Tom McFarlin created and has lead the development of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate for nearly four years now. I’ve used the boilerplate many times in my own work.
The project has evolved and gained traction by the WordPress community and developers seeking to utilize best practices and share code with one another. There are 51 contributors on Github, and there have been nearly 500 commits to the codebase. It’s also been starred more than 2,700 times and forked nearly 700 times.
The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is at the foundation of many, many plugins and has been used as a basis for development tutorials for years. All of this effort has been based on voluntary efforts from Tom and other contributors.
As Tom continues to focus his efforts with his company Pressware, he has decided to put a few projects in others’ capable hands. Therefore, he’s parting ways with the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. He’s handing over the project to Devin Vinson, a WordPress developer at Range who lives in Tampa, Florida. I worked with Devin myself until late last year, and I’m happy to see him take the lead.
Tom will remain as an advisor for the project, if Devin ever has questions.
Devin said the boilerplate has been useful for him as he’s evolved as a developer:
I’ve been a fan of the project for a long time (both the old and newest update).
Having a good example using best practices, logical organization, and continually updated has been a reference for me in growing as a developer over time.
And he intends to make it more accessible for newer developers:
When I started with Range last year I finally had a regular schedule and reached out to Tom to offer in helping create documentation. While it offers a great starting point in building plugins it isn’t very accessible without already having a strong base in development.
Now that I’m in the drivers seat I want to first work on making that happen by filling out the Github wiki for the project and then work on getting some examples available for reference.
There is also a course for WP Sessions coming soon, which Tom recorded already. The course details the logic behind each class of the boilerplate and how to build a plugin with it.
I love this project and I’m happy to see it continue on as Tom focuses in on other Pressware projects. It’s in good hands, and I’m sure it’ll continue to be a popular learning tool for a long time to come.
You can find more information on the boilerplate on the now transferred Github page and the project website. You can expect a blog post with more on the decision from Tom very soon, and you should just read everything he writes anyway.
