Category: Articles (Page 81 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

Should We Let Tools Dictate Our Projects?

August 31, 2017 / Tom

Does it make sense to use a different development stack or set of tools depending on the type of project you’re using even if it’s built on WordPress?

To give a little more context, I’ve written both about using tools like CodeKit (that bundles a variety of tools together to help streamline development).

Let Tools Dictate Your Project: CodeKit

And I’ve also talked about using things like CircleCI which are used in more enterprise-grade environments (but work just fine for smaller projects, too).

Let Tools Dictate Your Project: CircleCI

So when it comes to working on something alone or with a team, what’s the best thing to do?

Members Only: How It’s Going to Work

August 24, 2017 / Tom

A few weeks ago, I disabled comments (and talked about it a little bit) in preparation for the upcoming re-design and membership feature (or features?) of what I hope to accomplish with the site.

Arguably the best way to setup a Members Only site in WordPress.

Though it’s still a little bit of time before September (which is when I’m planning to launch it all), I thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and cover how the site will function, what it’ll include for members only, what it’ll include for everyone and all of that fun stuff.

Fix Valet, WordPress, Ajax, Bad Gateway

August 23, 2017 / Tom

Some time ago, I went back to using Valet for local development, and I’ve been happy with it since. Up until sometime last week, I’d yet to run into any problems.

Fix Valet, WordPress, Ajax, Bad Gateway: Valet

But when working on a WordPress plugin that imports data using admin-ajax, I kept getting a curious message in the console no matter how large or small the data was. Specifically, I was getting an error about “502 (Bad Gateway).”

The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from an inbound server it accessed while attempting to fulfill the request.

And if you try to diagnose it based on that definition, you won’t get very far. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s that you need to modify your server configuration.

Luckily, it’s easy. Or it’s likely easy.

WordPress-Focused Continuous Integration with CircleCI

August 22, 2017 / Tom

Writing about continuous integration or continuous deployments seems a little funny to me given that I’ve done this before and given that I know a lot of developers already use this as part of their day-to-day.

But I also know that there are a lot of hobbyists, beginners, and those who are just starting out who are looking for ways to make sure they are setting up solid practices for their work.

For what it’s worth, it wasn’t until I started working with a few more people that we began to incorporate a wider set of tools in our deployment process.

And that’s the purpose of this post.

That is:

introduce the whole idea behind WordPress-focused continuous integration,
introducing CircleCI,
getting ready to chat more about it.

With that said, here’s the run down on all of the above.

How To Use GitHub PR Templates

August 17, 2017 / Tom

If you do any work – regardless of if it’s open source or closed source – (though I know most who use read this site are involved in open source), you likely use some source control, and it’s probably GitHub.

For many of you, you either follow a project, contribute to a project, or handle pull requests to a project. And what about those projects that you work on with a team?

Perhaps your workflow is something like this:

you create a branch to work on a feature,
you push the branch to detail the work you’ve done for a peer to review,
the review is merged,
you carry on.

But what do you put in the template for the pull request? Is it the same every time or is it different? What about if the content of the PR is related to something in Trello, Asana, Basecamp, or some other project management system?

That’s where GitHub PR templates come into play.