Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Projects (Page 13 of 33)

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

Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog

March 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s incredibly popular right now – especially among bloggers – is writing a book, an eBook, or some type of paid digital good (and I’m all for it). Though I’ve no expectation of writing a book of my own anytime soon, I’ve had the pleasure of proof reading other people’s work, and offering feedback, critique, and reviews.

Early last year, I was invited to serve as one of the technical editors for the next edition of Smashing WordPress by Thord Daniel Hedengren.

I’m proud to say that the book hit shelves – both online and for the Kindle (or whatever your eReader of choice may be) – yesterday.

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The State of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

February 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

One of the projects that I love working on the most is the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

I dig it because it’s been a resource that has helped other people, and there are a number of other contributors that are constantly working to make it even better.

Earlier this year, I had plans to begin releasing more frequent updates, but – as with the nature of employment and side projects that are done for free – the updates didn’t happen as fast as I would like.

Additionally, it was becoming clear to me that the Boilerplate was headed in a direction that was going to be more intimidating for beginners, harder to grasp for those migrating their plugins to that format, and that it was not using some of the best principles in place.

So after talking with a number of notable developers, I’ve opted to delay the release of `2.7.0` until we have something significantly better than what’s in place.

In fact, it’s going to be a near total rewrite.

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Retiring Tipsy Social Icons For WordPress

February 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Tipsy Social Icons is now officially up for adoption in the WordPress plugin repository.

Back in 2011, I released the first version of Tipsy Social Icons – a WordPress plugin designed to make it easy to add all of your social networking icons to your WordPress-based blog.

As of last month, Tipsy Social Icons was officially three years old (pretty old in Internet years, right?), but development has slowed and my time has begun to be devoted to other projects – many of which I enjoy more – and additional plugin have been released that do a solid job of the same thing.

So today, I’m officially retiring Tipsy Social Icons.

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Mayer For WordPress – Now Available at WordPress.com

February 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Mayer is officially for sale on WordPress.com.

This particular release has been a long time coming, so much so that I’ve discussed it a number of times on the blog already:

Of course, after several rounds of beta, code reviews, feature changes, and so on, things are bound to change over the course of development.

But today, Mayer is officially at `1.0` and is ready for purchase.

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Test Your Own Work: Officially On Mayer

January 16, 2014 /
One of my dogs with the Monday feels.

dog fooding can sometimes give you the monday feels (as one of my dog demonstrates)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I firmly believe that developers should be dog fooding their own work.

This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that assembling a team of beta testers is unimportant – on the contrary – but if you’re building something, and the only people who have experience using said product are people other than you, then I think that’s a problem.

So as of today, I’m proud (if not a little bit embarrassed) to be officially test-driving Mayer – my next WordPress theme that I’ve been discussing for sometime.

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