Author: Tom (Page 170 of 428)

Name Your Staging Environment (It’s Fun!)

March 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I talk a lot about the significance of having a development environment, a staging environment, and a production environment whenever it comes to managing projects for yourself or your clients. Aside from previous blog posts I’ve written, this was a significant part of my talk at WordCamp Atlanta.

But at the end of the day, the talk about having three separate in which to manage, deploy, test, and release code can seem mundane especially if you’re working with the same codebase for an extended amount of time.

To help fight that boredom, one of the things I’ve always done is come up with a type of themes for my environments and then I’ve named them accordingly.

Case in point: The various environments we’re using for Pressware Plugins are all based in Star Wars (predominately those in The Force Awakens but not limited to that).

What Were Your Watershed Moments?

March 28, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Watershed Moments, defined in multiple places the least of which not being Quora, is defined as:

A “watershed moment” is a point in time that marks an important, often historical change. The pertinent original usage of “watershed” is to describe a ridge of land separating waters that then flow into two different bodies.

This idea isn’t isolated to web development or software development, though since that’s the area in which many of us work I think it makes for good conversation.

This weekend, I saw my friend Justin (who, if you’re a WordPress developer, should be following) tweet out the following:

Software Developers: What are some “watershed” moments you’ve identified in your own growth?

— Justin Sainton (@JS_Zao) March 26, 2016

And each time I tried to respond using 140 characters, there wasn’t enough space (or tweets) to share my opinion on the topic (and no, this is not my advocating longer tweets ;).

But seriously, I thought it was a great question and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might serve better as a blog post.

From GitHub to WordPress.org

March 25, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

There’s a portion of the WordPress development community who want to be able to manage their source code outside of Subversion but still send their code from GitHub to WordPress.org.

Granted, some great strides have been made in this area. Just this week, WP Tavern reported that we can now submit pull requests from GitHub to WordPress Core.

But what if you’re a theme developer or a plugin developer (or both), and you’re looking for a way to manage your code on GitHub but still take advantage of the resources offered in the WordPress.org repositories?

You’re stuck between choosing Subversion, choosing GitHub, managing two repositories, or figuring out a way to sync them. And in the latter case, that’s exactly what the following script does.

Do You Even Bother with a Personal Blog?

March 24, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

So here’s a short digression from the usual run-of-the-mill WordPress development post for you:

Do you maintain any type of personal blog?

The reason I ask is because, as if it isn’t evident enough, I’m kind of a fan of this whole blogging thing. But the idea of managing any type of personal blog is something that comes with a set of choices. I’ll talk more about that more in a minute.

I think it gets a little more complicated when:

You have friends and/or a following who are also online.
You have kids you want to share things about but don’t want to share photos of them because of reasons.
You care about data ownership, so you’re not willing to necessarily share the information on other publishing platforms.
And other reasons (or maybe not depending on who you are).

Yes, I have a personal blog and no I don’t really use any other social networks (though I have accounts, they are basically placeholders). Furthermore, I don’t normally promote those posts anywhere else.

I publish, and it goes into the ether than is The Google.

Part of it because I ask myself: Who cares? After all, this site is the one I write for the most and that I enjoy writing for the most.

That’s just me, though.

But I’m specifically curious how you deal with aspects mentioned above when it comes to blogging that’s not directly related to some aspect of your profession and whether or not you’d like to do it or not.

The FUD of Working with WordPress

March 23, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve read the title of this post, then it probably comes off as no surprise. When it comes to working with WordPress, maybe it’s even obligatory for someone like me to cover.

I don’t know, but I hope that doesn’t dissuade anyone from ignoring the rest of the words in this post.

But I do know that I’ve seen a lot of other WordPress developers and those involved in the community in some regarding talking about the latest results of the Stack Overflow survey and where WordPress falls.

That is, it’s high up on the list of “most dreaded technologies.” Before I share my thoughts, there are a couple of articles (and they are quick) that are required reading before proceeding.

The reason I want you to read those two articles is because they provide some background and perspective on where I’m going with my own take regarding this topic.