Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the Pulse Storm Launcher UI enhancement for WordPress, including integrations with WooCommerce and WP eCommerce. The source is currently available on GitHub, and I’m hoping to carve out some time to get it submitted to the official WordPress plugin directory.
If you’re not familiar with the Magento version of this plugin, it’s an application launcher that allows quick, keyboard only searching of your WordPress admin and store. Since a picture’s worth 1,000 words, please consider this 4 minute screencast the explainer novel.
Pulse Storm Launcher for WordPress from Alan Storm on Vimeo.
Back to WordPress
It’s been an interesting experience flexing some long atrophied WordPress muscles — despite outside appearances there’s content on alanstorm.com that was originally written in WordPress. In 2009 I wrote a PHP shim application that fetches content from the various CMS systems I’ve used over the years. Beyond the programming exercise, this shim application lets me switch back and forth between systems without having to do a giant import/export. I also chose WordPress when I moved my personal Portland site off of Square Space (albeit, published statically via a WP-Cli command).
Although I couldn’t have put it into the same words back then, in 2009 I was looking for a platform, and WordPress was in the running until Magento came along. At the time I was a little skeptical of the old cruft and code their backward compatible religion seemed to encourage.
Seven years later, with a little more systems programming under my belt, I’m significantly impressed with the trade-offs the Wordprss teams have made to keep moving the platform forward while ensuring it remains a collaborative enviornment for the community. Their event based programming (action and filter hooks) has proven a resilient system for plugin developers, and a fertile ground for functional programming in PHP.
The recent (and ongoing) work on the RESTful API is a boon for anyone doing javascript work with WordPress. Its also a nice way for returning-to-the-platform plugin developers (cough) to get at structured data without needing to wade through a decade of post querying code.
All in all, coming back to WordPress felt like visiting the opposite trailhead on that path not taken all those years ago. I’m still available for all your Magento consulting needs, but I do hope the work and business gods conspire to land some more WordPress projects in my inbox.