Publisher: Tom McFarlin | A Perspective on Professional WordPress Development

Hey, I Am Tom I’m a self-employed developer who primarily works with WordPress and JavaScript to build software for others. About This Blog This is my personal blog where I share articles, notes, tips, and resources related to WordPress development. I also discuss my projects both personal and commissioned. I aim to post at least three times a week, each time in a different category, but I often post more frequently than that. Some of my more popular posts include: My Thoughts on Building Web Applications with WordPress WordPress User Interface Design Why WordPress Isn’t Viewed as an Application Framework Using CodeKit For WordPress Plugin Development Don’t Feed The Trolls (or What I’ve Learned About Negativity on The Internet) I also frequently share functions, code snippets, and general tips on how to achieve certain things in WordPress such as: Properly Calculating Page Offset in Custom WordPress Queries Using WP_User_Query To Retrieve Users Across Multiple Roles How To Prevent a Page From Being Deleted in WordPress Add a Separator To The WordPress Menu Programmatically Set a WordPress Template I share various WordPress plugins that I’ve developed and maintain as well as notes on how I’ve built them. A few examples include: Comment Tweets For WordPress WordPress Widget Boilerplate WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Single Post Message and how I built it Comment Images and related notes on its development Occasionally, I speak at various meetups about WordPress both as a blogger and as a developer. If you’re a developer, designer, or a blogger who is passionate about WordPress, I invite you to subscribe! A Bit of History I graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science focused in Software Engineering. Shortly thereafter, I worked for CareerBuilder.com as a software engineer and as a team lead primarily working with .NET. In 2010, I moved to self-employment where I wanted to focus on building software and sites for small businesses, teams, and individuals. Since then, I’ve built products for others using PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (both vanilla and using jQuery), and WordPress. I’ve been a Microsoft MVP since 2011. When it comes to engineering, I believe in going deep rather than wide and have since begun to narrowly focus my professional development efforts. I believe that WordPress is the best blogging platform on the planet, and I also believe that it can serve as a tremendous foundation for building applications. Through blogging, projects, and speaking, I aim to help other bloggers and developers get involved with the WordPress community. Projects and Commissions I maintain a number of different projects. As evidenced throughout this page, I’m primarily spending my time working with jQuery and WordPress. Here’s where you can find my work: All of my open source projects including example code for certain blog posts are available on GitHub WordPress Comment Tweets allows authors to include tweets relevant to the given post in the comment stream of their blog. Comment Images is a plugin that allows readers to upload images along with their comments. Category Sticky Post allows you to mark a post as sticky within a specific category archive. It works exactly like the typical sticky post functionality within WordPress, except that it’s specifically for category archive. Tag Sticky Post allows you to mark a post as sticky within a specific tag archive. It works exactly like the typical sticky post functionality within WordPress, except that it’s specifically for tag archives. Tipsy Social Icons makes it easy to include a variety of social icons and custom labels into your WordPress blog or site. WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is an organized, maintainable boilerplate for building plugins using WordPress best practices. WordPress Widget Boilerplate is an organized, maintainable boilerplate for building widgets using WordPress best practices. jQuery Collapsible Menus makes it easy to create a collapsible menu using nested, unordered lists. Simple Overlay is a lightweight plugin that makes adding overlays trivially easy. For Hire I’m available for hire and enjoy partnering with others for fun and interesting projects. If you’re interested in hiring me, please contact me. Writing and Speaking Blogging Aside from my personal blog, I also aim to contribute to the WordPress community by providing various tutorials and articles on other blogs. I contributed to Smashing Magazine where I provided and discussed A Process For Professional WordPress Development. I’m also regular contributor at Envato’s WPTuts+ where I cover a variety of WordPress topics about four times a month. If you’re interested in having me contribute to your blog, feel free to contact me. Speaking I’ve recently begun speaking at a variety of events in the Atlanta area covering all things WordPress. I’ve given talks on the following topics: Getting started with WordPress Plugins Advanced Topics on WordPress Plugins Unit Testing in WordPress Migrating To Standard 3 …and more. Be sure to check out my speaking page for more information. If you’re interested in having me speak at your event be it for bloggers or developers, please contact me. Contact Me I try to respond to every comment, but I also enjoy hearing from others via email. Feel free to contact me using my contact page, or shoot me a tweet at any time.