Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
In my previous post, I shared a few thoughts on how I think someone can become a better WordPress developer.
When it comes to talking with beginner – or intermediate – WordPress developers, one thing that I’ve noticed is that when you suggest the WordPress Codex as a resource, there’s beginning to be a somewhat-typical response that I’m beginning to hear:
Please don’t suggest the Codex.
Bummer, right?
Recently, I received an email from a fellow developer who had finished reading a number of series of articles on WordPress, who had watched a number of WordPress tutorial videos, and was working towards mastering WordPress.
He went on to discuss his current skill set, his aspirations, and the type of projects he eventually wanted to take on as his career progressed.
Not bad, right?
Here, you’ve got a person that knows who he is, knows where he wants to be, and is looking for advice on how to get there.
Unfortunately, there was only so much advice I could give (I’d love to master WordPress, as well!), but the bottom is line I responded with a series of things that i think he – or anyone – can do in order to become a better WordPress developer.
After this post was published, Brady Vercher also reminded me of two WordPress-specific functions.
When it comes to working with the WordPress database – or any application that provides an API for data serialization – I try to always stick with the API unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.
For the most part, I tend to favor APIs that provides the necessary functions for reading and writing data, and I generally assume that they have everything built into them that they need in order to make data storage and retrieval as secure and as fast as possible (though I’ve been burned by this assumption before).
In some cases, this is true; in others, not so much.
Case in point: I’ve been working on a large intranet application for someone that’s built on top of WordPress. One component of the application requires the import of a relatively large set of data in CSV format that’s also piped through a third-party plugin.
Unfortunately, there was a bottleneck in the code that was causing timeouts on the remote server.
When I finally located the bottleneck, it was occurring in the third-party plugin.
When it comes to embedding source code into posts, I’ve been a fan of the SyntaxHighlighter plugin by Alex Mills for a long time – I’ve used it on every programming blog that I’ve maintained for as long as I can remember.
But ever since GitHub rolled out Gists, I’ve been using those to store frequently used functions, examples of code for posts or other articles, and snippets for which I’d like to have others come in introduce their changes, and/or their comments.
Straight from the Gist homepage:
Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are Git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable from Git.
Easy enough, right?
Perhaps one of the cooler things about gists is that they can be embedded in WordPress posts; however, I’ve had mixed success with the native support in doing that.
But Michael Novotny’s WP Gist plugin makes it really easy to embed nice-looking, gist-specific code into a WordPress post.
About a year and a half ago, I released the first version of Single Post Message for WordPress which is a simple plugin specifically for adding a notification at the top of the bottom of a given post.
For whatever it’s worth, it’s one of the plugins I’ve enjoyed creating the most not only because it scratched my own itch, but also because it’s an extremely lean, focused plugin that aims to solve exactly one problem.
The other day, Pippin William tweeted the following:
Good plugin idea for someone: add metabox to edit screen that allows notes to be entered and displayed just above comment form for that post
— Pippin Williamson (@pippinsplugins) September 28, 2013
To which Japh Thomson replied:
@pippinsplugins Sounds like a feature request for @tommcfarlin’s “Single Post Message” plugin: http://t.co/boCu7LdmSO
— Japh (@Japh) September 29, 2013
And to which Andrew Norcross built and responded with:
https://twitter.com/norcross/status/384463729578225664
You can read the entire conversation, but there are three things that I really dig about this particular exchange and the plugin that came out of it. But before discussing those, I think its worth checking out the WP Comment Notes plugin itself.
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