General Chicken logo from Freelancer.com

Freelancer.com is ridiculous for “design” contests! I’m not going to say the price, because it isn’t fair – given the quality of work. These guys are GOOD. Hazem actually submitted TWO entries that were good, and was able to adjust the design when requested. If you’re looking for a good designer, I’d definitely recommend Hazem.

General Chicken got our logo from this freelancer, Hazem W.:

Hazem W.
Hazem W.

Hazem on InstaGram
Hazem on Freelancer

First Draft
First Draft – I didn’t like the gun, so he redid it!

Sketch
Sketch

Behavior Driven Development from the Business Stakeholder’s Point of View

BDD is the best way to communicate business requirements from stakeholders to developers. General Chicken explains what BDD is from a business POV.

WordPress plugin: Randomize Main Loop Order

This is a plugin I made in response to a Quora post.

I made a plugin for this, in response to this Quora question.

Randomize Main Loop Order

Plugin on Github: JohnDeeBDD/WP-Random-Order-Main-Loop

Just download the .zip from github, then upload it to your site. Let me know if there are any issues.

Read John Dee's answer to Is there a WordPress plugin that will re-arrange my website posts constantly? on Quora

Code on github.com
Code on github.com

Business Stakeholders: How to Describe a Software FEATURE

A feature from the biz perspective

What is a feature?
A feature is an aspect of software that is useful. Anything you can express, that is possible, and that you can afford, can be a feature. A bug is an aspect of software that isn’t useful.

Since we’re talking about development, we’re discussing software features that don’t exist yet. These are features that we would like to build, or existing features that we would like to make better. Describe a feature with should statements:

  • It should email all the clients once a month.
  • The client should have a setting page in the admin area.
  • The plugin should have a custom post type called GPS coordinates for each subscriber.
  • The div should show a timeline of Civil War battles in the footer area.

The next statement you should create is the reason for the feature you are requesting. What is the business value of this feature? Describe the reason by using a “Because”, or “So that” .

  • So that the clients are routinely updated.
  • So that the user can change the settings.
  • Because we need to store the GPS data.

Alternatively, you can use Gherkin syntax for feature development.

Vanishing Checkbox in WordPress Comment Form

This is the tale of the incredible vanishing checkbox, on WordPress versions 4.9.6 and 4.9.8.

WordPress uses cookies by default to log in users and track who is making a comment. Cookies are small snippets of data kept on a user’s browser. WordPress is trying to deal with the new GDPR regulations. It seems from following Trac, that it’s a giant cluster fuck.

This annoying checkbox was forced onto every WordPress site in the world as of 4.9.6:

As soon as I saw this monster I started making a plugin to roll it back. It was obvious to me that most sites wouldn’t want this, and that it served absolutely no purpose. It comes from a misunderstanding of the law, and a desire to be clever.

 

 

 

 

There is no requirement in GDPR for websites to display a check box for cookie use. None, totally false.

Then comes out 4.9.8 which removed the check-box that was just installed!

However! This revert also breaks functionality. Users who aren’t logged in have no way now of knowing that their comment was submitted.

So the situation as of 4.9.8 is that the comment cookie check box came and went, and now everybody’s site is broken.

You can solve the problem by re-activating the comment check box in the admin SETTINGS >> DISCUSSION, but then you’ll still have the checkbox. Or use this plugin to restore functionality to the way it was.

Remove GDPR