Category: Resources (Page 13 of 60)

A summary of useful links, applications, and tools that I find around the Internet.

Version Control With Git: A Guide From Tower

May 13, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to version control with Git, it’s no secret that I’m a fan of Tower. In the WordPress development community, it’s not at all uncommon to hear others talk about why they love or hate GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Subversion, or whatever source control system they are opting to use.

That said, I think it’s fair to say that learning Git has its advantages. Although WordPress uses Subversion for core, themes, and plugins, many developers (myself included) opt to use GitHub for some our projects. This doesn’t mean that learning Subversion should be optional, but I think learning how to use both is important.

For this post, though, I’m talking specifically about Git. Case in point: If you’re looking to contribute to some of the most popular plugins (such as Easy Digital Downloads) then you’ve nothing to lose with this.

So what’s a good resource for doing just that?

The Modern WordPress Server Stack

May 6, 2016 / Tom

During WordCamp San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Carl Alexander speak on the topic of the modern WordPress Server Stack.

Modern WordPress Server Stack

A few notes:

If you’re not following Carl on Twitter, I recommend it. He’s an incredibly smart person who is doing some really neat things with WordPress.
If you’re not subscribed to his blog but are interested in advanced programming topics as it relates to WordPress, I recommend subscribing.
If you weren’t present for his talk, you can catch it on WordPress.tv.

With that said, Carl also included an article that accompanied his presentation on his blog and it’s something that I think makes for good reading.

I find this especially true if you’re someone who is at an intermediate level of WordPress development or if you’re someone who’s looking to learn more about server administration.

A Plugin for Testing Custom Post Types

May 3, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working on the latest version of Easier Excerpts, we added functionality so the plugin would work any post type that had support for excerpts.

Testing Custom Post Types

Because you can’t know that different custom post types that a person may have on their installation of WordPress, I wrote a small plugin that creates a generic custom post type that can be customized, used, and abused in your development environment.

This way, you can install the plugin, activate it, and have a custom post type with which you can test against should your project call for it.

Shiny Updates for WordPress

April 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I love about the ‘features as a plugin’ approach that the core team takes is that it allows us to evaluate plugins such as Shiny Updates for WordPress.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, feature plugins refer to functionality that may or may not ultimately make it into WordPress core. They allow us to evaluate functionality, give feedback, and determine if a given feature makes sense to become part of WordPress.

Anyway, over the last couple of years we’ve seen an increase in ways that WordPress provides updates. Sometimes these are automatic updates, other times they are updates that happen inline.

One of the potential iterations coming to plugin updates is in the form of Shiny Updates for WordPress.

Using Throttle To Manage Email

April 22, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

If there’s one thing that unites every single person who works with computers for the majority of their work, it has to be the amount of email we all receive.

At least, that’s my estimation. I don’t know. I’ve been too busy responding to emails to conduct a scientific study.

But seriously, there’s a lot to be said for making sure we control who has access to our inbox and who doesn’t. And I know: We’re living in an age where everyone is trying to “fix” email with a variety of different clients.

The Throttle Homepage

But I came across Throttle some time ago, have been using it ever since, and am really happy with how it helps me manage my email, especially for various online accounts.