Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Projects (Page 29 of 32)

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

Application Development with Rails 3, Flickr, and Google

A few weeks ago, I was contracted to build a custom web application to help with source, storing, and managing photographs.

Specifically, the application needed to allow a user to search for photos using the Flickr API, store a variety of information about the photo, and then provide a few ways to retrieve the photos and the associated data for later use.

Though I can’t speak to too much detail about the application, I thought I’d share a few notes on the development stack I used as well as some of the features of the application.

WordPress Widget Boilerplate

A few months ago, I contributed an article to WPTuts on Writing Maintainable WordPress Widgets. The motivation for this series was driven largely by the fact that as much as I love the WordPress community, there are more than a few poorly constructed plugins.

In some cases, this is fine. If you’re planning to quickly throw something together with no plans to continue development after its initial release, you can probably get a way with throwing something functional together.

But if you’re looking to build a plugin that you’ll be maintaining over time, then I believe applying good software development practices is a must. That is, I think that developers should follow the platform’s API, use design patterns where applicable, and clearly organize their files.

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WP Social Icons

Tipsy Social Icons is a free WordPress plugin that I’ve been maintaining for a few months. When I initially released it, the primary goal was to make it as easy as possible to integrate multiple social networking icons into your WordPress blog.

Over time, I’ve received a lot of great comments, emails, and feedback about the plugin all of which I appreciate. As such, I decided to create a premium version of the plugin of which I’m proud to announce: WP Social Icons.

WP Social Icons

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