Best Good Practices
In episode 18 of the React Round Up podcast, Alex Moldovan articulates something I've been feeling lately, as I dive deeper into the modern JavaScript world.
Category Archives: Standards and Best Practices
Stop Breaking the Web
Reading Stop Breaking the Web by Nicolás Bevacqua's feels like a breath of fresh air.
He writes about how several common practices in the JavaScript community have led to poor user experiences, and violated some of the fundamental principles that made the Web what is today...
Polyfilling Responsive Images
Scott Jehl — one of the creators of Picturefill — wrote a thoughtful piece on the tradeoffs of polyfilling for responsive images.
Progressive Enhancement is Still Important
Jake Archibald makes a compelling case that progressive enhancement is still important, not because of users who’ve chosen to disable JavaScript, or because of outdated accessibility concerns, but because of graceful error handling and faster page rendering. He also dispels some myths, pointing out that building a progressively-enhanced application doesn’t have to require duplicating server-side logic and templating on the […]
Progressive Enhancement with Backbone.js
I’m mostly focusing on back-end development these days, so I’m a bit behind the curve on a lot of the recent front-end practices, but I’ve been playing around with Backbone.js a bit, and one of the things that’s been nagging me is the hard dependency on JavaScript for the core functionality of the site. Looking around for some […]
Is TDD Dead?
Is TDD Dead? is an insightful debate about the merits of test-driven development, and the pitfalls of following it dogmatically.
My favorite quote, from part 5: “Most people cannot just leave good ideas the fuck alone.”
WordPress.tv Developer Presentation Roundup
I’m one of the mentors for WordPress’ SupportPress project in this year’s Google Summer of Code, and I wanted to put together a list of WordPress.tv videos to help introduce Varun to the WordPress community and some development best practices. I figured it’d be good to save it for future reference, so I’m also posting […]
Hide PHP Warnings and Notices from Poorly Written Plugins
Update: Zack Tollman wrote a plugin called Ostrichize that does an even better job of this, so I’ve reverted my version out of my functionality plugin skeleton and will use his in the future. Pro tip: search for existing code before writing new code ;) * * * There are a lot of WordPress plugin and theme […]
WordCamp Dayton 2014 Slides
I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Dayton 2014 this Saturday about best practices for customizing WordPress plugins. If you’re attending and would like to follow along, you can check out the slides.
The Right Way to Customize a WordPress Plugin
Video: I presented on this topic at WordCamp Dayton 2014. It’s very common for developers to customize and extend existing plugins to fit their own needs, which is one of the great advantages of using open-source software. They often do it by making their changes directly to the plugin, though, which creates a security vulnerability […]
Video from MVC presentation at WordCamp Columbus 2013
The video from my presentation on the Model-View-Controller pattern at WordCamp Columbus 2013 is now available on WordPress.tv.
WordCamp Columbus 2013 Slides
I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Columbus 2013 this Saturday on implementing the Model-View-Controller pattern in plugins. If you’re attending and would like to follow along, you can check out the slides.
Notices are Errors
One of my big pet peeves with WP plugins and themes is that so many of them trigger PHP notices and warnings by failing to check if array indices exist before referencing them, or checking if a file exists before including it, etc. It may seem trivial, but even if you don’t care about the […]
Using Singletons in WordPress Plugins
Eric Mann and Mika Toppa have been creating a interesting conversation about the use of the Singleton pattern within WordPress plugins. Eric started it with his article in defense of the pattern, and then Mike wrote a thoughtful response. Both make compelling cases for their position, and both avoid the teenage dickery that often accompanies […]
Creating Object-Oriented WordPress Plugins That Implement MVC
I’ll be giving a presentation at the Seattle WordPress Developers Meetup tomorrow about how to write WordPress plugins that are both object-oriented, and implement the Model-View-Controller pattern.
If you plan on attending, you can follow along with the slides and download the lab files.
Designing Object-Oriented Plugins for a Procedural Application
Note: This was originally a post to the Seattle PHP Meetup mailing list, but I’m reproducing it here to generate a discussion about the topic with people outside the meetup. * * * * I write a lot plugins for WordPress, and I like to make them object-oriented, even though WordPress itself is mostly procedural. […]
(Well Organized) Options, Not Decisions
The “Decisions, not options” philosophy argues that giving users too many options can make tweaking a piece of software a difficult and frustrating experience. When a user wants to make a small change, and they find themselves presented with five pages of disorganized options, many will simply give up rather than wade through each one […]
Sharing Passwords Securely
It’s common for developers to share login credentials with clients and team members through e-mail or other insecure mediums, but there aren’t a lot firmly established best practices on how to do it properly. I came across a SuperUser thread yesterday that contains several good ideas, and decided to add one of my own as well.
Why Short URLs are Evil and You Should Never Use Them
Ok, so maybe that title was a bit of a hyperbole, but this is one of my biggest pet peeves on the Web right now. Joshua Schachter has a comprehensive analysis of the concept of Short URLs and the myriad problems associated with it, but the biggest one for me is the fact that the […]
Why “Click Here” is A Bad Practice
Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.