Category: Resources (Page 6 of 60)

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

WordPress Plugins I Use (As Of 2017)

June 23, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, an international WordPress-friend of mine, Thorsten Frommnen, tweeted the following asking what WordPress plugins I use (and others use) right now:

https://twitter.com/thorstenfrommen/status/873711220611846144

You’d have to click-through to see the whole thread. I’ve wanted to follow-up with the post for a little while now and just now have the chance.

For what it’s worth, I don’t know if it’s all that interesting to cover all the plugins that I have running. Admittedly, it’s not many (and no, it’s not because I get into the too-many-plugins-slow-down-a-site-debate), but it’s because I just don’t use that many to run this site.

With that said, here’s a rundown of the WordPress plugins I use, why, and where you can get ’em.

An Option for a PhpStorm WordPress Theme

June 19, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Since talking about making the switch to PhpStorm, I’ve gotten feedback:

from “the first thing you need to do is to change your theme,”
to “what’s one of the first things I should learn.”

And I think all of that’s great because the whole point of starting off with a post about PhpStorm in general – as I have with other editors – is simply start from the ground up and show others how I’ve opted to setup my environment.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that I think that choices I make are the ones others should make. But, at the very least, it gives an idea as to some of the tweaks I’ve made and as to why.

Over time, I’ll get into more technical things that I’ve chosen to do but, for now, I thought talking about the theme – a PhpStorm WordPress Theme, perhaps? – that I’ve been using as a place to start.

Mindset For Debugging (And Why We Need It)

May 8, 2017 / Tom

When it comes to writing software, maintaining software, or simply trying to understand software, a debugger is one of the most powerful tools that we can use.

But when it comes to WordPress, it seems that it’s less common. Personally, I’m not sure why:

I don’t know if it has to do with the nature of open-source,
if has to do with the convenience of echo and var_dump that are built into the language,
or if I’m just missing other developers who talk about it.

Regardless, if an IDE doesn’t have a built-in debugger, it’s not too difficult to set up Xdebug and get started using it. And once you do start using it, you learn much more about how a given piece of software performs regardless of if you wrote it or if someone else wrote it.

Yes, I’ve written on this topic before, but I recently stumbled across an article that I found to be a really good break down of how to shift one’s thinking into a mindset for debugging.

Visual Studio Code TODOs, REVIEWS, and FIXMEs

April 25, 2017 / Tom

I’ve not been coy about my appreciation for Visual Studio or how it performs as an IDE for WordPress, but there are always things here and there I think are worth sharing either for the sake of making it a better experience or for improving our workflows.

Case in point:

How many of us work on codebases large enough that we’re writing comments, code, or other features that yield us dropping TODOs or FIXMEs throughout the code so we can focus on the task at hand?

I think our intentions are good. I mean, we do plan to come back to these, but if they aren’t documented in some way, it’s far too easy to come back and do then.

And sure, you can always do a “find all” at the end of a sprint or before the end of a project of whenever works best for you, but there are extensions that can do this for you.

Working with PHP Sessions and WordPress

March 24, 2017 / Tom

Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend and fellow developer about how I handle sessions in WordPress. Specifically, we were talking about how we take PHP Sessions and WordPress and make them work together (or how we adapt the former into the latter).

This is occasionally a point of interest for WordPress developers since WordPress, as an application, is stateless.

The neat thing, though, is that it gives us a variety of ways to approach this problem. But we’re not the first (and we definitely won’t be the last) to come across this problem.