Category: Resources (Page 32 of 60)

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

My Preferred Web Page Screenshot Tool

April 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I try to keep a running list of the tools that I use in my day-to-day development. The challenge in doing this is that finding new tools can get buried in that single post, so whenever I stumble across something that I introduce into my toolbox, I try to capture it here.

Other examples include:

With Chrome being my preferred browser, I’ve had a hard time finding an extension for taking a web page screenshot that I really like – every single one of them as come up short in one way or another.

Except for this one. Continue reading

The Most Exhaustive Set of WordPress Test Data

March 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the toughest things about building products for WordPress is making sure that you exhaustively test every single nuance of your theme.

Aside from things like post, pages, images, and headings, it includes, widgets, menus, non-breaking test, threaded comments, and so on.

At WordCamp Atlanta, Michael Novotny – the guy responsible for running QA at 8BIT – released WP Test arguably the best tests for WordPress.

Why I Believe in Pressgram

March 22, 2013 / Tom

The dangers in blogging about a product or service that your friends are offering is that it comes off as gimmicky or as if there are ulterior motives for doing such.

I recognize that risk and anyone who’s done this has felt this tension; however, I also believe that there’s value in sharing good work from people regardless of if you know them or not.

And for those of you who have followed 8BIT via Twitter or the web for sometime, or who are familiar with John Saddington, you know that he’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign to back his project Pressgram.

Introducing The WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards

March 21, 2013 / Tom

The comments on this post have been closed. Please check out this update for more information.

One of the things that open source advocates always claim is that you should give back to the software that has given you so much.

For some, this comes in the form of code, others this comes in the form of bug testing, tracking tickets, writing documentation, or something along the lines thereof.

Only occasionally do I discuss JavaScript on my blog, but it’s actually one of my favorite languages. In fact, there was a time in my career where I was looking to pure JavaScript applications.

Preferences change, though.

Last year, I made my first contribution to WordPress Core, which was exciting, and I’m currently working to edit the Plugin Developer Handbook with a group of a developers far more talented than I am (so I’m getting to learn from their work for free ;).

Anyway, one of the things about the WordPress Coding Standards that’s always seemed incomplete to me is how little it focused on JavaScript. It provides guides for PHP, for HTML, and it even has a stub for CSS, but there’s nothing in the Codex about JavaScript.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on exactly that. Today, I contributed to the WordPress Coding Standards by introducing the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards.
Continue reading

Save Custom Post Meta – Revisited, Refactored, Refined.

February 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

About a month ago, I shared a post that discussed the code that’s required to save custom post meta data. Generally speaking, this is a lot of boilerplate that’s required to make sure that the data being saved is permitted and that the author has permissions to do so.

Of course, depending on the nature of your project, the code will vary a little, but for the majority of the cases, it’s all the same.

But thanks to several commenters and contributors, the code has been completely refactored, and I’ve actually been using it in a recent project.