Posts by Alain Schlesser
Using Bento Components in Gutenberg Blocks
I have spent the weekend of March 19th to 21st at the CloudFest Hackathon in Rust, where I had submitted a project together with Pascal Birchler (@swissspidy). It was lots of fun and producing many interesting insights for me personally as well as for the team, so I’d like to share a few of my…
Read MoreThe Cost of Contribution
There’s a cost attached to anything we do, even when we’re talking about unpaid volunteer work done in the spare time. And that cost will be paid in some way, no matter what.
We need to more openly talk about the adverse effects of doing open source contributions in an unsustainable way, destigmatize the money topic when it comes to “free” software and directly address immediate issues of frustration and burn-out as they surface.
Read MoreApplication <=> Server Management Protocol (ASMP)
While we can automatically update WordPress Core, plugins and themes, we cannot do the same for the components of the WordPress stack that are installed at the server level.
I hereby suggest creating a communication protocol, ASMP, that allows for bidirectional communication between servers and their applications.
Read MoreSingletons And Shared Instances
Given the popularity of the Singleton design pattern, how comes that some developers decry it as an “anti-pattern”? Can it really be that bad?
This article explains the rationale of why it can indeed be that bad and provides alternative approaches that should be used instead.
OOP-NOOB Series – The Publicity Stunt
OOP makes use of access modifiers to control the accessibility of methods and properties. This is what allows you to use the concept of encapsulation, so that you have a public interface that consumers of your code can develop against, as well as a private implementation that needs to be treated as a black box from the outside.
Having all of your methods and properties be public generally defeats the purpose of using OOP in the first place, as most of the benefits depend on the concept of encapsulation in some form or other.
Read MoreMeeting The US Community
A spontaneous trip to Philadelphia allowed me to attend two value-loaded conferences and finally get to know the US WordPress Community. This tale is all about Discussions, Dinosaurs and Dim Sum.
Read MoreProject Moiety – A Hypothetical WordPress Roadmap
What would it take for WordPress to reach a next big milestone of accounting for 51% of the web? Here’s a hypothetical long-term roadmap as a thought experiment, targeting enterprise clients as the next big audience to tackle.
Read MoreUsing A Config To Write Reusable Code – Part 3
In a previous instalment, we identified the Config file as being a promising tool to map data reusable code to project-specific code. In this third article, we’ll examine what our Settings page example looks like if we do indeed make use of such a Config file.
Read MoreStructuring PHP Exceptions
While the consensus is to use exceptions instead of errors, there is very little information on how to structure and manage them in a larger codebase. In this article, I want to talk about the way I currently set them up and use them in PHP, in the hopes to spark some discussion on the topic and get further feedback.
Read MoreInterface Naming Conventions
Naming is a hugely important factor to consider and directly influences how effective my work is and how much I enjoy it. It forces you to think about the very nature of things. This article discusses the PHP convention of adding the suffix “Interface” to your interfaces.
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