Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Category: Articles (Page 252 of 258)

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

How I Organize My Files When Developing WordPress Plugins

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.

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Professional WordPress Development

Professional WordPress Development

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.

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

Easy Digital Downloads

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.

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Improving WordPress Plugins

Improving WordPress Plugins

In some ways, plugins are kind of the “apps of WordPress” and they need to be treated as such. Many developers care about improving WordPress plugins and the associated experience, but there’s a long way to go.

Currently, it’s more like the Wild West than anything else: Anyone who can write code that does something with WordPress – regardless of if it follows any of the best practices – and can have their work added the plugin repository.

Last week, an impromptu discussion about the state of plugins grew into a much more serious talk. So much so that what started as a Twitter conversation moved to a Google Hangout then migrated to a blog.

Obviously, this touched a sensitive spot in the WordPress Developer community and a discussing ensued about what could be done to begin improving WordPress plugins and the associated process and repository:

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