Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.
A few months ago, I released my WordPress Widget Boilerplate. Since then, it’s received several contributions from the community that’s made it a solid resource off of which to begin building WordPress Widgets.
In that same post, I mentioned that I was working on a boilerplate for plugins but had yet to finish it; however, today – with a little help of a few contributors that have already been watching the repository – I’m releasing the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.
I’ve just released an update to WP Social Icons. The changes include:
This update also includes the all of the major updates from the previous release.
Additionally, you can grab a copy of the plugin for 50% off from now until Cyber Monday – head over to the project page for more information!
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.
Two months ago, I released WP Social Icons. Since then, I’ve shared my thoughts on plugin development and even spoken about them on the WP Tavern podcast.
I’ve received a lot of great feedback regarding minor bugs and feature requests. As of now, WP Social Icons 1.5 is now available.
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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