Category: Development

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The Actionable Guide to Web Design Planning (16 Questions to Answer)

Planning a new web design project or a redesign is a tough exercise growing organizations go through. And in the era of $59 premium templates, understanding the rationale behind spending months in conceptualization, mockups, and prototypes requires some business insight. There are three reasons custom web design solutions are important to businesses: Corporate/brand identity User experience Conversion rates It all boils down to solving the business problem of generating new leads or customers through the front-facing web technology. Regardless of how beautiful the website is or whether it includes a thousand features, unless it is built with the customer in… Continue Reading
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Xdebug for Fedora with PHP 5.3

In February I wrote a guide on setting up Xdebug for Eclipse usage under Ubuntu. Using a neat debugger while exploring an existing WordPress project is a must and among the two possibilities (the Zend one or Xdebug) I use Xdebug. However, setting it up on my ThinkPad took a bit more time due to the different configuration. Basically the installation process and the Eclipse configuration is all the same - install php-devel and pecl and then proceed with xdebug install, configure Eclipse further. However, adding the Xdebug support for the PHP has several differences to be taken into account.… Continue Reading
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Don’t Call Yourself a Developer If You Don’t Code

This essay was originally written in 2015 after years of "race to the bottom" in the WordPress space, especially among service providers who sell low-cost solutions without revealing the drawbacks of their work. For some unknown reason, the number of "WordPress Developers" out there is probably nearing the number of Java developers, despite the fact that all Java developers do program extensively whilst the WordPress developers far too often have no idea what's going on behind the admin panel. Full disclosure: I am a WordPress Core contributor since version 3.7 with background in Java and Python. Many of our agency projects serve… Continue Reading
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First Week With Croogo

It's been my first week using Croogo - a CMS platform based on CakePHP and created by the Bangladesh developer Fahad Heylaal. Recently I've been looking for a next level platform in order to decrease development time and reduce wasting time for writing standard things from scratch such as menus, user controls (Auth+ACL), multilingual options etc. What Croogo does is delivering all this in a way upper lever. Croogo itself works out some general concepts in a way that we know from other popular systems. Overall look & feel in admin panel seems like the one that we've seen in… Continue Reading
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Append a JavaScript code to DOM and run it

When you have a user input box to promote to the frontend with plain JavaScript, attached via JSON-P or other approach serving JSON, there are few hints for appending. For instance, we have a script tag that has to generate a dynamic content. We need to locate it somehow, two possible approaches are: 1) pulling the last loaded script, usually the one executed right at the moment: [javascript] var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName( 'script' ); var script_element = scripts[ scripts.length - 1 ]; [/javascript] 2) getting the script via ID [javascript] var script_element = document.getElementById( script_id ); [/javascript] In order to append… Continue Reading
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Forgotten Password In Django

Turns out that there are plenty of useful features in the Django admin that I never thought about. The other day I found the last task of a project of mine was adding the "Forgotten password" feature. It's basically a standard task included in every users-related project, but the whole process requires few interactions: clicking 'forgotten password' link writing user email where the password should be send to verifying email against users database sending confirmation link confirming link choosing password resetting password The whole 7-steps list (with UI and backend communications) could be boring and time wasting (usually). That's where… Continue Reading
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Test Drive For Plugins and Themes is Not Popular Enough

The pricing dilemma with WordPress themes and plugins is a critical problem, mostly due to the widespread race to the bottom. Unfortunately, people don't understand the magnitude of a problem until they are personally involved and affected by the consequences. Discussing Business With Developers [caption id="attachment_11439" align="aligncenter" width="752"] Business owners and Developers working together[/caption] That's on of the reasons why I often have a hard time discussing business with developers working on a payroll for large companies. Part of them are not interested, nor involved with the actual business processes, or don't really care where do money come from. After all,… Continue Reading
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Why Does WordPress Fall Behind In Tech?

What I call a "Community Virus" is a fraction of a community that sets a bad example. You know, when you're a part of the society and there's a small (or larger) number of people doing bad stuff and are loud and annoying at the same time, and you tend to get embarrassed while shopping near them in the supermarket or at the airport. The Manifesto I was reading an email from Curtis with his manifesto - "NO is NOT a Curse Word" (definitely subscribe here and read it) and he's explaining his strategy for working with customers and valuing his services. It's a… Continue Reading
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WordPress Code Architecture and Maintenance

In my last post on WordPress services and pricing I've mentioned that I prefer to work on different assignments and avoid the "cloning" pattern - such as building standard 5-page business websites all the time, 20 times a month. Working and experimenting with different APIs, trying to bend a platform in a non-standard way, providing features that others were unable to implement before are the challenges that bring joy in my work. However, to be realistic in most projects, I need to rely on code snippets and patterns. I have a private GitHub repository with some of my previous projects, keeping… Continue Reading
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Techniques For Self-Taught Computer Programmers

I built my first site nearly 20 years ago and even then I was able to source quite a lot of information online. Even though most of my learning was a combination of reading IDE manuals (QBasic), downloading manuals and guides on a floppy disk from Internet cafes, and reprinting original books in multiple copies since these were extremely rare to find. Some engineers here have been coding for 40 years and faced a far more conservative ecosystem while still being able to produce code decades later. Studying programming now is a no-brainer. Between YouTube and Udemy tutorials, Coursera and FreeCodeCamp training programs, tons… Continue Reading