Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
One of the toughest things about building products for WordPress is making sure that you exhaustively test every single nuance of your theme.
Aside from things like post, pages, images, and headings, it includes, widgets, menus, non-breaking test, threaded comments, and so on.
At WordCamp Atlanta, Michael Novotny – the guy responsible for running QA at 8BIT – released WP Test arguably the best tests for WordPress.
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One of the things that open source advocates always claim is that you should give back to the software that has given you so much.
For some, this comes in the form of code, others this comes in the form of bug testing, tracking tickets, writing documentation, or something along the lines thereof.
Only occasionally do I discuss JavaScript on my blog, but it’s actually one of my favorite languages. In fact, there was a time in my career where I was looking to pure JavaScript applications.
Preferences change, though.
Last year, I made my first contribution to WordPress Core, which was exciting, and I’m currently working to edit the Plugin Developer Handbook with a group of a developers far more talented than I am (so I’m getting to learn from their work for free ;).
Anyway, one of the things about the WordPress Coding Standards that’s always seemed incomplete to me is how little it focused on JavaScript. It provides guides for PHP, for HTML, and it even has a stub for CSS, but there’s nothing in the Codex about JavaScript.
For the past few months, I’ve been working on exactly that. Today, I contributed to the WordPress Coding Standards by introducing the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards.
Continue reading
I’ll be the first to admit that I think the WordPress Plugin Repository does some great things for WordPress and for its user base. When they rolled out the updated forums and the some of the new features, I was really excited about it.
But as time has passed, I’ve come to believe that the repository is more user-centric than developer-centric. Don’t read me wrong: I’m not claiming that this is an either/or situation. Ideally, both should be elevated to the same level.
On one hand, this makes perfect sense. After all, you have thousands of plugins all of which are available for users to search and download not only from the web, but from within the WordPress dashboard.
But plugins are created by developers – often times for free, obviously – but I don’t think that the repository does such a good job of supporting the work of the developers.
Sure, I agree that free hosting of your plugins is great and the ability to generate a landing page with several rich features based solely on a README is impressive, but each of these things also results in a number of issues that simply make it difficult to stay motivated to continue contributing plugins to the economy.
All that to say, I think the repository is a fantastic resource where users are the first class citizens. To that point, I want to outline several issues that I’ve experienced while using the WordPress plugins repository as a developer.
And for those of you who have read this blog, you know that I dislike when people offer problems without proposed solutions, so I’m aiming to provide those, as well.
If you hang around WordPress long enough, you begin to notice that people involved with it – in whatever capacity – often refer to “the WordPress community.”
And maybe I’m alone in this, but if you hang around even longer you begin to ask yourself what is the WordPress community?
Here’s the thing: When I first began focusing the majority of my efforts on working with WordPress, I stumbled into the community of people who are involved with the application.
But doesn’t that sound generic? I mean, what does it mean to be “involved with WordPress,” anyway? And the more time that I’ve spent working with WordPress – or that anyone spends working with WordPress – the more I’ve – and they – will notice that the community is actually made up of smaller sub-cultures, microcosms, or whatever you want to call them.
And this raises a number of different issues. Continue reading
This past weekend, I attended WordCamp Atlanta 2013 and had an great time listening to some awesome speakers, finally meeting some Twitter friends face-to-face, and hanging out with a number of different people at the conference at the after party. All-in-all, it was a great weekend.
I gave my talk, Level Up Your WordPress Development Skills, on Saturday morning at 9am. Though the talk was filmed, I’m not sure when it will be online, so I’ve shared both my slides and the notes from my talk below.
If you are looking for WordPress guides and unbiased reviews, I recommend checking out WPKube. They also have an exclusive deals section.
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