Getting Access to Raw, Layered Design Files

Every once in awhile I run into a situation where a graphic designer refuses to share copies of the original layered art they created with others working on the project, or with the client. This has never really made any sense to me, because as a developer, I always give the client the raw source […]

Negativity and Meanness in Online Communities

Here’s a thoughtful and insightful post by Jen Mylo on negativity and meanness in online communities.

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.

Grandchild Themes in WordPress

It’s not possible to create grandchild themes in the same way that you create child themes, but you can use a plugin to dequeue/enqueue stylesheets and scripts, and also override the locations of the main query templates.

It’s obviously not the ideal solution, but there are cases where it may be the least-bad one.