Author: Tom (Page 70 of 427)

Quick Tip: Reinstalling Git on macOS Mojave

October 2, 2018 / Tom

When it comes to upgrading a an operating system, specifically if you’re on a Mac of any sort, people have mixed feelings. I’ve heard some people say they’ve lost a day’s worth of productivity. I’ve heard others say that the upgrade worked flawlessly.

Reinstalling Git on Mojave

With two very minor hiccups, the upgrade to Mojave has been in the latter camp. Specifically, at the time of this writing, Firefox doesn’t mainly play well with writing to the filesystem via its standard dialog. And my installed of Git was hosed.

Debugging for WordPress Developers: Stepping Around Code

September 27, 2018 / Tom

If you’ve been following along with the series thus far, then you’re likely seeing just how useful proper debugging can be especially when working on WordPress.

That is to say that not only are you able to gain valuable insights into your own projects, but you can see how WordPress core works, too.

Stepping Around Code

At this point, though, we haven’t done much. As you may recall from the previous post (or if you haven’t watched the screencast, now is a good time to do so), you can see just how much debugging offers.

The truth is, we’ve barely scratched the surface. As I mentioned last time, this post and this screencast are going to focus specifically on the following:

In the next post, we’re going to look at more advanced things we can do such as stepping into functions, stepping out of functions, and stepping over functions.

We’re still not at a point where we’re going to worry about changing variable values on-the-fly, but we’re definitely going to see how we can strategically use the debugger to step into certain functions, step over certain functions, and step out of certain functions.

How to Set a Goal, Part 2: We’re Writing Code

September 26, 2018 / Tom

In the first post in this [two-part] series, I talked about the idea of what it means to set a goal. Specifically, I said it was more nuanced than just setting a goal and aiming for it. Instead, I said I thought of doing this:

set a goal,
make a plan.

And, if you read the first, you know that I gave an example outside of programming (because I tend to do that sometimes).

But why not also look at what this would look like regarding programming? I mean, the whole point of the site is to talk about how to handle WordPress development from a practical perspective.

And this seems like something that intersects with that whole idea, right?

How to Set a Goal, Part 1: We’re Not Writing Code

September 25, 2018 / Tom

I’ve talked about productivity and similar resources various times, though sparingly, since writing consistently for the past eight or so years this October (can’t believe it’s been that long).

Though I try to stay true to the whole slogan that I pronounce (that is, Practical WordPress Development), there are times that I like to share things that I think can’t help those involved in the industry that is tangentially related to software or web development.

Writing

And in this case, that’s what this post is about; however, I’m going to try to break it into two short reads. In short, the purpose of this is what it means to set a goal, how to go about achieving it, and how to do so both regarding working on self-employment, fitness, or otherwise, as well as how it relates to side-projects (and specifically programming).

I’ll start with the former, first.

An Introduction to Debugging for WordPress Developers

September 20, 2018 / Tom

In the most recent post in this series, I walked through the process of integrating Xdebug with your IDE. And given that I’ve been using Visual Studio Code as my IDE of choice, that’s also the IDE I’m using as the example.

Installing Xdebug: PHP Debug for Visual Studio Code

Furthermore, it’s cross-platform, easy enough to get started for beginners, but powerful enough to extend and operate for more experienced programmers (and for the rest of us who fall in between).

In the last post, I stated that I’d be doing a series of screencasts. Specifically, I wrote the following:

Starting in the next post, I’ll begin sharing some screencasts that walk through how to debug functions and variables, change values on the fly, work with the debug console, and more.

In this post, I’m going to have a short screencast providing an introduction to debugging WordPress the first part of this series. Namely, launching an instance of a site built using WordPress and using the basics of debugging a plugin.