Category: Projects (Page 10 of 33)

Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

Documenting The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

October 7, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

A little over a month ago, I released the latest version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. The response has been great – more than I was expecting, really but that’s a good thing – and, generally speaking, it’s been overall positive.

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Homepage

Over the last month or so, it’s become clear that more time and resources will be needed to focus on the Boilerplate and to continue to refine its codebase, its functionality, its documentation, and so on. The bottom line is that I want to make sure that I get the right – or as close to right – as possible during the first try.

To that end, I need some input from others (read: you).

Easier Dev Practices For Everyone

September 13, 2014 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Rather than posting a comment, submit a few dev practices.

I don’t talk about this much on this particular blog because it’s outside the scope of the usual content on which I try to focus, but whenever there’s something worth mentioning, I bring it up.

As such, almost a year ago, I started Dev Practices. In fact, I have a very short post introducing the site on September 16th, 2013.

I still stand by what I said in the first post:

There are two absolutely amazing things that the Internet has brought us:

1. Animated GIFs

2. Memes

And when you combine the two together, you get some seriously good stuff, right?

When I set out to create the site, I didn’t really think of it as anything else that a dumb way to have some fun for a little while.

But it grew into a just a little bit more than that.

In fact, I’ve even considered porting it to WordPress and adding a lot of new features around it. Maybe eventually, but the honest truth is that it’s just a fun site, and there are so many other things that have priority.

So I’ve tried to compromise and improve just one part of the process. For now.
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The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 3.0.0

September 2, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few years ago, I started the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate project as nothing more than a GitHub repository used to store code that I found myself frequently using in both personal and client projects.

As I became more involved with WordPress, as I began to build more plugins for fun and profit, and as I began updating the repository, it grew into something a little more than I had expected.

Over time, people began to open issues, offer pull requests, perform code reviews, and create their own forks of the project. I learned a lot over the next few years, and I honestly couldn’t be more excited to see such a little project become, you know, such a slightly less little project.

Months ago, I mentioned that work on the next iteration of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was started and I’m excited to announce that, as of today, the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 3.0.0 is officially ready for use.

And it comes with a lot of new and neat things to boot.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate: Testing 1, 2, 3

August 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In 2011, I released the first version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and have been maintaining it (along with contributions from other programmers) ever since.

Over the last couple of years, the Boilerplate became quite active – as far as very small projects are concerned – with issues, pull requests, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to maintain, and it’s been really neat to receive so much feedback from other developers in terms of making the Boilerplate more resilient and from those who were just getting started with plugin development.

Earlier this year, I shared that I – along with a small group of other people – began working on the next iteration of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. That is, we were initiating a complete rewrite of the project.

As of today, I’m officially launching a beta of sorts of 3.0.0 of the Boilerplate. This is a major rewrite and refactoring of the Boilerplate in the state that its had for the past few years, and there’s a lot of change coming not only to the Boilerplate itself, but to new site, documentation, forks, and so on.

Educate Your Users in Open Source Software

August 4, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I’m working hard to have released by the end of the month is the latest version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

The latest version has been in development for quite a while now (a lot has happened offline so, you know, that’s how it goes).

The last time that I really spent any time talking about this project was in November 2013. A lot has changed since then. Initially, I was planning on a minor upgrade with some of the following features:

Releasing the version has part of the 2.x.x versioning
Including a class specifically for administrative functionality
Fixing issues with symbolic links and textdomains
Including more TODO’s for users to find what needs to be changed
…and so on.

But when I got started on the next version of the Boilerplate, a lot of things changed. The short of it is that it’s being completely re-written from the ground up and the code and documentation are being split into to separate things for the sake of user education.

I’ll spend more time talking about the Boilerplate in a future, but one of the things that I wanted to share that’s related to running a project like the Boilerplate has to do with open source, contributions, lack of a vision, and how this can negatively impact your project and your users.