Tag: WordPress (Page 100 of 219)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

The Tension of Refactoring Legacy Code, Part 1

May 9, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

In a post last week, I talked about various problem spaces that exist in WordPress, but I also briefly touched on the idea of practical applications as it relates to writing WordPress-specific solutions.

Specifically, I made the comment (more or less in passing):

When I was in school, I had to take a class in Computational Theory. For the most part, I’m more of a fan of practical application, but I know that much of said practical applications are the concrete implementations of proven theories.

And then I went on to talk about more theoretical topics as it relates to solving problems in a given computing space (for us, that’d be WordPress).

$Computational Theory$

Since I spoke about the previous topic at this particular level, I thought it might be fun talk about a more accurate or more practical approach to writing WordPress-specific software.

Recently, I’ve been working on a codebase that’s a few years old. The desire to want to refactor the whole codebase is strong (and I know I’m not alone in feeling this way when it comes to working with previous projects).

But this is not pragmatic, and it’s not so for some different reasons. So over the next three posts, I thought I’d share a little bit about the state of the project, managing the tension that exists, and how to do what we can when we’re faced with this type of situation.

The Modern WordPress Server Stack

May 6, 2016 / Tom

During WordCamp San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Carl Alexander speak on the topic of the modern WordPress Server Stack.

Modern WordPress Server Stack

A few notes:

If you’re not following Carl on Twitter, I recommend it. He’s an incredibly smart person who is doing some really neat things with WordPress.
If you’re not subscribed to his blog but are interested in advanced programming topics as it relates to WordPress, I recommend subscribing.
If you weren’t present for his talk, you can catch it on WordPress.tv.

With that said, Carl also included an article that accompanied his presentation on his blog and it’s something that I think makes for good reading.

I find this especially true if you’re someone who is at an intermediate level of WordPress development or if you’re someone who’s looking to learn more about server administration.

Thinking Through Problem Spaces in WordPress

May 4, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I enjoy talking with fellow developers about the problems they are thinking about as it relates to their field, and the problem spaces in WordPress is no exception.

That is, I enjoy hearing about what they are working on, what they are thinking about, or what they are tinkering with as it relates to their primary line of work.

Tinkering

For many who read this blog (and this includes myself though I’m the one actually writing it), we spend a lot of our time working within the WordPress space but does mean we spend a lot of time thinking about the WordPress space? Furthermore, does this mean that we spend a lot of time thinking about problems and potential solutions to what we see in our area?

First, this is not something that’s unique to our space. I believe that you can find this in any programming community.

Secondly, I think that this notion of thinking about a particular set of problems is something that’s a bit more abstract than what we usually discuss or see written about on other blogs.

A Plugin for Testing Custom Post Types

May 3, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working on the latest version of Easier Excerpts, we added functionality so the plugin would work any post type that had support for excerpts.

Testing Custom Post Types

Because you can’t know that different custom post types that a person may have on their installation of WordPress, I wrote a small plugin that creates a generic custom post type that can be customized, used, and abused in your development environment.

This way, you can install the plugin, activate it, and have a custom post type with which you can test against should your project call for it.

Shiny Updates for WordPress

April 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I love about the ‘features as a plugin’ approach that the core team takes is that it allows us to evaluate plugins such as Shiny Updates for WordPress.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, feature plugins refer to functionality that may or may not ultimately make it into WordPress core. They allow us to evaluate functionality, give feedback, and determine if a given feature makes sense to become part of WordPress.

Anyway, over the last couple of years we’ve seen an increase in ways that WordPress provides updates. Sometimes these are automatic updates, other times they are updates that happen inline.

One of the potential iterations coming to plugin updates is in the form of Shiny Updates for WordPress.