Tag: WordPress (Page 136 of 220)

If you’re ever interested in getting into WordPress plugins, then there’s a wide array of material available for you to read – this includes material across who-knows-how-many blogs, people on Twitter, and even physical books available on Amazon or likely your local bookstore (well, maybe – heh).

But when it comes to building and maintaining a free plugin (let alone several), I’ve found that there’s not as much discussion, sharing, and overall dissemination of information available. To that end, I thought it might be worth looking at four things that I’ve found useful when maintaining free WordPress plugins.

Continue reading

A few years ago, I was working on a WordPress theme that had some really cool features (if I can say that without sounding as if I’m bragging). The features were brainstormed by a team and gathered through feedback through a number of customers and users, and all were implemented over a long period of time.

When the time came to actually release the theme, it proved to be worth it – it was well-received.

As with any product, we then went into maintenance mode doing the usual round of fielding bug reports, features requests, and so on, and then continued maintaining the product with periodic releases in order to provide bug fixes, minor feature updates, and so on.

Generally speaking, it was great. There was a lot to be proud of and things were going well.

But, as with anything, things couldn’t continue on the up and up forever and during one of the releases, I neglected to remove a line of code that was intended only for the development environment.

We shipped it.

And it negatively affected all of the customers who applied the update.

Continue reading

One of the biggest challenges that comes with working with PHP and WordPress is determining which version of PHP to use.

From the WordPress.org Requirements page:

PHP version 5.2.4 or greater (recommended: PHP 5.4 or greater)

With respect to PHP, a lot has changed between 5.2.4 and 5.4. And the problem, for developers, usually comes down to something like this:

If we opt to stick with the oldest supported version then we have the largest audience appeal, but if we stick with newer versions then we get some nice, new features in the language but at the expense of certain hosts.

So when it comes to WordPress and PHP, what do we do?

Continue reading

Earlier this week, WP Tavern wrote up an excellent piece on Jason Schuller’s newest project, Pickle. 

I’ve ended reading over the article (and the comments) a number of times because I think there are some really, really great though as it relates to using WordPress as an application platform.

This is something that I’ve talked about a number of times and it’s something that I really want to see happen more and more in the future; however, this is one of the first times that I’ve really seen someone take WordPress, use it as a foundation for solution that’s built towards a specific market, and then articulated it in such a way that does a great job of expressing what exactly it means for WordPress to be an application platform.

Continue reading