Tag: WordPress (Page 159 of 220)

As far as WordPress projects are concerned, I’m far more comfortable talking about projects that I’ve been working on myself regardless of if they are for fun or profit.

And yes, there are times where I’ll share code and other snippets that come from contract work, but I generally do not talk about those types of projects out of respect for the client and/or out of respect for the terms of our agreement.

Contracts, respect, professionalism, and all that fun stuff.

The Disenchanted Young Professional

But there’s been a project that I’ve been a part of for a few months now, and I received an email last week that struck a chord with me. I asked the client if I could share the quote – keeping them anonymous of course – but use it to try to make a point.

They obliged.

I hate trying to support a theme that’s so dated and broken. I can hardly wait until I can offer support for a theme that I am proud of and is coded well and will be kept up-to-date.

And though it’s already been referenced through a number of different blogs, and the article is already over a week old (which is, you know, practically forever in Internet time), I couldn’t help but think: “We’re ruining WordPress.”

You may or may not think of it as hyperbole, but this is a very real problem.

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I’ve written a little bit about the WordPress Theme Customizer in a number of previous posts primarily because I think it’s one of the best features that has been introduced into WordPress in a long time (of course, this isn’t meant to downplay any of the work that’s been done since ;).

To be clear, I’m a fan because it takes a significant amount of guesswork away from the end user allowing them to see the results of their changes almost immediately versus, say, having to tab back and forth between the settings in the dashboard and the public-facing view of the site.

Couple that with additional changes introduced in more recent versions such as being able to add and remove widgets from within the customizer and improvements to this particular experience in the pipeline for a future release (such as 4.0), then you’ve got a nice feature that’s only getting better.

It’s evident that the same problems that have plagued us in one part of the application are migrating elsewhere in the application.

I’m sure this is something that happens in any language, framework, foundation, library, or platform, but if you’ve specifically been with WordPress for the last few years, then you’ve seen this happen.

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Over the last week or so, I’ve been writing about the various pillars of the WordPress Philosophy.

These include:

• Out of the Box
• Design for the Majority
• Decisions, Not Options
• Clean, Lean, and Mean
• Striving for Simplicity
• Deadlines Are Not Arbitrary
• The Vocal Minority

And today, I finally finish up with the Bill of Rights.

Ultimately, I’ve been looking at how I believe that the majority of us who are involved in driving the WordPress economy in some way have been ignoring these core tenants.

This isn’t to say that we’re all doing it, and this isn’t to say that they’re all being ignored, but I do believe that there are some significant issues that are happening within the WordPress product space that need solutions.

This isn’t to say that I have it figured out – hardly so – but I do believe that one of the things that many of us need to do is to begin forcing segmentation in the market based on how we price, support, and offer our products.

The final aspect of the philosophy to cover is that of the WordPress Bill of Rights. I almost opted not to write about this particular part because it’s directly influenced by the GPL which always has been, and always will be a fire starter of sorts for the WordPress economy.

Even still, it’s part of the philosophy and should be included.

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For those who have been following along, the purpose of this post should come as no surprise: I’m going to be talking about another pillar of the WordPress Philosophy.

Specifically, I’m going to be talking about The Vocal Minority which, in my opinion, is arguably the least discussed, and the least shared among all aspects of philosophy. That doesn’t make it any less important, though – it just means that we, as those who are involved in the WordPress economy, have more with which to familiarize ourselves.

Then again, to be fair, there are probably those who are just as familiar with this particular aspect of the philosophy as they are as much with the rest of the philosophy – and that’s great!

But remember: We’re primarily looking at how we can take the philosophy and not only how it applies to WordPress, but how we can apply it to the products that we’re building on top of it.

So the vocal minority – what does that even mean?

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When it comes to writing software – regardless of the type – it seems as if it’s always easy to get the first 80% done. This isn’t a new problem, either. You may have also heard it stated as:

80% of the work is done 80% of the time.

Or some variation thereof.

But anyway, when it comes to a project like WordPress – which is software – and it comes to projects being built on top of it – which are also software – then it stands to reason that they are subject to falling into the same trap.

And they are.

This is why this particular aspect of the philosophy is so important.

Of course, for anyone who has followed not only WordPress but who have worked on projects that sit on top of it as a foundation, then you know that deadlines have slipped and work that we do does miss deadlines.

There are so many different reasons that people can list for this that an entire series of posts could be written about each one in and of itself. That doesn’t mean that this part of the philosophy is being ignored, nor that we should treat it lightly.

If anything, I think it builds a stronger case for why it’s needed.

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