Tag: WordPress (Page 124 of 219)

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

An Interview with Pagely on WordPress

July 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Most of the technically-minded folks in WordPress are familiar with Pagely: They provide managed hosting for WordPress-based sites.

In addition to that service, they also publish a blog that highlights a number of different topics – anything from running case studies on WordPress SaaS products to covering the new features they are releasing to their customers.

Over the past few weeks, they’ve been running a series in which they highlight people who are involved in WordPress in some capacity and, as of yesterday, I had the honor to be featured on the blog.

Ask Not “What Can WordPress Do For Me?”

July 7, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I love it when I see tweets like this show up in my timeline:

I’d like to know if there’s any part of WordPress that needs more tutorials and more attention. I’m going to start blogging soon :)

— Nikhil Vimal (@nikvimal) July 6, 2015

And it’s for multiple reasons, but I’ll get to those in a moment.

First, if you’re involved in WordPress in any capacity and you’re not following Nikhil, then he’s a solid recommendation. He’s representative of the type of developers and contributors that we need coming up to continue working on WordPress.

He’s smart, he gets things done, he shares his work, he’s constantly looking to learn, he’s constantly looking to help others, and he’s had the opportunity to intern at places like iThemes and Rocket Genius.

By the time he’s out of college, he’s going to have the education and experience to continue to do great things from the project (if he so chooses).

Though with all of that said, it doesn’t explain why I enjoy seeing tweets like this.

WordPress and Developer Maturity

July 6, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that we often hear about WordPress is that it has a low-barrier to entry for those who are interested in programming and/or for those who are interested in applying what they’ve learned about computer science or software development.

Generally speaking, I have a hard time saying that out loud. I’ll talk about this in more detail momentarily, but suffice it to say that I’m suspect of saying that.

Barreir

Don’t get me wrong: There are some nice things about working with WordPress that are easier than working in other environments, but that’s all assuming you’ve worked in other environments before.

Secondly, I think it’s important to also know where you fall on the spectrum of developer maturity (that isn’t a real thing, so don’t bother googling it, but I’m using it for the sake of this post :). This has always been a fun topic to talk about, but Matt Briggs of Google recently wrote an article that did a great job articulating this.

I highly recommend reading it before continuing with this post, though I’ll be quoting a few parts of it.

WordPress Coding Standards Are Good for the Planet

July 3, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past few years, one of the areas of WordPress that has interested me the most is the area of the WordPress Coding Standards. Specifically, it’s one area in which I’ve tried to contribute and it’s one area in which I’ve talked about at my local WordCamp.

To say that I think they are a little important would be an understatement, so given the opportunity to talk about them – evangelize them, even – I will.

The short of it is this:

I’ve had a number of people help me to begin writing better WordPress-style code over the years, and I’ve seen a direct result of the impact that it can have when maintaining projects that are built with teams or even just myself.

Furthermore, there’s a lot of code that I’ve audited, reviewed, or seen suggested that does not follow the WordPress Coding Standards and this helps to perpetuate a problem that has a clear solution on how to fix.

To that end, I’m excited to share that I’ll be participating in an upcoming event at WP Sessions all about the WordPress Coding Standards.

Officially Partnering with WPBeginner

July 2, 2015 / Tom

As evidenced by this entire blog, one of the things that I enjoy most is writing about software development within the context of WordPress.

That is, I enjoy writing about taking techniques learned in computer science, software engineering, object-oriented analysis and design, and so on and then applying them in the WordPress space.

I’ll also talk about front-end development, and web application development. Sure, I’ll occasionally cover things like databases, though that’s not really my strongest area and I try to leave that to those who are far more skilled than I am.

But one of the tough spots that comes with having a site like this is making sure that you’re able to make the information as accessible to those who are just starting out in WordPress. As much as I would absolutely love to help bring others up to speed on where to start, it’s really hard to do that without giving them a strong foundation off of which to build.

Hopefully, we can change that.