Episode 79: WordPress Development Challenges, Hiring Developers, and Other Listener Questions

We’re going to answer some listener questions today. We’ve been getting a lot of great ones, and we thank you! We will continue answering questions in future episodes. If you have questions that you’d like to submit, you can do so on the form on our website, or you can Tweet us or send an email.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Pippin’s and Brad’s least favorite parts of developing for WordPress and why.

How Composer and Bower can help with single plugin development as opposed to when working with a team. Also, Brad’s and Pippin’s thoughts on using auto-loading for classes and plugins.

Whether new plugins should use API to insert new posts, or whether Brad and Pippin prefer WP Insert.

Thoughts on debugging Admin Ajax and making it faster. Which plugins are the most likely to be hogging resources and slowing it down?

How to determine a good price to pay for a plugin, as well as how to approach a plugin creator with a specific offer price.

Tips on hiring developers, where to find them, managing them, determining salaries, and working remotely.

Links and Resources:

Apply Filters question form

Apply Filters on Twitter

Composer

Bower

WP Insert

Admin Ajax

Debug Bar Actions and Filters

Query Monitor

AuthenticJobs.com

WeWorkRemotely.com

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

PIPPIN: Welcome back to Episode 79 of Apply Filters. Today Brad and I are going to go over some more listener questions. We’ve been getting quite a few from everybody. Thank you all for submitting them via Twitter and email. If you have any questions that you would like to submit, you can go to our website at ApplyFilters.fm. There’s a form there to submit your question, or you can reach out to us in any way that you know how to, whether it’s Twitter, email, other websites, et cetera. We love to get your questions.

We’ve got quite a few to go over today, and we will try to get to all of them. If we don’t, then we’ve got more episodes coming. Brad, do you want to take us away with the first one?

BRAD: The first question is from Darren Spence. He asks, “What is your least favorite part of developing for WordPress and why?” Huh.

PIPPIN: Plugins.

BRAD: I think for — yeah. What? Isn’t that your whole business?

PIPPIN: Yes, sir. Let me expand on that a little bit.

BRAD: Okay.

PIPPIN: Okay, so I think one of the most awesome things about the WordPress industry, world, community, whatever you want to call it today is the fact that we have such a thriving plugin ecosystem. There are 50,000-plus plugins that do anything and everything from full blown solutions that transform your website to little tiny things that put quotes on a page. There’s a plugin for just about anything, and anybody can get into building plugins. It’s a free for all. You can — you have a plugin you want to build, build it. You can release it for free. WordPress.org provides a great infrastructure from which to do that. It gives you an opportunity to put it in front of people and find an audience for it.

It’s obviously been successful for us, as both you and I, Brad, have been able to build successful companies on top of the WordPress plugin industry. But because of the success, it is also sometimes super painful to build plugins within WordPress and build them reliably so that they always work. I mean I think if you look into any commercial plugin or theme or any WordPress business, their biggest support burden is probably people having problems on their site using your plugin, your theme, et cetera. And a lot of the time it’s because of some kind of conflict with another plugin, whether it is a, like, PHP error, if it is notices from another plugin, or if it’s simply two plugin clashing in their design or what their outputting on the front of th