A project is considered successful only when it is attributed to two critical factors: Submission of the project as demanded in the scope and secondly, the intrinsic quality of the deliverable when it reaches its General Availability stage. One must ensure the result of the team efforts to meet the level of quality from the standpoint accessing the project’s success.
It is rightly said, that the project manager is eventually responsible for the resultant quality of the deliverable. Apart from successful completion of the needed scope and timely delivery as defined in the schedule, maintaining quality is a significant measure of the project’s success. Sequentially, the goal is to improve the quality of what project you’re doing such that the result is better achieved.
The word quality includes three things: The competence of a thing, the distinctive characteristic of a thing and a high level of value or excellence. And if you ask WordPress developers what does quality means to them, they will state the WordPress coding standards, the level designing, etc. Whatever the case may be, “quality” can mean different things to different people.
Here is a deep discussion regarding quality and WordPress development.
The Space of Quality in WordPress Development
Undoubtedly, WordPress is the best content management system for your website from the abundance of open source to paid CMS available on the market, and each ensuring the users that they are the true evangelist. There are only a few followers of Drupal, Joomla, who have taken their website’s reliability and security at risk.
Now let’s look at an example:
In WordPress 4.4, you add support to the title tags by simply adding the following line in your functions.php file:
Some plugins and themes that require updating. But still it is quite usual to see codes in the template files like:
But it is not easy to buck up with the title. Consider few SEO plugins. They will offer alternate title elements which are more search-engine-friendly. Let’s suppose you are working on a WordPress theme and its title element includes a call to wp_title. And you want to make sure that the title element is sortable so that other codes can be updated.
But Let’s say you want to dress it up a bit by including a separator and updating its position. You may include:
Or if you want to introduce a name into your Blog and its description or want to set up a title on the homepage to carry a difference experience. Then you may move ahead like this:
This is fine. But what will happen if someone wants to use a plugin to alter the title element? Or someone wants to distribute the theme? Everything is over! This is the why it is not always recommended to use less code. Less code can be of lesser quality.
Does Quality Amplify with the Coding?
Make the usage of wp_title() as much flexible as you can. We need to define a custom function and filter it using the wp_title filter. Obviously, more coding will be required than the previous examples, but this will prove to be more pliable!
In the beginning, the code sees if the page is performing in an RSS feed. If yes, it returns the specified title only. Contrarily, it supplements the title name to the specified $title string. The code places the description after the separator while viewing the home page or front page. And if the user is paging through the website, the code prepends the page number to the separator and title.
This provides the title element within the theme, which is of course not the default way to all the theme, but a better method.
Some other Components for Successful WordPress Projects
1. Source Control
Almost every developer is familiar with source control in some capacity. It retains snapshots of your source code throughout the development lifecycle. It helps to roll back code that breaks a release and tests a new feature before it releasing it. The source control helps in number of things:
– Roadmaps: Source control makes it easy to release a version, tag it, move on to the next, and then return.
– Forking: There are times when you create a separate project based on the same codebase. You may want to link an independent project based on the same codebase. Source control systems make it easily possible while keeping the new code under version control, at the same time.
– Bugs: Source control makes it incredibly easy to grab a copy of the last build, patch a bug, and track the file which requires change.
2. Bug Tracking
Once your work is done and forwarded to the other people, it is definite that they will encounter issues, and it’s best to be prepared for it sooner rather than later. So, it is recommended to spend some time investigating some ways for tracking issues. There are three viable options to be considered to track bugs; this will help to plan patches and make product roadmaps:
- Email is seen as best in the initial stages as it has thousands of users.
- Google Spreadsheets is a better way to track incoming requests.
- User Voice, Trac, and GitHub are great Hosted Help Desk solutions for outsourcing bug tracking.
3. Support Forums
Support Forums are considered important platforms for your users. It helps to interact directly with the people who are building the product. Apart from keeping your customers happy, it is also a great way for you to keep your pulse on your product. Just like bug tracking, there are great options like email, Self-Hosted Forums, and Hosted Support Forums which helps to scale with your work as it is in demand.
Wrapping Up
Quality should never be avoided as an after-thought. The above-written point will clear you everything you need to get a high-quality WordPress website. A transparent process, quality preparation, and communication are few ingredients of WordPress project to be successful. Of course, there are many WordPress development companies which offer high-quality and affordable solutions too.