Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
For the next two days, my team and I are going to be hanging out with a lot of awesome people at WordCamp Atlanta.
You can find out all of the information about the conference on the official website, but the short of it is that a ton of people are coming into town to chat about all things WordPress.
When it comes to turning a profit on open-source software, I’d like to think that the majority of developers follow the same set of ethics. I’m my experience, it’s true – though, as with anything, there are outliers.
As I continue to work to introduce a premium level of support for my WordPress-related work, one of the things that I’ve found myself wrestling with is turning a profit on work to which others have contributed.
But are open source ethics that complicated?
The past couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the challenge of supporting free WordPress plugins. Though I’ve done this in the past, I’ve retired those projects, but am looking to get back into doing so all the while documenting the process here.
But first, for those who haven’t been reading the articles up to this point, I wanted to reference the previous posts just to let you know where I stand with regard to all of this:
The point is that I’m slowly working my way back into building a small business around building WordPress plugins, supporting them, offering documentation, manuals, and so on, but I want to make sure that I’m doing it right.
To that end, I’m enjoying the discussion with you guys via the comments as well as the challenge of finding the best tools possible not only for me but for potential customers, as well and this is what raises my next issue: Finding the right WordPress support system. Continue reading
As previously mentioned, WordCamp Atlanta 2013 will take place on March 15 – 16 at The Loudermilk Center. I’ll be speaking on Saturday, March 16th at 9:00am for the Developer Track.
Specifically, I’ll be speaking on how to Level-Up Your WordPress Development Skills.
Generally speaking, I’ll be looking to speak to both beginner and intermediate WordPress developers, but hopefully providing some useful information for advanced developers, as well.
That said, I thought it may be worth looking at a few of the topics I’m planning to cover during the course of the talk:
At my recent WordPress Developer Meetup, the topic of shortcodes came up as a point of discusion. When talking about it, I realized that I’ve never actually talked about them here on the blog, so I thought it might be worth bringing up for discussion.
For those of you who have seen any of my plugins, you see that none of them include shortcodes despite the fact that people have requested functionality offered by them.
For the most part, I dislike WordPress shortcodes. I think they are unintuitive, difficult to use for the average user, and go against much of what the core functionality of WordPress aims to offer.
But the challenge is that there’s not yet a suitable alternative.
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