Tag: WordPress (Page 95 of 219)

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

Start Black-Box Testing WordPress Projects

June 22, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I love how easy it is to create a project on top of WordPress and release it into one of the free repositories, there are certain aspects of development that are neglected.

Case in point: testing.

And though I’ve been talking a little bit about unit testing, there are also other types of testing such as acceptance testing, integration testing, black-box testing, and so on.

This is not the type of black-box I had in mind.

All of the above are ways that we can go about ensuring a high degree of quality is built into our projects. Sometimes, I think we forgo these things for the sake of shipping something more quickly.

Other times, I think that we neglect to do them because writing tests is not as much fun as actually building a project. In other cases, I think that we opt not to test because we don’t have the proper education around the tooling for how to do so.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a much better track record of writing tests around client projects that I do about some of my public plugins (save for Easier Excerpts and Scheduled Post Shortcut which are done by Eric and myself), so I’m working to change that.

But if you don’t do any other type of testing, I urge you to at least try to introduce black-box testing into your development process.

Namespaces in WordPress: File Organization

June 21, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Those who have worked in object-oriented programming languages are likely familiar with namespacing and the benefits they provide when organizing a project. Unfortunately, namespaces in WordPress aren’t something that I’ve seen as much as in projects I’ve seen elsewhere.

Namespaces in WordPress: File Organization

And when I say “namespaces in WordPress,” I’m not talking about WordPress core. I’m talking about WordPress plugins. I think there are a variety of reasons developers don’t use namespaces (and may I’ll talk about those later); however, I’ve gotten curious about those who do use namespaces in their projects.

Specifically, I’ve been interested in the conventions that people follow, how they map their files to their namespaces, and so on.

how many of you use brackets when working with #php namespaces, or just use `namespace`, `use`, and “ to handle nesting?

— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) June 17, 2016

Though there’s likely variation in some of the things we do, I think making sure our files map to a particular directory structure is helpful when dealing with projects (especially large projects).

Start Here for the Aspiring WordPress Developer

June 20, 2016 / Tom

Earlier this year, I launched a closed-membership site, The First Version, aiming to help the aspiring WordPress developer.

Ultimately, the goal of the site was not to teach in-depth concepts such as PHP, object-oriented programming, or how to create themes or plugins.

Instead, it was meant to give budding developers a survey of the landscape of WordPress development and what tools, resources, and options they have at their disposal for starting on their journey.

Given the feedback, response, and membership, I think it went well. But it’s been closed for a few months. After an exercise in re-branding and a refocusing of the content, I’m relaunching the site for another few months.

Optimus For WordPress Image Optimization

June 17, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

WordPress image optimization is one of those things that’s useful for anyone who blogs regularly (be it weekly, bi-weekly, daily, or however many times).

Including images in your posts is usually considered a good thing, but as you start to do so over time, you’re going to end up utilizing storage space on your server. On top of that, sometimes images include metadata that isn’t always necessary for images posted on a site.

For example, the time, date, and location of a photo isn’t always necessary to keep when sharing an image on the web. Sometimes, sure, but all the time? Doubtful.

Anyway, there are a number of great plugins that are available that compress images, remove metadata, and generally help with all of this. One of the one’s that I’ve been using and that I’ve grown to really like is Optimus.

Using Laravel Valet for WordPress Development

June 16, 2016 / Tom

One of the latest options available for local development is using Laravel Valet for WordPress. This is now one of the options available for the already set of options we already have:

XAMPP, MAMP, WAMP, etc.,
VVV,
WP-Lib Box
And more.

When it comes to having choices like this, it can make it difficult for a beginner to decide where to start. And as important as I think it is to explain the benefits of each of the above options, that post is not this post.

Instead, I want to share a short tutorial I wrote about using Laravel Valet for WordPress. Personally, I think Valet is a great solution for beginners, but it assumes a bit of familiarity with the command-line that might be off-putting to new users.

Once you setup the software, it’s hard to argue against using it. So with that said, here’s how you can get started.