Developing for WordPress with Andrew Nacin

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This show was posted a bit late due to a miscommunication, we’re sorry about that.

This week we are joined by Andrew Nacin. Andrew is one of the WordPress core developers and a member of the commit team, he also works as an independent WordPress consultant and, as he aptly describes his daily activities; “I wrangle contributions, develop new features, and try to fix more bugs than I create”. Andrew became instrumental in the development of WordPress in an astonishingly short space of time. Within 11 months to be precise, and in this week’s show we kick things off by asking him how.

• Andrew talks about what being a core developer involves on a day-to-day basis.
• We discuss the inner workings of multi-site, how you can utilise it, and what the future may bring from its inclusion in core.
• Andrew tells us all about the 3 major features he has been working on recently, blowing away some of the smoke surrounding custom meta data capability handling, custom post types, and improved in menu handling.
• We discuss how far away WordPress 3.1 is, and what changes we can look forward to seeing
• We tackle the debate on whether hosting companies are on top of what their actual deliverables are to customers – do they need to innovate faster than they have?
• We get down to the practicalities of performance and security and ask Andrew why the versions of software that run on your computer are important. What is the significance of these versions and what do they matter?
• How comfortable should users be with upgrading and/or switching host companies?
• Some quick tips and tricks for the developers out there – Andrew talks about leveraging API’s. Last week he held a talk on WordPress API’s which will be available on WordPress.tv soon.
• Andrew talks about how WordPress are taking a step back from the codex and building curated edited handbooks on specific topics.
• We discuss the use of xref.yoast.com which Joost has modified to make searching through functions a lot easier.

Picks of the week:

• Developer oriented:
  • Use the WP_DEBUG constant – this turns on all sorts of notices, and lets you know about deprecated functions you are using. Andrew talks about this in his article “Deprecated functions and WP_DEBUG“
  • Log deprecated notices by Andrew Nacin. It logs all the different things your plugins are doing on your install and puts them into a neat table
  • Core control
  • WordPress beta tester
• User oriented:
  • Use screen options to hide or show what you want – e.g. custom fields.
  • Use the Help – for links to the WordPress codex and support forums.
  • WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk