Category: WordPress

Categories
WordPress

The Role of Developers in the WordPress Community

Earlier this week, influential British designer Sazzy wrote a blog post entitled The Elephant In The Room about the depressing state of freelance web design. While not directly related, her post got me thinking about the current plight of the back-end developer inside the WordPress universe.

Over the past 3 or 4 years I’ve focused my work around custom WordPress development. In that time, in spite of (or maybe because of) WordPress’ meteoric rise to popularity, I’ve found interesting backend development work in WordPress to have almost completely dried up.

I believe this is largely because WordPress is mature, stable and has little need for serious back-end developers.

Core Contributions

Earlier this year, I took it upon myself to get a patch into WordPress core. I logged into the WordPress slack daily, watched conversations and dug around TRAC to find something I could contribute back to the community.

In doing so, I came to learn that the core contribution team seems to be a well defined clique of developer who have been there a long time. Breaking into the little club is not easy. Based on my digging around in TRAC is looks like most feature requests are met with bureaucracy and bickering, as tends to happen in nerd forums. More serious issues are already adequately handled by long-time core contributions. The slack conversations are dominated by a few voices who really know what they’re talking about.

Don’t get my wrong, the core contribution community is not unfriendly and none of the things I encountered are bad, per se. I simply got the impression that there’s little room and little need for the average developer in the core contribution team. WordPress is mature and stable, so is the development team.

Plugins

Simply put, most common and many uncommon features/problems/use-cases have been solved by well-established, mature, stable plugins. Most of the more popular plugins are supported by businesses that have sprouted up around them. Not only that, but Automattic seems to be spending even more resources developing plugins — as saw just this week with their AMP plugin.

A few years ago it might have been possible to start a cottage business surrounding a custom developed plugin that solves a popular problem. Something you could implement on all your development client’s sites, while selling support or premium services to the general public.

Today, those unsolved problems are few and far between.

Themes

The theme marketplace is bananas. There… are… just… so… many… themes and a lot of them are technically quite bad. But all that clients need are pretty pictures, slick demos and a low price point. It’s very difficult to sell the average mom & pop on the merits of a custom designed theme. To be honest, a lot of the time there is little value to be gained.

At the end of the day, custom themes are a non-starter for a large portion of the potential clients-base that the average freelance developer could expect to encounter. There are certainly cases where a custom template could be part of an overall design/branding strategy or something to that affect.

WordPress as a CMS

WordPress has always been and still is a bad choice as a general purpose CMS. But that’s a post for another day.

So, what’s left?

In my experience over the past couple of years, there are two related roles being filled by professionals who make their living in the WordPress universe.

The Expert

The WordPress Expert is someone who stays up-to-date with WordPress. They know about key features in the latest release; they maintain a personal list of goto plugins to solve various problems; they have preferred theme vendors and know how to spot a bad theme just by looking at it and they’re just really good at using WordPress.

The WordPress Expert can set you up with a website from start to finish, without ever touching a line of CSS or a PHP template. They act as a liaison between a clue-less client and the confusing world of websites. They can troubleshoot most issues, if not, they’ll know who to call.

The Customizer

The WordPress Customizer has all the skills and knowledge of The Expert and on top of they are usually a skilled front-end developer, with some basic back-end knowledge. They know what a child-theme is and aren’t afraid to use one.

When an off-the-shelf template doesn’t quite fit a client’s needs, the client will end up hiring a Customizer. The Customizer is able to wrangle the theme, bending it to meet he needs and wishes of a particular client.

At the end of the day, this type of customization can often be hard to maintain. Being a good customizer is not always an easy task. But The WordPress Customizer can be a reasonable solution to provide budget conscious clients a more customized website.

 

Over the years, my roll has morphed into that of a customizer. I enjoy the work, but it doesn’t really scratch my programmer itch. Calling it “web development” seems like a stretch.

 

Categories
Apps Web Development WordPress

TeeVee for WP: building Apple TV apps with WordPress Plugins

Imagine you create tonnes of great video content every day and publish it all through WordPress. Your viewer can watch your amazing shows everywhere…on iPhones, iPads, iMacs, but not their TVs. Wouldn’t it be great to have a branded Apple TV app so that all your viewers could watch your content in full screen glory? Well I’ve got just the WordPress plugin for you…

Behold, TeeVee for WP!

A straightforward WordPress plugin I created to allow content creators to use WordPress as a data source Apple TV apps. TeeVee for WP attaches video metadata to blog posts. The metadata is used to to generate TVML ((TVML is this cool little XML apple created for basic layout – check out Apple’s documentation for more information.)) which gets ingested by a custom/branded TvOS app.

Screenshot 2015-12-06 21.01.03

—
On the xCode end you simply create a new TvOS single-view application, with an AppDelegate that looks something like this:

Modify the `TVDomain` to point the domain where TeeVee for WP is install and the rest is show business.

—

The project is up on github here: https://github.com/ohryan/teevee.

Contributions would be much appreciated.

If you have any questions or suggestions hit me up on twitter at @ohryan or email me [email protected].

Categories
Tips & How To's WordPress

Using Jetpack’s Photon CDN to host images in custom WordPress themes

Photon is a great free image CDN that you can use with any self-hosted WordPress install via Automattic’s Jetpack suite of plugins. Photon uses wordpress.com’s infrastructure to host your site’s images on one of the fastest CDN globally.

I highly recommend enabling it on every WordPress install. If your site is on cheap shared hosting, it will dramatically improve page load times. If you’re hosting a huge news site, it’ll save you loads of money.

By default, Photon automagically serves any images embedded in or attached to a WordPress post or page. Including feature images, galleries, third-party sliders. Due to the nature of WordPress hooks and filters, it’s not possible for photon to grab images stored in post meta fields, or any images that are part of theme template files.

I’ve written a gist that exposes Photon’s CDN wrapper as a simple function you can call in templates:

Relevant Jetpack documentation. 

Categories
WordPress

Historian for WP

Today I relaunched my WordPress plugin (RetroPosts) with the more descriptive title: “Historian” and a pretty major feature, a sidebar widget!

Historian is a plugin that gives you a glimpse into the past by surfacing your blog post’s from this week in history. I’ve been blogging on ohryan.ca for 7 years and every time I look at the plugin, I am reminded about a cool thing from the past. It’s really interesting to see of far the internet has come since I started this blog.

For example, I couldn’t believe how terribad the first version of Instapaper was? I found this by reading one of my old posts. Based on the techcrunch post this was considered great app design back in 2008. Unbelievable.

When I originally came up with the idea for Historian, I had thought it would just be a useful way to gain some inspiration from the past or follow up on a topic I hadn’t covered in a while.

In reality, I think it could be really cool to let your visitors see what you’ve written in the past. I think it can add some credibility to your blog if you once were a more prolific blogger than you are today.

You can see my historian in my sidebar right now.

Try it out yourself on your blog →

Categories
Tips & How To's Web Development WordPress

How To: Tweak Disqus CSS for Twenty Fifteen Theme

After installing the twenty fifteen theme I found that disqus’ comments were butting up against the edges of the layout.

You can fix this by adding the following Custom CSS

 

@media screen and (min-width: 59.6875em) {
	#disqus_thread {
		margin-top: 8.333%;
		margin-left: 8.333%;
		margin-right: 8.333%;
	}
}

@media screen and (min-width: 38.75em) {
	#disqus_thread {
		margin-top: 7.6923%;
		margin-left: 7.6923%;
		margin-right: 7.6923%;
	}
}