the backbone for their software. For the former, I’ve built a number of plugins – most free, a few premium – and have worked on a number of contracts building sites, plugins, and applications for others.
With that said, I thought I’d do my part in sharing some advice for the aspiring WordPress developer.
I’ve talked quite a bit about my thoughts on using WordPress for web application development. Specifically, I’ve shared:
During the State of the Word 2012, Matt discussed the past, present, and future of WordPress which included WordPress being an “app engine” of sorts. Some time ago, I stumbled across an article by Matthew Eppelsheimer in which he discusses his team using WordPress as just that.
Specifically, he says:
The WordPress platform essentially manages content and authentication for us, gives us frameworks to build custom UI and our own functionality, and offers extra features in the form of plugins developed by a large community. It gives us everything we need to rapidly build our own custom tools that fit our own process, style, and needs.
Interesting, isn’t it?
Obviously, I’ve been a fan of treating WordPress as such for some time, but I’ve never really shared how I’ve viewed various features and parts of the API for actually building applications.
Since I’ve recently wrapped up a project where we did just this, and since I’m currently in the middle of building one that’s following suit, I thought I’d share a few notes on my approach for building web applications with WordPress.
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