Regarding the podcast, two of the best things that’ve happened since the previous episode is that the number of questions is steadily increasing and people are saying they appreciate the length of the show.

So that’s good stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, if you’ve previously subscribed to the show, then this episode should be available in your favorite app or service.

With that, here are the notes for this episode.

PHP, UI, UX, A11Y, APIs (Oh My)

What’s Up?

Before getting into the questions, I share a few things that are going on in my personal life that are pretty exciting. I talk about:

  • Getting ready for kiddo #3,
  • Moving my house within my house (it makes sense on the podcast, I think),
  • Starting guitar lessons with my oldest,
  • And running in the blistering summer heat.

Enough on all of that, though. The read of the show focuses heavily on several different things all related to WordPress development.

Questions

Building Modern Solutions Using Modern Tools on on WordPress

With the upgrade of PHP to 7.0 coming in new year, what changes could WP make to make the codebase better? Could you spell out some that would make breaking changes?

As with the rest of the episodes, I elaborate much more on this in the episode, but you can expect to hear about:

  • My take on contributing to WordPress core and following Trac,
  • How I view WordPress in terms of a foundation for development,
  • How modern versions of PHP and other tools can still place nicely with a backward compatible codebase,
  • Why it’s important to have a conceptual model of WordPress before setting out to review your solution.

There’s a lot to cover here, so these are just the highlights.

Improving Your Competence

How can intermediate WordPress developers improve their competency?

This was a really good question, and I go on in my answer on this for a while. Specifically, I hit on:

  • Theme design and development,
  • User interface, User experience, and accessibility,
  • Plugin development
  • How to know if you’re headed in the right direction with what you want to do,
  • Key things to look for when working with various technologies and contributing to the WordPress economy as a whole,
  • And much, much more with the bottom line being this: Work to refine your skillset, positively contribute back to the economy at large, and then repeat the process all the while challenging yourself a little bit more so that you’re not staying steady or your skills aren’t staying stagnant.

You can hear the entire answer in the episode (which is linked at the end of the article).

These were both great questions and ended up being the longest, relatively speaking, episode I’ve recorded thus far.

Before Episode 7

Stranger Things is coming out next month so, for those of you who are fans, things are about to get turned upside down again.

And on a more relevant note, I appreciate the emails and other tweets regarding the podcast because it shows you ladies and gentlemen are listening. That’s a pretty big deal if the goal of the podcast is to be heard, isn’t it?

I’m looking forward to the next episode for answering more questions, sharing what’s up, and even introducing another sponsor who I think is providing an awesome service to the WordPress economy – especially you developer types. But that’s next month.

Where to Listen