Tag: WordPress (Page 155 of 219)

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

Steps for Soft Launching WordPress Products

August 8, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things with which I’ve just started experimenting is soft launches of product updates. That is, I’m providing updates to users of certain plugins through automatic updates in order to garner feedback – if any – prior to announcing it and launching it to everyone else.

For those involved in the software world, this is nothing new, but for those who are just getting into building products for others or who are looking for ways to test the proverbial waters of their projects without a public announcement for every single release, then this isn’t a bad idea.

Wikipedia defines a soft launch:

A soft launch is the release of a website, hotel, or other product or service to a limited audience. Soft-launching is a method for gathering data on a product’s usage and acceptance in the marketplace, before making it generally available as a hard launch or grand opening.

I think the idea of soft launches, open source, and the general WordPress economy is a really broad topic about which there’s a lot to discuss, but I thought I’d share some quick ideas based on my experience for those who are looking for a process on how to perform soft launches of their work with their existing customer base.

The Usability of WordPress Featured Images

August 6, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Featured images (also referred to as “post thumbnails”) are nice features to include in WordPress themes, but there are times where I question their implementation.

I know, I know: talking about stuff like this can come off as frivolous, but I think that if you deeply care about what you’re working on, then evaluating the decisions – every one of them – that go into your product matters.

And since featured images are a decision that need to be made when working in theme development matter, then it’s worth evaluating their implementation.

Your Own Instance of the WordPress Media Uploader

August 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the nicest features of WordPress 3.5 was the introduction of a refresh of the WordPress Media Uploader.

For developers who aren’t familiar with the change, the short of it is a new version of the media uploader was built using Backbone.js and Underscore.js both of which are newer JavaScript libraries that introduce a different type of structure to creating JavaScript-intense web applications.

Sometimes, one of the challenges that comes with working with any new feature is the lack of documentation around how to take advantage of it. When that happens, you’re more or less left to dig into the core source code and/or the documentation for each of the specific libraries to learn how to use them.

Educate Your Users in Open Source Software

August 4, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I’m working hard to have released by the end of the month is the latest version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

The latest version has been in development for quite a while now (a lot has happened offline so, you know, that’s how it goes).

The last time that I really spent any time talking about this project was in November 2013. A lot has changed since then. Initially, I was planning on a minor upgrade with some of the following features:

Releasing the version has part of the 2.x.x versioning
Including a class specifically for administrative functionality
Fixing issues with symbolic links and textdomains
Including more TODO’s for users to find what needs to be changed
…and so on.

But when I got started on the next version of the Boilerplate, a lot of things changed. The short of it is that it’s being completely re-written from the ground up and the code and documentation are being split into to separate things for the sake of user education.

I’ll spend more time talking about the Boilerplate in a future, but one of the things that I wanted to share that’s related to running a project like the Boilerplate has to do with open source, contributions, lack of a vision, and how this can negatively impact your project and your users.

Stop Including Custom CSS in WordPress

July 30, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I think many, many young (that is: inexperienced) theme developers do is ship a custom.css file in WordPress. Years ago, I made the mistake so I’m just as guilty as the next person.

Unfortunately, this is something that’s still happening today – we need to stop including custom CSS in WordPress and use the native facilities to take advantage of the same functionality we’re trying to achieve with this particular file.

Here’s the thing: Normally I wouldn’t bother talking about something like this because the Codex does such a good job of outlining the proper way to introduce customizations into themes, but I recently received a comment (that I’ll paraphrase) in which I was told that:

In the real world not everyone uses child themes.

Odds are, many of us have heard the old cliché that:

The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference.

And when you’re talking about something like a complex algorithm for traversing, say, the shortest path across a graph over a large network, or when we’re talking about something like properly handling memory in embedded systems, talking about theory and the real world makes sense.

That is, all of those cases are important and are worthy of optimization, but we’re talking about a single CSS file.

We’re not talking about a complex system.

And it concerns me that those who are contributing to the WordPress economy through products aren’t taking the built-in features of the application seriously. It’s seen as some bit of impracticality that they don’t want to pursue.

But this introduces it’s own set of challenges that negatively affect theme development from both a developer and a customer standpoint.