Category: WordPress

Last update on

The “Work For Myself” Myth

There is a common myth that working as a freelancer, consultant or a company owner means "working for myself". In my opinion that's often a wrong perspective for people who are tired of working the wrong jobs for the wrong managers, trying to find an escape from this by running their own business and finding the holy grail. Let's revise several work scenarios in the WordPress development world. Junior developer - managed by the other devs in the team, fully dependent on everyone else Senior developer - with a team leader or a software architect laying out the foundations of the project,… Continue Reading
Last update on

Reply: Handling WordPress Project Management And Sales (Video)

One of the members in my Mentorship Group group has asked me a few strategic questions regarding the way we do business at DevriX. I'm trying to cover different areas related to running a business, handling marketing activities, becoming a better developer and solving business problems. This time I've decided to record a video since the questions would have taken a good chunk of time to write down and sum up as compared to a 13min video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5S_qlIssGo Here are the 5 questions I've covered in my video: How do you manage multiple client requests in a limited… Continue Reading
Last update on

My MVC Experiment for WordPress Plugins

I spent a few days last week working on a new plugin, trying to approach it from different angles and test a few development flows in a way that would possibly change the way I work. One of my experiments was related to building an MVC plugin for WordPress - and I failed to do that in a way that satisfies me. tl;dr - there are ways to build MVC plugins on the top of WordPress, some people do that, it didn't seem natural to me even if I like MVC a lot. Why MVC? Even if some developers, architects… Continue Reading
Last update on

Plugins Scalability

Recently, I've been thinking about the state of plugins. In my previous post I've mentioned the free and premium plugins, and additionally I could split them in other categories, such as: small and large, self-contained and extensible, user-oriented and developer-related, optimized and non-optimized. I could go further with secure/insecure and everything, but that's another story. I'd also like to cover the aspect of user-oriented plugins vs. developer helpers, which is a separate topic. Scalability According to Wikipedia: In electronics (including hardware, communication and software), scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in… Continue Reading
Last update on

DX Share Selection – Fork

I have that habit of selecting text snippets while I read (like adding breakpoints every few lines), but still I find it quite helpful when I can share a given snippet in an article by selecting it and sharing it through a popup. I found the WP Selected Text Sharer in the repo and it looks pretty close to what I need, however it hasn't been maintained for a while (more than 3 years). I have contacted the plugin author and he mentioned that he'd like to rewrite it one day, so I forked it into a simplified version with few… Continue Reading
Last update on

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

My talk at WordCamp Sofia two weeks ago was related to choosing the right WordPress theme. Slides are available here. The gist of the talk was making users cautious about their WordPress sites and managing their stack properly, especially in the WordPress context. I find it quite common for users to browse for random, free hacked themes and get their servers attacked from the inside, or becoming a part of a botnet. That is one of the reasons why I'm quite sensitive when it comes to the WPTRT work. Users choose from several options for picking a theme for their… Continue Reading
Last update on

5 WordPress Contribution Tips Learned from Scribu

If you have used WordPress for at least a few months, you have probably used a plugin by scribu or at least heard a discussion over one of the tools or plugins he is involved with. Recently Cristi (scribu) announced his "retirement" from the WordPress industry and he's currently involved in just a few projects, mostly WP-CLI (which involves mostly some custom PHP, server-related tasks and playing with cool stuff such as Travis, Composer, Behat). However, I've been monitoring his work on the WordPress Core and his plugins over the Trac/support forums/GitHub and I am happy to outline my top 5… Continue Reading
Last update on

Contributing Together

Recently I've been spending a lot of time poking others' projects. Since I have more time than I had while working full-time for an employer, I'm polishing more of my snippets and I've been busy with small enhancements that couldn't find a place in my long list before. Additionally, I find myself sending more pull request than before and requesting from plugin authors to clone their WordPress.org project to GitHub as well for collaboration: https://twitter.com/no_fear_inc/status/377052160518672384 As a developer, I'm tempted by reinventing the wheel and releasing something on my own. But I try to be practical and I often browse… Continue Reading
Last update on

WordPress IRC Chats Schedule

Since I tend to forget when most WordPress dev chats are or pick wrong time zones instead, I set up a small weekly schedule with weekly IRC chats: http://devwp.eu/chats/ I got the schedules from the Make blogs and listed them with custom post type entries in a calendar. The handy thing is that one can control the timezone listing with a UTC-relative GET argument (also, few time zones are listed at the top of the calendar that switch that automatically). For example, what I use in Bulgaria is http://devwp.eu/chats/?utc=+3 which triggers the events shifted towards my timing instead of UTC. Even though I… Continue Reading
Last update on

DX Plugin Base v1.3 with AJAX

Earlier today I pushed an update to my skeleton plugin builder - DX Plugin Base. The plugin is meant to be used as a base for creating new plugins, you can either copy-paste it and just delete and replace what needs to be changed (that's what the author of the Metwit Weather Widget did) or just use specific functions to create post types, meta boxes or anything like that in new plugins without having to browse again in Codex or old projects for "how exactly did I write that the last time". The new enhancements in version 1.3 are AJAX… Continue Reading