• Making Singletons Safe in PHP

    Last time, I argued in favor of the Singleton pattern in WordPress.  Singletons make sense in WordPress specifically for several reasons: They live in the global scope without using the already abused/overused [cci]global[/cci] keyword As a distributed application maintained by several hundred developers, they prevent problems that likely arise from others misusing your code But […]

  • Podcast

    Today I start on my goal to produce a short, weekly audio broadcast. More details to follow.

  • The Case for Singletons in WordPress

    Please also review my follow-up post, Making Singletons Safe in PHP. There has been a lot of discussion this week regarding the Singleton pattern and whether or not it has a place in modern software development.  Mike Schinkel wrote a tutorial about a Singleton factory.  I wrote one about using Singletons as a WordPress plugin […]

  • WordPress Plugin Structure

    The power of WordPress lies in its pluggable infrastructure.  Unlike other content management applications which require you to edit the core code of the system to make changes, WordPress supports plugins.  These smaller applications tie in to a rich API provided by WordPress that allows you to change just about everything about the application and customize […]

  • Introducing WP_Session

    Last time, I talked about what it would be like if WordPress supported sessions.  Well, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and actually took the time to build it. I’m proud to announce the very first release of an implementation of [cci]WP_Session[/cci].

  • WP_Session: A Proposal

    My first experience with WordPress was when a client asked me to hack apart the registration system to allow for simple custom referral links.  They wanted users to be placed at different user levels depending on the URL they used to sign up for an account. My initial attempt was … atrocious   When a user hit […]

  • Haiti 2012

    In October, 2012, I had the opportunity to take a week-long trip to Haiti. Below is a collection of photos from my trip and a recording of a sermon I presented about my experience. Enjoy! Haiti 2012 from Eric Mann

  • Twenty-Nine

    That’s right. Today is my 29th birthday. Usually I take time on my birthday to write a to-do list for the coming year.  It’s close enough to the end of the year that it serves double-duty as a list of New Year’s Resolutions.  Unfortunately, I never bother to share the list, so no one holds me […]

  • There’s Nothing Wrong with Comic Sans

    When I was in high school, my favorite football team wasn’t very good. I was excited when we’d win at least half the games in a season. I also distinctly remember once when the cable company switched to a “more competitive game” during the 2nd quarter because we were losing so badly. When the Ducks […]

  • jQuery as a Global Event Bus

    Some time ago, I made a mistake.  Rather than taking the time to truly understand how events worked in jQuery, I built my own JavaScript library to handle event delegation. It worked, but why reinvent the wheel? It turns out jQuery is perfectly capable of serving as a global event bus for all of your […]