My Week With WordPress
The Mess I’ve Created
For a recent interview, I was given the challenge of creating a WordPress plugin. I had only worked with PHP for about a week and I had just gotten WordPress running locally the day before my interview. (I did tell both of these things to the interviewer.)
I went through the usual phases of my development cycle:
Confidence -> Uncertainty -> Insanity -> Breathe -> Make it Work
I had many challenges, beyond just writing unfamiliar code. I couldn’t get my local environment running and under a time crunch, I tried to use a free web host for my testing environment. (I quickly exceeded their allowances).
How I Made It Work
After I was locked out of my second free web host, I knew I had to get my local server running. The WordPress download didn’t include any server or database programs, so after a little research I installed Xampp which was very easy to install and use.
Now I could finally breathe and write some code. Or so I thought.
My Not DRY Workflow
My workflow was a frantic, panicked mess. I didn’t have time to dig in and properly learn WordPress. I just had to make it work and go.
Here’s what I did:
- Write code
- Zip code files
- Upload zip to dashboard
- Install plugin
- Test
- Uninstall plugin
- Repeat
Since I didn’t have enough time to fully understand WordPress, my workflow was less than ideal and this is why I am writing you.
Your Suggestions?
So, now that I’ve made my code work and submitted my project, I’d like to learn how to do it better. What are your experiences developing for WordPress? How can I make my processes more DRY (dryer?)?
Thanks for reading and cross your fingers for me getting this job 🤞.
