048 – WordPress and Phone Numbers

This week I had the pleasure of having Sean and Randy (custom plugin developers from beAutomated.com0 on the show. Our discussion was centered around all the necessary information needed before a programmer (either, software, plugin or theme developer) can actually start coding.

We dug in and looked at one specific field on a form – the phone number. Here are ten specific questions that could be asked of this one small piece of a project:

1. Size/width viewable to user
2. Maximum length (characters) for text entered
3. Label text (e.g., phone, telephone, phone number, telephone number)
4. Contextual help information (tooltips)
5. Formatting requirements (examples)
6. Possible inclusion of an auto-formatter utility
7. Validation requirements or behind the scenes conversions
8. Consideration for numbers that may have extension numbers appended to them
9. International support on prefixes and format considerations
10. Breaking into multiple fields, with or without automatic tabbing and autocompletion

If you’d like to read the entire article, you can do so here.