Eric Mann's Blog

  • Opinions. I Have Them.

    This is my personal blog. As such, any opinions contained within are my personal opinions, built out of my own personal and professional experience. The fact that I need to explicitly call this out is, frankly, insulting to both me and the majority of those reading the site.

  • Query, Template, Actions as MVC in WordPress

    I love WordPress. I also love MVC design fundamentals. Unfortunately, these two loves of mine are at odds with one another, and that makes me sad. Here’s my simple idea to make WordPress’ built-in templating engine play nice with MVC sensibilities – everyone can win!

  • Crowdfunding a New Year’s Goal

    After watching a few sessions of WordSesh – particularly the podcasting roundtable – I’ve decided to take another stab at podcasting. This time around I want to cover a broad range of topics, and throw in some video. I’m asking for the community’s help getting this show off the ground, and I won’t be able to get things started without your help!

    ,

  • To Test or Not To Test: Unit Testing and Privacy

    Determining which methods in your application needed testing used to be easy – test everything exposed by the public API. But once you invite other developers to contribute, you are exposing a whole other set of internal APIs to the team. The behavioral consistency of these methods is just as important as that of the public API, so shouldn’t you be testing them too? I would argue you should, even if this internal API consists of private and protected methods. To make life easier, I’ll give you a couple of tools for testing these limited-visibility functions without forcing everything to…

  • Linux-flavored Windows

    I use both Mac and Windows for development because I’ve managed to set up a Linux-style command environment on both. Here are some simple steps you too can follow to have the power of Linux-style commands right from the Windows command prompt.

  • Three Decades Down

    Today is my birthday, and also marks the completion date for my previous “to do before I reach a certain birthday” list. I’m asking for your help in building my list for the next however many years.

  • WordPress: Falling Behind or Still Leading?

    When Tumblr first appeared, everyone wanted WordPress to begin emulating its features. Then came Medium and the same cry. Then Ghost launched and again the retort sounded that “WordPress is falling behind!” But is WordPress really lagging behind the pack? I would argue otherwise.

    ,

  • Hi jQuery, Meet Vagrant

    I use Vagrant for local development on WordPress. It made perfect sense to use it for local jQuery development, too. This weekend I put the finishing touches on a patch to add Vagrant support to the jQuery project – now you can leverage the power of this awesome tool as well!

  • WordPress is One Of the Best Decisions You Can Make

    Some would say the decision to use WordPress in an enterprise or mission-critical environment is a mistake. I disagree. Strongly. Using WordPress is the best decision I’ve ever made.

  • Limited Liability

    Every once in a while, I get an unsolicited sales email from a random company. It usually has some laughable “limited liability” statement attached that claims to protect the sender from any legal claims that their message damaged my machine. Honestly, such a statement is laughable and guarantees I will never respond to the email.