Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Author: Tom (Page 353 of 430)

How To Use Sequel Pro with MAMP For Local Development

For those of you who have read my previous blog posts, you know that my local development environment consistents of using MAMP for Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Though I’m not particularly hardcore about any given IDE, I’ve been using Coda 2 since it was released and have enjoyed it especially because of its integrated database environment.

But with the need to work with several other remote databases outside the context of an IDE, and the recent release of Sequel Pro 1.0, I thought it may be useful to share how I’ve also been using Sequel Pro with MAMP.

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You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems

I think one of the major characteristics of anyone who’s a digital native – that is, anyone who spends a vast amount of time on the Internet and that has a certain level of proficiency – has no problem upgrading their apps to the latest version and tinkering around with the new features and/or looking for new bugs.

I mean, we can always roll back, right?

And when it comes to WordPress – especially for those who build things for the platform – it’s not at all uncommon to see us urging our users and others to upgrade, as well.

I love updates as the next geek, but we can’t blame others for wanting to wait to upgrade WordPress immediately, nor can we expect everyone to upgrade WordPress as quickly as we do.

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Save Custom Post Meta – Revisited, Refactored, Refined.

About a month ago, I shared a post that discussed the code that’s required to save custom post meta data. Generally speaking, this is a lot of boilerplate that’s required to make sure that the data being saved is permitted and that the author has permissions to do so.

Of course, depending on the nature of your project, the code will vary a little, but for the majority of the cases, it’s all the same.

But thanks to several commenters and contributors, the code has been completely refactored, and I’ve actually been using it in a recent project.

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Startbox WordPress and View Page Templates

One of the things that I love about the open source community is not only how others can contribute to your work to create a better product, but how your work can be folded into someone else’s work.

Last week, Brian Richards (who works on Startbox WordPress) tweeted me:

And I was more than happy to oblige.

This whole short exchange brought up several aspects of open source software that I really appreciate.

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Apps or Programs?

As with practically anyone who considers themselves a digital native, I dig using Twitter. One of the things I love the most is seeing various people’s opinions on many things (not everything, but I digress), especially when it’s related to an interest of my own.

Last week, Baratunde tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/baratunde/status/296319290263629825

Though I respect the opinion, and definitely get where he’s coming from – probably more than I’m going to convey in this post – I disagree with the sentiment.

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