Month: April 2018

wpplugincheck – in-depth reviews of WordPress plugins

My WordPress radar noticed a new website – wpplugincheck.  This website provides in-depth reviews of WordPress plugins.  I’ve checked a few of those and they seem solid – honest and to the point.

There’s a gadzillion of websites online that review WordPress plugins (occasionally including even my own blog), but most of those either get too commercial with sponsored posts, or turn into collections of “5 best of this” and “7 awesome of this”.  I hope the site continues and gets into a routine of publishing reviews of the new and updated plugins, especially focusing on the areas where there are a lot of choices, or not enough.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate – a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress Plugins

WordPress is an excellent system for a whole lot of different projects and needs.  It’s widely used, fast, and flexible.  However it does show its age in many ways.  One of the areas where things could be a lot better and simpler is the WordPress plugin development.

WordPress plugins are still non-trivial to develop.  This is mostly because WordPress is behind the current technology in many ways: new features of PHP programming language, such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), namespaces, dependency management with composer, unit testing, etc.   There are good reasons for this, but those don’t help WordPress plugin developers.

What does help is, for example, this WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, which is a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress plugins.  Using it still requires a bit of effort and dumb find-replace changes.  But it saves a tonne of time, as well as trial and error, especially for those people who are working on their first or second WordPress plugin.

Parsing: a timeline

“Parsing: a timeline” is a historical timeline of parsing, as done by computers and computer programming languages.  It starts well before computers were actually invented, from the time where people started thinking about what is a language, what it consists of and how it works.

Even though this article is mostly aimed at technical people, I’m sure pretty much anyone will find interesting bits in there, as some of the names and works mentioned are well known outside of technical industries.  For techies, you’ll find all your favorite names in there – Markov, Turing, Boehm, Chomsky, Knuth, Dijkstra, Wall, and more.

The deepest reason why modern JavaScript frameworks exist

“The deepest reason why modern JavaScript frameworks exist” is a nice article looking at the crazy world of JavaScript frameworks and exploring why things are how they are.  The conclusions from the article are:

  • The main problem modern JavaScript frameworks solve is keeping the UI in sync with the state.
  • It is not possible to write complex, efficient and easy to maintain UIs with Vanilla JavaScript.
  • Web components do not provide a solution to this problem.
  • It’s not that hard to make your own framework using an existing Virtual DOM library. But I’m not suggesting you to do that!

Read the whole thing for some examples and explanations.