Tag: WordPress (Page 211 of 219)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

The Problems with WordPress Themes

September 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Problems with WordPress Themes

Japh – a fellow tweep and WordPress evangelist at Envato – recently shared a post on his blog titled “The Problems with themes on ThemeForest are problems with Themes.”

The topic of discussion boils down to this:

ThemeForest has a massive library of themes that are available for purchase
Some of the themes that are available for purchase consist of poor code that ultimately affect plugins and/or the overall WordPress experience
A proposed solution for how to increase standards and improve the theme review process

Though I’ve little experience with ThemeForest, I shared my thoughts as a developer who cares about the importance of code quality, as someone who as worked directly work Automattic’s theme team, and as someone who is highly aware of the problems with WordPress themes. Continue reading

How To Get Started with WordPress Plugin Development

September 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I mentioned that I’m often asked by aspiring WordPress Developers is how to get started within the community. After all, it’s active, there are a lot of people, and there are various ways to contribute.

One thing that seems to be a common thread is that developers often come wanting to know how to develop themes or develop plugins. If they’re interested in both, their interest still seems to lean in one of the two areas.

That said, the same challenge exists: How do you get started with WordPress Plugin Development?

How To Prevent a Page From Being Deleted in WordPress

September 5, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're experienced with programmatically creating pages, you may wish to skip down to the code.

I’m currently working on two applications that I’m building on top of WordPress (of which I hope to share once they’re complete).

Both projects have views – basically pages with templates – that need to be created when the application is installed and the pages aren’t meant to be deleted.

Though I’ve covered how to programmatically create a post in WordPress, I thought I’d share a quick example of how you can programmatically prevent a page from being deleted in WordPress, too.

How To Get Started with WordPress Theme Development

August 31, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the questions that I’m often asked from developers is how to get started with WordPress theme development. Sure, there are great resources like the Theme Development guide, but if you’re looking to dive headfirst into working with an existing theme, your options are limited.

At least, that used to be the case.

Yes, you can tinker around with Twentyten, Twentyeleven, or another theme, but sometimes the best place to learn is to watch someone develop a theme from the ground up. Thanks to GitHub, being able to do this is easier than ever.

Brian Krogsgard is currently in the process of building a theme and he’s made his work available on GitHub.

How I Organize My Files When Developing WordPress Plugins

August 30, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

So much of software development consists of actually maintaining projects after they’ve been released. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of time is actually spent refactoring that didn’t necessarily have to occur if more planning had been done from the outset of the project.

Sure – some teams get this right, some teams don’t, and sometimes it’s just the nature of bad luck. After all, the best we can do is try to make the smartest decisions possible given the initial requirements.

When it comes to building plugins, there’s a specific way that I organize my WordPress plugin files that I’ve found to make bug fixes, future updates, and overall development much easier as a the lifetime of a plugin increases.