Tag: WordPress (Page 162 of 220)

As I’ve been working through a number of different plugins both for myself and for client projects, one of the things that has started to become glaringly apparent over the last few projects is just how unintuitive WordPress plugin settings can be.

I know, isn’t a new idea, but bear with me because I’m not talking about your standard run-of-the-mill plugins that have a settings page or that may add some type of shortcode functionality to the editor (though that’s unintuitive unto itself).

Instead, I’m talking about plugins that include a little bit of both: settings pages, additions to custom post types, perhaps the additions of shortcodes or buttons to the editor, and so on.

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Right now, there’s a lot of talk about themes and their place within the WordPress community. Generally speaking, I think that this is a good thing as it’s finally forcing theme designers and developers to thing more strategically about the products that they’re creating, releasing, and to think more critically about their target audience, marketing efforts, and so on.

There are some who believe the market has been saturated, and though I follow that train of thought, I don’t agree with it. Just because there are more product options, more companies, and so on producing themes does not necessarily negatively detract from the industry.

I think it makes it more competitive which, in turn, can make it more innovative (though it can also create more products that should never be on the market, but that’s the nature of an economy and I’d rather keep the post optimistic).

With that said, I don’t think that there’s any reason to be discouraged from entering the theme development space, creating a new theme company, or anything like that.

In fact, I think on the contrary.

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Regardless of your level of experience with WordPress, everyone is familiar with seeing the messages that display whenever an action has completed within the dashboard:

• We have success messages for when something has completed, ahem, successfully,
• We have notification messages which are neutral pieces of information that give a heads up something has happened,
• And we have error messages that let us know that something has gone wrong.

For anyone that’s read past articles, you know that when it comes to introducing functionality into the WordPress dashboard, I firmly believe that the work we do should look as native as possible. That is to say that I am not a fan of custom styles, custom controls, or extraordinary styles to give your theme or plugin that “extra edge.”

And for those who are familiar with the Settings API and/or the Options API, then you’re likely familiar with introducing new sections, settings, controls, and options, but what about error messages?

Generally speaking, success messages and notification messages are reasonably easy to come by, but let’s say that you need to validate some piece of information that’s coming into the server and return an error if it fails.

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The more time anyone spends with WordPress and all associated products (that is, themes, plugins, and so on), the more likely they are to also pick up on all of the commentary – both good, bad, and neutral – that surrounds the core application.

Obviously, I’m a fan of WordPress and make my living building things for it and trying to give back to the core application when I can so I know that what I’m going to say is going to come off as biased just as anyone else who writes about their preferred technology stack.

I’m well aware of the common complaints people have about the WordPress codebase and I’m not here to defend, to make statements about how it’s getting better, or to spark a discussion on how hard it is to maintain legacy features for a decade.

But if you’re a developer who is just getting into WordPress – specifically, products built on top of it – then I think that a significant portion of your first impression has to do with your experience on the first product that you use.

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