Posts by Alain Schlesser

Using Bento Components in Gutenberg Blocks

Bento + WordPress @ Cloudfest Hackathon

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…

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The Cost of Contribution

Hourglass with blue sand on a rocky surface.

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.

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Application <=> 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.

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Singletons And Shared Instances

Singletons & 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.

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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.

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Meeting 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.

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Structuring 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.

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Interface 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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