Category: Articles (Page 42 of 258)

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

Lessons on Launching (Three of Them, for Now)

February 7, 2019 / Tom

One of the biggest things I’ve learned since trying out this whole podcasting thing (the second episode should be out next week, for those waiting with bated breath 🙃) is that achieving whatever arbitrary level of perfection before releasing something is hard.

Practical WordPress Development Podcast

You’d like I’d know this after so long in working in this field, right?

But there are several lessons on launching that I am trying to keep in mind especially as I’m working to get a few other projects off the ground all the while working in my day job.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 9

February 6, 2019 / Tom

Though the last post in this refactoring series wasn’t incredibly long, I do think it was a bit dense. That is, it required a fair amount of work to get the code in a place that we can more easily work with it.

But that’s just it: All the work we did should make it easier to move forward with the rest of the code we need to write.

And to make sure that we’re taking advantage of the work and the foundation we’ve laid thus far, we’re going to round out the series with a set of shorter, more focused articles that should take less time to read, implement, and understand what we’re doing with the code.

WordPress Programming: Separating Concerns

February 5, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to creating classes for WordPress plugins, I’ve been asked about why I bother separating functionality into subscribers and into other classes.

I think this is a good question because it helps to understand two things:

the role of a subscriber as it relates to the WordPress architecture,
the role of the other classes as it relates to what it is you’re building (and how this can help with other things like unit testing and so on).

So I thought why not respond in the form of a short post? It’ll document the why behind the what [and it will give me a place to update if things change in the future].

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 8

January 31, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to refactoring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate, we’ve done a lot of work to bring the code base up to more object-oriented standard. Further, we’ve introduced a variety of other tools that allow us to bring our code up to more modern standards

Now that we’ve spent time doing that, it’s time to jump back into the code and begin refactoring it in such a way that allows for the use of abstract classes and subscribers (that work as part of the event-driven design pattern).

At the end of the previous post, I wrote:

In the upcoming posts, we’re going to look at how we can implement subscribers for the public-facing side of the site (that is, where the widget content is displayed). And we’ll do the same for the administration area of the site.

So in this post, we’re going to do exactly that. Specifically, we’re going to start with working on a subscriber for the widget and then getting the base widget to display on the administrative side of the site first.

Successful WordPress Freelancing By Andy Adams

January 24, 2019 / Tom

For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time (and by some time, I mean years), then you’ve likely heard me mention Andy Adams.

I’ve talked about him in the previous posts:

Though we don’t work professionally together anymore, we’ve kept in touch, and I’m incredibly proud to share that he’s just released a book: Successful WordPress Freelancing.