Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
My favorite Git client for OS X is GitBox – it’s incredibly simple and makes working with git-based repositories really easy.
Still, there are times where I prefer the command line for a couple of things and the various GUI clients come up short. If you’ve not installed the OS X Developer Tools, like Xcode, on your machine, then you’re likely unable to use a command line version of the application that is bundled with your client of choice.
Here’s how to do it:
Earlier this week, I shared my approach to and the tools used for building a WordPress Plugin. In the post, I briefly touched on CodeKit, but I didn’t really talk about why I use it nor did I share how I configure it for my WordPress-based projects.
CodeKit is a platform-agnostic application – it’s meant for anyone who is doing web development – and it has been one of the single best tools that I’ve added to my WordPress toolbox in the past year.
The thing is, there’s a variety of ways to tailor CodeKit for your needs. It has support for LESS, Sass, a couple of JavaScript linting utilities, dependency management, minification, and so on.
Though there’s no single “right way” to configure it, here’s how I’ve been using CodeKit for WordPress plugin development.
This version is a major update but if you're interested in skipping most of the information, jump down to what's new in this version.
In January 2011, Atlanta was hit with a major snow storm that had many of us hanging out inside of our homes for days at a time. To say that I had cabin fever would be an understatement.
During that time, I wrote a really simple social icons plugin for WordPress. Because I used Jason Frame’s excellent jQuery plugin called Tipsy, I aptly named the plugin Tipsy Social Icons.
Since it was first released, I’ve done much more WordPress development and this plugin wasn’t up to par with my usual standards, so I’m updating it and am officially releasing Tipsy Social Icons 3.0.
If you’ve done any development on themes, plugins, or the core application itself, then you know that the team uses Subversion for WordPress development. This means that when you checkout the project, you’re either pulling down at least three directories, or you’re pulling down the trunk.
The challenge is figuring out a way to organize your local development environment so that it resembles the staging and production environment rather than what the repository looks like.
But this can be tough if you’re used to working with the trunk, with copying files, or with whatever crazy ways you’ve come up with managing version controlled files.
Here’s the most effective way that I’ve found to organize my installation when using Subversion for WordPress development:
As a developer, one of the things that I love to do is read how others created their work. Sure, we’re all a different type of programmer but that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the work that others are doing.
In fact, I find that I often learn new things from seeing how other people face the technical challenges of their particular platform.
So, to that end, I thought I’d share the work that went into and that tools that I used to create Single Post Message.
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