10 Mistakes you could avoid in wordpress plugin development
Even the best idea can be made useless if the implementation isn’t up to standard. I’ve learnt how to make plugins mainly by opening the code of other people in trying to understand it.
After a few month of development I can see the differences between good and bad code. Like in graphic design, the details in coding are important too. Even if all the plugins I have tested were working fine most of them could have used a rewrite, so here are a few things I think one shouldn’t do when developing a plugin.
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New Poll: How do you start your WordPress plugins development projects?
My present work involve working with WordPress a lot and one good thing about Wp is how easy it is to extend it using plugins. Even without any programming knowledge one should manage to install pretty much any plugin from the repository. But what if you don’t find the plugin you need to do the job?
I think every WordPress developer should learn how to write plugins:
- It saves time on the long run, no more core hack, just write what you need in a plugin.
- You can re use a plugin very easily on other projects, just copy paste the folder and activate
- It’s insanely rewarding when you get you plugin to work :p
- You can get WordPress to do anything with plugins, and I mean it, anything.
Because I’ve been writing plugins for the past month or so I wanted to get some feedback from other people on how they start writing their plugins.
So if you can spare a sec and vote on the poll on the right hand side that’d be much appreciated.
I will also write a post on things I think people should know before starting to right a plugin because to learn my way around all the hooks and action I’ve looked at many plugins from the repository. And they are not all written in the same standard if you see what I mean…
Import Data from any database into WordPress
I recently had to find a way to import hundreds of pages into a WordPress site from a Access database. I considered two solutions: query the Access db and insert the data into WordPress or query the Access db and write an xml file that would match a WordPress export.
I went for the second option because there are some database stuff I am yet not too sure about and I was afraid I would get corrupted data.
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Apache Benchmark, WordPress framework, time = ?
After my article on WordPress framework I gave some of them a try and developed sites with Hybrid, Thematic and Sandbox.
I am a bit funny when it comes to performance and I was bothered about all those functions I was not using and all those files php had to include compared to the default theme. So I did a quick benchmarking of all those framework using apache built in benchmark tool. Continue reading “Apache Benchmark, WordPress framework, time = ?”
Web design trend, 3D Ribbon
You may have seen them appearing here and there. I couldn’t find any better name and no one seems to talk about this so I’ve made my own denomination: the 3D Ribbon.
Sometimes used has title background or as full container background they’ve appeared over the last few month, maybe late last year. Some big sites have use them in their design. The “3D” effect brakes the flat surface of the page and gives some depth to the content. Continue reading “Web design trend, 3D Ribbon”
New blog theme, half way there
Here it is! The new theme for the blog is live. Ok, nothing revolutionary with it, just a style that matches the hompage. But still, I am quite happy to roll out a new design.
So as I mentioned before, this theme is developed on the Hybrid framework, using the child theme feature from WordPress 2.7. Although I find it usefull there are still things I need to learn. Like how the hell do I overwritte a library file from Hybrid. Because so far no luck, all the changes made to those file have been made in the framework itself, which doesn’t sounds right to me.
I’ve discovered a few very nice features in Hybrid. Like how it enhance the default widgets to give you more control over the content. Or how easy it is to insert widgets pretty much everywhere in the page.
Still work to do though, but it’s the best part: the details =).