Category: Articles (Page 254 of 258)

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

WordPress Generators and Why I Dislike Them

July 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

WordPress Generators

At this point, it’s relatively easy to find a generator to do almost anything you want with WordPress. In fact, you can assemble an entire theme with custom post types, taxonomies, and options all without actually writing any code.

Bummer.

But you know what I’m talking about – generators are small web-based tools that are used to, er, generate code for you based on a couple of inputs that you specify on an interface.

Off the top of my head, I can think of…

Generators for custom post types
Options frameworks for easily creating settings pages
Generators for taxonomies
Custom theme generators
…and more.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that these tools have their place in the development space (in fact, my boilerplates have even been converted to generators!).

But as a profesional developer and someone who cares about writing quality code tailored exactly for the problem at hand and as someone who wants to create the highest-quality products that I can, I dislike WordPress generators.

WordPress For Application Development

July 3, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as software is concerned, I’m particularly fond of working on web applications and have spent the majority of my career focused on exactly that.

Specifically, I spent the first few years of my career working on enterprise applications in .NET. Like any programmer, I spent a lot of my free time tinkering with various languages, frameworks, and tools partly because it was fun and partly because I wanted to stay current on newer technologies.

It’s funny, though: The longer you work on web applications the more you recognize that all of them – at some basic level – come back to the same thing: getting data into the database and getting data out of the database.

Sure, there’s a lot going on between the two and there are tons things to consider but, at the end of the day, that’s what’s happening and everything else is details.

Introduction To WordPress Unit Testing

June 19, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Unit Testing (or other testing methodologies) is one of those things that’s often relegated to larger software applications or enterprise-level projects and seems to be often overlooked in the context of WordPress.

Why is that?

WordPress is a web application and the tools, themes, plugins, and extensions that we build are software that run on top of said platform and the platform as well as the certain themes and/or plugins can be used anywhere from just a few hundred people up to several million people.

In some cases, I think this qualifies it as enterprise-grade. Regardless, WordPress should not be excluded from the best practices in software development. As such, I’m contributing a series of articles on Envato that is meant to help you get started with WordPress unit testing.

It’s targeted at beginners but aims to lay a foundation on which more experienced developers can build. Additionally, I’m providing working examples of plugins and themes both of which have been built using unit tests:

Throughout the series, I walk you through how to setup your local development environment to include both PHPUnit and the WordPress Testing framework along with giving a background of unit testing, what it is, why it matters, how it can improve plugin architecture and theme development.

All of the code is also available on my GitHub page:

Hello Reader is a sample plugin
Basic Theme is a sample theme

My Career, Software Engineering, and WordPress

June 4, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I graduated school, I had one objective in mind: obtain a development position where I could apply software engineering principles in the context of web application development.

Then I made the jump to self-employment at the end of 2010 and was dividing my time between two things: serving as lead developer at 8BIT and developing and sites and software for others out of my own business.

Initially, I was doing work ranging anything from vanilla PHP projects, Ruby on Rails projects, some typical client-side projects, and custom JavaScript work.

Achievement Unlocked

As time as passed, I’ve ended up spending more and more time working exclusively with WordPress so much so that I’m currently doing nothing but WordPress-based projects (save for a single Rails application).

On Professional WordPress Development

March 8, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

On Professional WordPress Development

I recently had the opportunity to share a few thoughts over at Smashing Magazine on professional WordPress Development.