Category: Articles (Page 251 of 258)

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

Don’t Feed The Trolls (or What I’ve Learned About Negativity on The Internet)

September 3, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I commented on a blog post on the Mika Epstein’s blog – also known (or perhaps more commonly known) as @Ipstenu – on Handling Negatives.

In the article, Mika talks about the fun that comes with developing plugins, themes, and generally any product where customers can share their thoughts with you. And if it isn’t obvious by the title, she covers how to handle negative feedback.

It was a good read and fun discussion and it definitely rings true for anyone who is an open source developer, but I think that it rings true for anyone who’s an aspiring developer, photographer, videographer, blogger, and so on.

So, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the pervasive negativity on the Internet and how it’s hit home for me.

How I Organize My Files When Developing WordPress Plugins

August 30, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

So much of software development consists of actually maintaining projects after they’ve been released. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of time is actually spent refactoring that didn’t necessarily have to occur if more planning had been done from the outset of the project.

Sure – some teams get this right, some teams don’t, and sometimes it’s just the nature of bad luck. After all, the best we can do is try to make the smartest decisions possible given the initial requirements.

When it comes to building plugins, there’s a specific way that I organize my WordPress plugin files that I’ve found to make bug fixes, future updates, and overall development much easier as a the lifetime of a plugin increases.

Professional WordPress Development

August 30, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Professional WordPress Development is a topic that’s something I obviously discuss quite a bit here – I believe that WordPress has matured to a point where its potential for building not only blogs, websites, or content-managed sites has grown to where it’s a viable platform for building applications.

In order to share my thoughts on this with a wider audience, I’m currently running a series on Envato that’s all about professional WordPress Development.

Include, Require, and get_template_part in WordPress

August 28, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the easiest mistakes to make as an early WordPress developer is understanding the difference in PHP’s include and require functions and WordPress’ built-in functions – such as get_template_part – for working with templates.

In my latest article on WPTuts+, I take a look at each of these functions.

Why I Contributed To Easy Digital Downloads, What I Learned, & Why You Should, Too

August 21, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

At the risk of sounding like a marketer rather than a fan and contributor of the plugin, Easy Digital Downloads is a free plugin for WordPress that makes it exceptionally easy to sell digital products through your WordPress-based site.

Though it’s available for download from the WordPress Plugins Repository, Pippin – the lead developer behind the plugin – open sourced the plugin on GitHub in order to get other developers involved.

This past weekend, I was able to contribute a couple of fixes. In light in the whole plugin conversion that’s going on within the WordPress Developer Community, I found several points worth mentioning with regards to getting involved with Easy Digital Downloads.