Category: Resources (Page 24 of 60)

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

Making The Switch To Postmatic

November 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I decided to install the latest Postmatic beta on this site in order to give it a try. For those who aren’t familiar, Post Status has a great write up about it and you can watch the promotional video for it below:

In short, I think that anyone who manages a blog with any number of subscribers and commenters wants an easier way to manage their comments.

Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a few of us. But I know that I spend a significant portion of my day in my inbox, and I know that I try to respond to every comment that I get on this blog.

Sure, some fall through the cracks and that sucks, but having everything aggregated into email should alleviate that problem, right?

A WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator

November 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Since the release of the latest version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, the top two things that people have requested are documentation complete with examples, and a generator to ease the pain of having to replace certain tokens throughout the boilerplate’s codebase.

And I’m all for it – I’ve even committed to begin providing this material in early 2015 (and not just via the project’s website, but a few other channels, as well – more on that later). The awesome thing about open source is the contributions that can come from other people.

Sometimes these come in the form of patches or pull requests, other times they come in the form of extensions, enhancements, and other types of projects that help improve the initial project.

It’s awesome, isn’t it?

Formance for Client Side Form Validation

October 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Arguably, one of the most tedious tasks that comes with building pages – or just parts of pages – is form validation. And by that, I mean handling all information that users provide in a given form and making sure that it’s in the proper format and safe to write to a data store.

For the most part, we don’t build forms that freely accept any type of information. We’re usually looking for names, dates, addresses, phone numbers, and so on. Sometimes, we’re looking for more, like payment information, in the case of building an eCommerce site.

At this point, there are validation libraries in the majority of common programming languages. This means it’s pretty easy to hook up a library to our work, pipe the information through it, and then report any errors before actually submitting any information.

But in the context of web applications, good validation is usually two-fold:

Client-side form validation
Server-side form validation

Using Codeship For Continuous Deployment of WordPress Projects

October 9, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone who has worked on commercial software for an agency or an organization – either large or small – is likely familiar with the idea of continuous deployment.

And it’s a great thing, right?

At several points throughout the day, all of the code that’s been committed to source control is run through testing, compiled (if needed), and then deployed after which an email is sent giving statistics of the build.

When working with WordPress, I think that tools like that are far less common. Instead, we test things locally, maybe we deploy things to staging, and then we hand off the project to the consumer or to the client.

For very small projects, I think a case can be made that that’s acceptable – I mean, you can go overkill on nearly anything – but if you’re going to be working on something that has a lot of moving parts and will be used by a lot of different people, doesn’t it stand to reason that having some type of deployment strategy something we should all be using?

Why I Use GistBox

May 31, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Note that I no longer use this particular piece of software as I've resulted in using standard Gists.

One of the tools that I’ve been using more and more each day is GistBox. As the website states:

The Beautiful Way to Organize Code Snippets GistBox is the shared code library your team needs.

This isn’t a bad explanation by any means, but if you’re a single developer and/or you’re looking for quick reasons as to how this may be useful in your day-to-day workflow, this particular sentence leaves something to be desired, right?

Personally, I was skeptical until I gave it a try, but now I can’t really imagine not using.