The Single Point Of Failure
As a SOHO Developer one of the many challenges is the fact that there is no one else to discuss code changes with. This is a bigger deal than it sounds as I, for one, am a great believer that two minds are better than one. If you are unsure of the best way to […]
From Developer To Businessman : A New Venture
For many years I have wanted to go freelance but there has never seemed to be a good time. I’m sure you know how it is. As a dad of three children and a wife and home to support going freelance always seemed too much of a risk. However it is something I had been […]
Whats the Meta in WordPress
Often when tutorials cover the how of doing a task they do not cover the why. And sometimes you need to understand what problem a feature solves so you can understand where to apply it. If you have ever looked at the WordPress API or at the WordPress table structure you will find three tables […]
Events Do Not Equal MVC
A while ago a developer who’s articles I read and who I have a lot of respect for suggested that WordPress is not suited to MVC and that the filters and hooks system(call it an event system, or an implementation of the observer pattern if you so wish) kind of negated the need for using […]
The Help Helper
So in part one of this two part series I covered how to integrate help documentation for your plugin into WordPress using the built in WordPress functions. But if you write a lot of plugins, or plan to, then it might be a good idea to create a class which encapsulates some of this functionality. […]
Anyone Can Be A Codesmith.
If you are a Star Wars fan or not most of you will have heard of the Jedi. In the world of Star Wars these were an elite class of warriors, who went around putting wrongs right. There were not that many of them and when one of them went rogue, only one of the […]
Integration with the WordPress Help System
I am a great believer in having a consistent user interface. So when I write a plugin for WordPress I try my best to make it look like part of WordPress itself. This isn’t always possible but you can usually come close. For this reason I wrote a small helper class to integrate a plugin’s […]
SOHO Agile – Practices make perfect
If you follow what we call football in the UK or soccer as it is known in the US and other parts of the world you will probably have heard of David Beckham. He was a very successful football player who played for the UK football team Manchester United in his early career and L.A. […]
On Technical Debt and Craftsmanship
Technical debt is something we, as developers, live with every day. Sometimes a pragmatic solution needs to take precedence over a perfect solution. A software craftsmanship purist would argue that you should always strive for the perfect solution but in my opinion this is not always practical.
Taming WordPress Taxonomies
A while back I wrote a short series of articles on programatically manipulating taxonomies in WordPress. If you didn’t see the series it included :- The Hidden Value of Custom Taxonomies. How to Add a Custom Taxonomy To Your Theme. How To Programatically Add Terms to a WordPress Taxonomy and De-registering A Custom WordPress Taxonomy. But […]
