Category: Resources (Page 23 of 60)

A summary of useful links, applications, and tools that I find around the Internet.

The Basics of How WordPress Works

March 23, 2015 / Tom

If you’re getting started in WordPress development, odds are it won’t be long until you bump up against the concept of hooks. That is, points during the WordPress life cycle that allow us to add our own functionality to customize how WordPress behaves.

Of course, this is how both themes and plugins are made to do some of the neat (or not so neat, depending on the project) things that they do. And though I obviously recommend reading up on them in the Codex, I think it’s also important to understand how the WordPress application loads itself.

More specifically, I think it’s important to understand how WordPress works. There are a lot of resources out there available to read and review; however, John Blackbourn has been working on a no-frills version of this very idea that I believe to be worth starring and referencing.

WP Sessions: Using The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

March 16, 2015 / Tom

Prior to handing off development and maintenance of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate to Devin Vinson, I had the opportunity to work with Brian Richards of WP Sessions to put together a short course on how to use the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

Using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

The purpose of the course was to provide the initial set of documentation for the project that would give users and developers a complete walkthrough of the source code, understanding its organization, and a tutorial for how to build a plugin with the project.

Interested in SEO For Beginners?

February 18, 2015 / Tom

One of the things that I enjoy about keeping up with friends who are involved in different areas of development than I am is all of the cool things that they’re working on.

Sure, many are doing cool stuff within WordPress, but there are also a lot of people who are doing things with other technologies in web development, with OS X development, with eBooks, with their blogs, and so on.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Andrew Mason (no, not of Groupon), for the past several years and he’s someone who’s always got his hands in something media related – be it video production, audio production, or something along those lines.

Recently, he was tapped to narrate several audio books on search engine optimization, and he’s been kind enough to offer up several codes for free access to the audio book SEO Like I’m 5: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Using Tap WordPress Hosting (and a Giveaway!)

February 3, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to running this blog, I’m not nearly as technical as some of my peers.

In fact, I try to keep the hosting environment has much of a black box as possible. I want to be able to focus on blogging – not tweaking servers, configuring settings, dealing with staging environments, caching, CDNs, and all that normally comes with major projects.

That isn’t to say I don’t do that for the projects on which I work – there’s a time and a place for everything – but my goal for this site is to focus on blogging. To that end, when it comes to hosting, I don’t look for something that offers the greatest feature set with all of the fancy knobs to turn and tweaks to make.

Instead, I look for something that works well, that performs quickly out-of-the-box, that has great support (when needed), that grants me S/FTP access to my files, and then let’s me get on with blogging with minimal hassle.

Tap WordPress Hosting

For the past few months, I’ve been trying out Tap WordPress Hosting and, generally speaking, I’ve been really impressed.

ThemeFuse Giveaway: Hosting, Theme, and Domain

December 16, 2014 / Tom

Comments on this post have been closed and the winner has been contacted. Thanks to all who participated!

Every now and then, I try to offer up several giveaways or opportunities that I think will be beneficial and useful to those of you who regularly read this blog.

ThemeFuse

Today, I’m happy to be offering a pretty sweet deal from the team over at ThemeFuse.