It’s a funny old world. Over the course of the past few years I’ve seen a lot of people take a step back from contributing to WordPress, and I never thought I would get there. But here I am, writing about taking exactly such a break. When I joined the WordPress community back in early… Continue reading Taking a break from my WordPress community activities
Author: Jonathan
WordPress Plugin Development Best Practices
This morning I presented a workshop at WordCamp Johannesburg. Here are the slides for that workshop Here is the GitHub repository If you want to see the updated plugin code, with the security fixes, you’ll need to switch to the feature/more-secure-plugin branch.
The Process of Writing
The general recommendation to becoming a better writer, is to write every day. Besides high school creative writing, I am mostly a self taught writer. I’ve never completed any official copy-writing courses, even though I have three purchased on Udemy from about 2 years ago. I generally don’t understand the finer details that would take… Continue reading The Process of Writing
The two worst things you can say to your freelancer.
I’ve been freelancing full time for just over three years now, having spent 10 years developing for either digital agencies or small to medium sized businesses, in various roles. In the 3+ years since I switched to freelance development, the two sentences that I’ve heard/read the most from clients, and the ones that illicit the… Continue reading The two worst things you can say to your freelancer.
A Quick Hack to Writing Testable Code
I’ll be the first to admit that I am fairly inexperienced in the practical application of unit testing, or any kind of automated testing. That’s not to say I don’t understand what these things are. I was first exposed to the concept of unit tests back in 2008 and automated browser testing in around 2012.… Continue reading A Quick Hack to Writing Testable Code
Unit Tests for your WordPress plugin using WP CLI and PHPUnit
Often when I write a blog post, part of the reason I write it is to document things that I tend to forget. This is one of those times. Requirements: PHPUnit: At the time of this writing, WordPress only supports the latest stable 7.x version of PHPUnit, and recommends installing it globally. wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-7.5.9.phar chmod… Continue reading Unit Tests for your WordPress plugin using WP CLI and PHPUnit
Travelling the web on the WordPress HTTP API
At WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, I was accepted to present a workshop, which was on the WordPress HTTP API. Unfortunately we had some WiFi issues, and not all the attendees were able to complete the workshop. Also, there were some folks who were not able to attend at all, due to the workshop being… Continue reading Travelling the web on the WordPress HTTP API
The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Today, I turned 42. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, specifically Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, you’ll understand both the importance of this number, and the reference in the title. I do think it’s sort of apt that the number 42 was used in this context. When I hit 40 I felt good… Continue reading The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Some news updates.
I don’t think I completed my year end review for 2018 or wrote a resolution post for 2019. However a bunch of things have happened so far this year, mostly in the past few months. As it’s almost exactly halfway through the year, I thought it might be cool to share them. As one door… Continue reading Some news updates.
Thoughts on Unit Testing
I’ve never been someone who understood the value of unit testing. During my programming studies, when I learned new languages like PHP or JavaScript, unit testing was never a topic that came up. The byproduct of a non university, tertiary education I guess? The first time I discovered unit tests was when I was working… Continue reading Thoughts on Unit Testing