Posts in Category: WordPress

WordCamp Nashville 2016: The promise and peril of Agile and Lean practices

Presenting "the promise and peril of Agile and Lean practices" at WordCamp Nashville 2016

Presenting “the promise and peril of Agile and Lean practices” at WordCamp Nashville 2016

I’ve spoken at WordCamp Nashville every year since it started in 2012, and it was an honor to be invited back again this year. In preparing my talk, I wanted to share my experiences, both good and bad, in bringing Lean and Agile practices to different organizations over the years. Adopting these practices can lead to enormous benefits in quality, customer satisfaction, and developer happiness. But they can also involve very painful transitions, they can go very wrong if not done carefully, and some practices don’t translate well to the world of consulting and freelance work. The challenge was to present all these considerations, in 40 minutes, which doesn’t really allow time to explain a whole lot about actual Agile and Lean practices! My goal was to explain just enough about Agile and Lean – what they have in common and how they are different – and give some real life examples of what to expect if you try them in various kinds of work environments. The audience had great questions for me and I got really good feedback after the talk, so it went well. Here are my slides (they’re also embedded below).

As always, the after-party was great. It was at The Family Wash this year, and I saw a lot of familiar faces. Nashville is starting to feel like a 2nd home.

Here are my slides:

WordCamp Nashville 2016: The promise and peril of Agile and Lean practices from mtoppa

There were a bunch of excellent talks this year. I especially enjoyed these two:

I also had time to do some exploring around Nashville. Since it wasn’t my first time there, I skipped most of the touristy stuff. I spent most of my time in the Germantown neighborhood, where the WordCamp was held this year. Here are some pictures:

Mike’s Talk on Dependency Injection for PHP

Mike Toppa speaking at Boston PHP

Mike Toppa speaking at Boston PHP

Yesterday at the Boston PHP meetup I gave a talk on Dependency Injection for PHP. It went really well and I got a bunch of great questions at the end.

Our speaker Mike Toppa will first review some key concepts for object oriented programming in PHP. He’ll then discuss the benefits of writing small classes, how to do class auto-loading, and explain how to get your objects working together through the use of an injection container. He’ll also cover more advanced techniques for managing multiple object dependencies, dynamic dependencies, and dependencies within dependencies.

For a preview of the talk, here’s a short interview I did with Matt Murphy, who is one of the Boston PHP organizers, and my slides are below the video.


Rails and WordPress, BostonRB and WordCamp Boston

I recently moved from Philadelphia to Boston, and my house is currently overflowing with half-unpacked boxes. Despite all the craziness of moving (or perhaps because of it…), I was a speaker at WordCamp Boston this past weekend, and also gave a lightning talk at the BostonRB Ruby meetup last week.

If you’ve followed our blog so far, you may have noticed we talk about both WordPress and Ruby on Rails. While it’s unusual to see a consultancy that develops in these two very different platforms, supporting both gives us the flexibility to choose the platform that best suits our clients’ needs. For applications that primarily need CMS (content management system) functionality, WordPress is a natural fit, while Rails is best suited for highly customized application development. Well known sites with a focus on content, such as The New York Times, CNN, Mashable and many others use WordPress. Twitter was originally developed on Rails, and sites such as Groupon, Bloomberg, Airbnb, and many others also use Rails.

Many consultancies will shoehorn the development of your web application into the one platform they happen to know, even if it’s not a good fit for your needs (this may not be a conscious decision on their part – if they only know one platform well, they may not have the perspective to know whether another platform might be a better choice). For example, WordPress’ Custom Post Types are great for situations where your data can be well represented in the relational database table structure on which WordPress is built, and using them can speed along the development process. But if they aren’t a good fit, then you will likely encounter poor performance when your traffic increases, or have to do custom database development work, which is a breeze in Rails but is awkward and inefficient to do in WordPress.

We also do extensive work in javascript. The ROI calculators we’ve created for Hobson & Co are written entirely in object-oriented javascript, using jQuery and HighCharts (javascript frameworks such as AngularJS or ember.js would have been overkill for this kind of project). Our latest calculator for Greenway Health is a good example.

Regardless of the platform, we take an Agile approach to our work. On the technical side, this means a relentless focus on quality, using object oriented design and test driven development (TDD). My lightning talk at the BostonRB meetup focused on an aspect of this: following the Law of Demeter in Rails application development. Check out my slides.

My WordCamp Boston talk was about the business side of the Agile development process, with a focus on how to build professional, long term partnerships with your clients. I’ve given this talk a few times now, and it’s been a lot of fun to have the opportunity to refine it and keep improving it (I also gave it at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference and WordCamp Nashville). The video is above, and you can check out my slides.

Here are some tweets from people at each of my talks:

Discontinuing WordPress plugin support

I posted a message in the WordPress.org support forums a couple months ago saying that I was temporarily discontinuing support for my Shashin plugin. I was single-parenting for over a month, and getting ready to move to Japan.

Unfortunately, I now need to say that I’m discontinuing development and support of my plugins for the foreseeable future. I’m living in Japan until the end of the year, working full time, studying Japanese, and enjoying the unique experience of being here with my family.

My work over the last couple years has involved an increasing amount of time with Ruby on Rails, and currently involves little WordPress work. Also, I never developed a business model for my plugins, which means I’ve spent many hundreds of hours over the years developing and supporting them for free. That’s not something I can continue doing.

I’ll keep the current versions available at wordpress.org and they are also available on github, if anyone wants to fork them and continue their development.

The WordPress community has been a fantastic place for me. Because of WordPress I’ve improved my technical skills, made friends, advanced my career, and had the privilege of giving 7 WordCamp presentations over the last few years. So this was not an easy decision. I hope that in the future I’ll have opportunities to contribute to the WordPress community again.

WordCamp Lancaster

Giving my talk at WordCamp LancasterGiving my talk at WordCamp Lancaster
Giving my talk at WordCamp Lancaster01-Mar-2014 15:11, HTC EVO, 2.0, 3.63mm, 0.05 sec, ISO 222
 

I’ve lived in the Philly area more than 10 years, and yesterday was my first time visiting Lancaster, because I finally had a good reason to go! I gave a presentation at WordCamp Lancaster. It was the first WordCamp in Lancaster, and had a single track, with web accessibility as the theme:

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

— Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

There were a bunch of great talks. I especially enjoyed Aaron Jorbin’s and David Kennedy’s:

My talk focused on the language aspects of accessibility, which entailed a discussion of internationalization, localization, and character sets. The title alone was a mouthful: “A11Y? I18N? L10N? UTF8? WTF? Understanding the connections between accessibility, internationalization, localization, and character sets” (slides are below). I managed to make people laugh while discussing character encoding, so I must have done something right.

I also enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and talk with George Stephanis
(@daljo628S), who organized the WordCamp, Scott González (@scott_gonzalez) the jQuery UI project lead, and catch up with Jason Coleman (‏@jason_coleman), Liam Dempsey ‏(@liamdempsey), and Eric (@ericandrewlewis).

WordCamp Lancaster also had one of the nicest designs for a WordCamp t-shirt that I’ve seen.

Here are my slides (if you view them on slidehsare.net you can see my notes as well), and hopefully the video will be up on WordPress.tv soon.

A11Y? I18N? L10N? UTF8? WTF? from mtoppa

Get some more coal, it’s time to fire up the old blog engine

I haven’t been blogging for ages – it’s time to fix that. Let’s start with a recap of last night.

The monthly philly.rb meetup at the Comcast Center: how good were the presentations? They were just as good as the view from our room on the 45th floor:

View from the 45th floor of the Comcast Center, where we had the philly.rb monthly meetupView from the 45th floor of the Comcast Center, where we had the philly.rb monthly meetup
View from the 45th floor of the Comcast Center, where we had the philly.rb monthly meetup11-Feb-2014 17:58, HTC EVO, 2.0, 3.63mm, 0.067 sec, ISO 1209
 

I got a lot out of Nate Olds’ talk, “Refactoring with a View.” A large part of my career has been spent wrestling with big, old, sprawling, messy codebases, so Nate’s real-life walk-through of his strategies for dealing with such challenges was very informative. Check out the February meetup page for more information.

Afterwards, a group of us went to Ladder 15 for beer, where we met up with Maria. She stoically suffered through several minutes of extremely nerdy conversion, before she and I headed to the Boot & Saddle, for a rare evening out without the boys, to see one of Maria’s favorite bands, Cibo Matto. It was a sold out show, and we ended up stuck near the back, but it was still a good time. I tried to take a couple videos, but they didn’t come out. A good introduction to their utterly goofy side is the song Sci Fi Wasabi (I’m Miho Hatori, straight out of purgatory), and their split-screen video for Sugar Water, with one side portraying the visual story in reverse, is quite clever (the ending is in the middle).

I’m presenting at the WordPress ‘Burbs meetup next Monday on Kanban. And on March 1 I’m presenting at WordCamp Lancaster: A11Y? I18N? L10N? UTF8? WTF? Understanding the connections between accessibility, internationalization, localization, and character sets.

Shashin 3.4: responsive design and social sharing

Shashin 3.4 is now available for download at wordpress.org. It has great new features for sharing your photos, and for responsive design (so your pictures will look good on any size display). Check out Post to Post Links II error: No post found with slug "shashin-3-development-progress" to see it in action.

Important upgrade notes:

  • This version of Shashin comes with a customized version of prettyPhoto. On the Shashin settings page, you will want to pick prettyPhoto as your viewer to take full advantage of the new responsive design and social sharing features.
  • If you customized your Shashin stylesheet (shashin.css) in a previous version and placed it in your theme folder, you will need to update it to incorporate the latest changes in the new version.

New features:

  • Sharing: you can now share a link that will take you directly to any Shashin photo on your site, and automatically open it in prettyPhoto. The sharing links appear below the caption in prettyPhoto.
  • Mobile display of slideshows: I’ve customized the version of prettyPhoto that comes with Shashin to improve its display on mobile devices (if you are using Fancybox, I’ve disabled it on mobile displays, as it simply doesn’t work very well on them).
  • Two thumbnail design options to choose from: one is almost exactly the same as the design Shashin has always used – showing the captions underneath the thumbnails and putting a border around each thumbnail. The other design gives the thumbnails rounded corners, a slight box shadow, no borders, and puts the captions in an overlay along the bottom of the thumbnails. Long captions are truncated, to prevent them from covering the entire thumbnail. You can specify which design you want on the Shashin settings page.
  • Responsive design for thumbnail layouts: Shashin will resize and rearrange thumbnails to best match the available space on the page. The final result for a given layout depends on several factors. Let’s say you want to display 3 thumbnails in a single row. If you enter “3” for the columns in your Shashin shortcode, Shashin will try to give you 3 columns. How many you actually get depends on how big the thumbnails are, and how wide the content area is. If the content area isn’t wide enough to accommodate the thumbnails at their full size, Shashin will scale down the thumbnails to about 90% of their actual size to maintain the 3 column layout. After that, it will let the columns start to “wrap,” so the thumbnails don’t shrink too much (that is, the number of columns will go down). If you gradually narrow and then widen your browser window you can see Shashin re-arranging and scaling its thumbnails on the fly.

Implementing responsive design for Shashin was a real challenge. This is because the traditional tools for responsive design – media queries – are not helpful with Shashin. Since Shashin is a WordPress plugin that needs to work in any theme, I couldn’t make any assumptions about the page layout. So basing layout decisions on the display width of the viewing device or the browser window is not helpful. What I need to know is the current width of the HTML element Shashin happens to appear in, which could be anything. So I implemented Shashin’s responsive design with a mix of CSS and jQuery.

Please post any support questions in the wordpress.org support forum for Shashin, not here.

Shashin 3.4 Beta: please help test

The beta version of Shashin 3.4 is ready. It has a lot of front-end design changes, which means its needs testing in a variety of browsers. So if you’re comfortable installing WordPress plugins manually, please download the beta version from GitHub and give it a try (important note: rename the folder after you unzip it to “shashin”). It especially needs testing in everyone’s favorite browser, Internet Explorer. Note since this isn’t a normal upgrade through the wordpress.org repository, you will need to deactivate and re-activate Shashin to update its settings.

The biggest new feature is responsive design. This was quite a challenge: since Shashin is a plugin that should work with any theme, the thumbnails it displays need to be responsive to their containing element (the <div> containing a post). This means I can’t just rely on media queries, as they require knowledge of the entire theme layout. So the first thing to note is that if your theme isn’t responsive, Shashin won’t be either. If your theme is responsive, Shashin thumbnails will shrink as the available width decreases. I also tried to find a happy medium for honoring the number of columns you specify for displaying your thumbnails. The rule I’m applying is this: if the thumbnails shrink to less than 80% of their intended size, then the columns will “float”, meaning that the number of columns will go down as the page gets narrower. Also, Shashin detects browser resizing, so you can expand and contract the width of your browser to see how Shashin responds.

Captions now overlay the bottom of the thumbnails, instead of appearing below them. A rule I’ve applied to displaying captions is that they will not appear if they would cover more than 30% of the image.

I’ve improved the browsing experience when you are paging through albums that contain a large number of photos. The “previous” and “next” links will scroll you to the top of the next thumbnail set as you page through them. I’ve added the navigation controls to the bottom as well, which several people have requested.

There are various other updates as well. The complete list is in the Change Log in the readme file.

Please use the comments section on this post for any feedback.

WordCamp Nashville 2013

Update: here is the wordpress.tv recording of my talk. It spent several months featured on the wordpress.tv homepage:



A Minnie Pearl poster from 1944, at the Station InnA Minnie Pearl poster from 1944, at the Station Inn
A Minnie Pearl poster from 1944, at the Station Inn20-Apr-2013 09:45, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 4.5, 9.584mm, 0.125 sec, ISO 1600
Eric Brace and Peter Cooper at the Station InnEric Brace and Peter Cooper at the Station Inn
Eric Brace and Peter Cooper at the Station Inn20-Apr-2013 10:14, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.1 sec, ISO 1600
Video: a clip of Eric Brace and Peter Cooper playing "Nobody Knows" at the Station InnVideo: a clip of Eric Brace and Peter Cooper playing "Nobody Knows" at the Station Inn
Video: a clip of Eric Brace and Peter Cooper playing "Nobody Knows" at the Station Inn20-Apr-2013 18:44
 
Nashville's life-size replica of the ParthenonNashville's life-size replica of the Parthenon
Nashville's life-size replica of the Parthenon22-Apr-2013 02:21, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 125
Spring in NashvilleSpring in Nashville
Spring in Nashville22-Apr-2013 02:42, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 8.0, 4.3mm, 0.003 sec, ISO 200
Mike Toppa presenting "Clean Code" at WordCamp Nashville 2013Mike Toppa presenting "Clean Code" at WordCamp Nashville 2013
Mike Toppa presenting "Clean Code" at WordCamp Nashville 201320-Apr-2013 11:18, NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D7000, 5.6, 68.0mm, 0.017 sec, ISO 400
 

Spring is conference season, and I’ve given four presentations in the past four weeks: two in Philadelphia, one in Nashville, and one in Washington DC. Each presentation was different, and I did most of the preparation outside of my regular work hours, so I’m looking forward to not doing any more presentations for a while 😉

I already wrote about the first presentation – Knowledge Slam, and a few days after that I headed to Nashville for their 2nd annual WordCamp. I also presented at the first one last year, which was my first time in Nashville. For both trips I was there for only a couple days, but I was able to get out and see some of the city each time, and I have to say it’s a great place. It’s a small, clean city, with very friendly people, and has culture and arts you’d normally find only in a bigger city… as long as you like country music.

My friend Caryn from grad school lives there now, and after I arrived Friday evening, I headed to the Station Inn to meet her, and see a show by Eric Brace and Peter Cooper. I’d never heard of them before, but Caryn was a fan, and after hearing the first song, so was I. Here’s a version of that song – “Ancient History” – that they recorded for Couch by Couchwest:

…If you liked that, I recommend the album.

The WordCamp was great. It had 3 tracks scheduled – one for beginners, one for users, and one for developers (a 4th was actually added on the fly, to accommodate the variety of skill levels in the beginner track). I spent the day in the developers’ track. Something I was excited to see in several of the presentations was a wider focus, showing WordPress as part of a broader ecosystem of development tools, as opposed to being the only tool in a developer’s toolkit. This came across especially in the talk about using WordPress in an enterprise software environment (unfortunately there is no information about this talk online), and Nathaniel Schweinberg’s talk on debugging strategies (many of which apply beyond WordPress).

My Clean Code talk was scheduled between those two, which was perfect, as the 10 techniques I presented are ones which you can apply to any software development project, not just WordPress. My talk went really well, with lots of good questions at the end. We even went over our scheduled time (normally that’s not allowed, but I was right before lunch, so it didn’t take away from anyone else’s speaking time). Here are some of the tweets people made during my talk:

Tweets about the "Clean Code" presentation at WordCamp Nashville 2013
Tweets about the "Clean Code" presentation at WordCamp Nashville 201311-May-2013 16:31
 

Right before I came to Nashville, we finished working on the WordPress plugin for the ElectNext Political Profiler, so I took the opportunity to debut it at the start of my talk. The plugin relies on PHP in the WordPress plugin, and 3rd party javascript to dynamically inject into the WordPress site the political profiles generated by a Ruby on Rails application running on the ElectNext servers. It’s actually a great example of the importance of having clean and consistent coding practices across platforms (otherwise such a project would quickly become a nightmare to maintain).

Here are my slides, as well as the recording of my talk I made with my Flip camera (a professionally recorded version should be available on wordpress.tv sometime in the next few weeks is now on wordpress.tv)

WordCamp Nashville: Clean Code for WordPress from mtoppa

WordPress: community and architecture

In his recent post The Dire State of WordPress, James Shakespeare predicted doom for WordPress if it doesn’t undergo radical architectural change. Henri Bergius followed up with a similar argument in Why WordPress needs to get Decoupled. I appreciate where they are coming from: I can say without hyperbole that Bob Martin’s book Clean Code changed my life (I even had him sign it for me), but as a WordPress developer, I can also say the approach they’re taking is counter-productive.

Bergius advocates rewriting WordPress into multiple, separate software components, and Shakespeare calls for “…a fundamental rethink of the entire platform. We’re talking thousands of man-hours for no direct financial reward… But this doesn’t mean it couldn’t or shouldn’t be attempted.”

There are three big problems with thinking about it this way:

  1. Chasing the “grand rewrite in the sky” is typically a recipe for disaster. Being aware of this is a tenant of the Agile approach, where “the boy scout rule” is preferred (leave the code better than you found it, by making continuous incremental improvements). Here’s Bob Martin describing what happens when you have a team still maintaining the old code on a project (since you can’t just abruptly abandon it), and a “tiger team” working at the same time on the grand re-write:

    Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Not only that, they have to keep up with the changes that are continuously being made to the old system. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does. This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.

  2. Check out Yoast’s infographic on WordPress’ popularity: 72.4 million sites running WordPress, and 20-25% of all new websites are using WordPress. There are over 19,000 plugins in the wordpress.org repository and over 1,700 themes (with probably thousands more not in the repository). With that kind of user base, backwards compatibility and stability take precedence over everything else. Therefore, architectural change must be gradual, low-risk, and backwards compatible.
  3. When you’re not actively involved with WordPress, and you’re telling people who live and breathe WordPress development that what they’re doing is awful, it’s hard for that to not come across as antagonistic, and therefore be unproductive. There is a huge community of developers and designers who make their living coding for WordPress, and really enjoy it. While feedback and guidance from outside the community can and should be welcome, one-off prognostications of doom at some vague point in the future are likely to be met with a shrug.

Having said all that, there are some things they’re right about, and there are a couple practical steps forward I’d like to recommend:

  1. Bergius observes that he doesn’t see WordPress developers at non-WordPress conferences, and relates a similar observation from Symfony activist Lukas Smith. This fits my experience as well. I see a very real gap between the WordPress development community and the mainstream object-oriented coding community. The WordPress community is big enough that it can get away with being insular – probably every major city in the US (not to mention the rest of the world) has a WordPress meetup group and an annual WordCamp. I’ve spoken at several WordCamps, and a common reaction to my talks is that people are intrigued, and sometimes mystified, that my talks are about various aspects of how to shoe-horn object oriented design into WordPress plugins. I also attend the Philadelphia ETE conference every year, which is the annual tech event in Philadelphia, and I’ve attended various Agile conferences in other parts of the country. Developers in Java, Ruby, C++, JavScript, Scala – you name it – they’re all there, attending each others’ sessions and learning from each other. I’m a gregarious guy, and I have yet to meet another WordPress developer at any of them.

    I can’t speak for other cities, but Philadelphia has meetups for PHP, DevOps, JavaScript, blogging – you name it. There are well over 100 different tech meetup groups in the greater Philadelphia region. And there is interaction between groups, such as the annual RedSnake Philly event that brings together the local Ruby and Python communities. The WordPress meetups are fantastic, but if you’re a WordPress developer, consider getting involved in the broader community. There’s lots of good stuff out there!

  2. One of the reasons WordPress is so successful is that it’s such a great platform for hacking. You don’t need a degree in computer science or years of experience to get started with it, and once you learn some basic techniques and WordPress best practices, you can be productive and successful with it. So even if a huge rewrite was a practical idea, it would be a really bad idea to introduce an architecture with many layers and abstractions, as it would make the barriers to entry too high (and if someone wants to use a full fledged web development framework, then they can use a framework – WordPress doesn’t need to become one).

    However, I strongly feel that the WordPress architecture needs to become more open to modern object-oriented design practices. In my previous position at the University of Pennsylvania, I hired many developers, and interviewed some who primarily had WordPress experience, and it did not prepare them well for working outside of WordPress. They had acquired habits they needed to un-learn. I’m talking about routinely using global variables; using classes only as giant buckets of vaguely related functions; using constructors for more than just initialization; etc. As far as I know, these are design practices you really don’t see anymore in well-established development environments, except WordPress.

    The WordPress architecture forces awkward design choices for developers trying to take an object oriented approach. It drives them to use Singletons to deal with all the global state (a choice I can understand but disagree with). It requires a laborious setup to do automated testing (and even after you set it all up, you still can’t do unit testing – you’re doing integration testing). In general, it forces a style of development that is very particular to WordPress, as opposed to an architecture independent style that can be commonly applied to other modern development environments.

    The complaint that learning object oriented design is too hard or not worth the trouble doesn’t make sense to me. WordPress developers learn all kinds of arcane and complex practices to be successful with it. Why not instead make WordPress more compatible with mainstream development practices? Then learning those practices will allow you to be successful with more than just WordPress.

    I understand how and why WordPress evolved the way it did, but I haven’t yet heard a compelling reason why the approach taken to its architecture should forever remain apart from the practices of the mainstream development community. Backwards compatibility can be provided while gradually shifting the organization of the core code.

    The key step that needs to be taken is providing better encapsulation. Here’s a simple example in PHP for moving away from globals but still providing backwards compatibility (more than just that would be needed to getting a handle on all of WordPress’ globals, but with some planning it should be feasible). For hook and filter functions, they could become thin wrappers for instance methods (through the use of an injection container you can avoid unneccessary re-instantiation of objects). Doing these two things would provide backwards compatibility (so nothing breaks, and hackers can still hack), and at the same time would open the door to decoupling, real unit testing, and object-oriented design (without needing to argue about Singletons).

The WordPress community is big and vibrant. Philly WordCamp 2011 was the first WordCamp I attended, and I was thrilled by all the energy and enthusiasm. But from what I can see, WordPress has isolated itself, both as a community and as a web development environment. I don’t see a benefit for anyone in perpetuating this situation, and I see lots of potential benefits for WordPress joining the mainstream development community.

I’m speaking at WordCamp Nashville in a few weeks, where I’ll touch on some of these topics, and I’m happy to discuss this further with anyone interested.