Development

An introduction to setting up SSH keys for server management

By Ben Lobaugh on July 28, 2014

Utilizing SSH keys in conjunction with the servers you connect to is a great and highly recommended security practice. SSH stands for “Secure Shell” and enabling SSH for a server creates a secure channel between you (via the command line) and your server. SSH keys help the server validate and authenticate who you are. SSH servers can even be setup to require a known valid SSH key in order for the server to acknowledge you to begin the login process. […]

Tips for local WordPress development with Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

By Jason Resnick on July 11, 2014

I’ve used local development environments for as long as I can remember. They’ve always been a fluid part of being a developer. The biggest pain point was keeping everything upgraded at all times and switching from one stack to another. In case you didn’t notice, I said ”was”. This is because in the Spring of 2013 I found Varying Vagrant Vagrants, or VVV. With VVV you can have your local WordPress development environment virtually silo’d in it’s own container. There are […]

Automating i18n in WordPress themes

By Brady Vercher on July 8, 2014

According to the Polygots Make blog, WordPress is used all over the world and in many different languages. To put that in perspective, more than a third of existing WordPress installations are non-English and in his keynote at WordCamp Seattle, core developer Andrew Nacin mentioned that only 5-10% of the world speaks English. At AudioTheme, we’ve been selling themes for a little more than a year and have already had sales in at least 45 countries, with only around 52% […]

Better local development with Airplane Mode

By Brian Krogsgard on June 24, 2014

Websites are complicated these days. Even when we work locally, we typically still need to make a bunch of calls to external, online applications, on any given page load. If you’re ever without an internet connection, but still attempt to work (novel concept, right?), then you have experienced this frustration. Andrew Norcross recently created a fun plugin, called Airplane Mode. Airplane Mode attempts to find and prevent external HTTP calls while you have Airplane Mode enabled. This is a fun […]

Software development tips you probably still need to learn →

New Relic has some advice for programming concepts to learn for newly graduated software engineers. While they target degreed engineers, I think these topics are quite practical for anyone that considers themselves a programmer or developer. Some of my favorites:

How to write (More than just code!)
Regex (The justification here was fantastic, and has me inspired)
SQL (Everything is on databases)
Teamwork (A great prerequisite for a job that is probably not focused on enough)

There are ten total items. This post gives me a bit of inspiration to re-think my own learning priorities. Maybe it will for you too.

h/t Dion Hulse

How to build a Gravity Forms add-on →

In an effort to showcase how Gravity Forms can be used as a platform, Rocket Genius developer Steven Henty has created a quite in-depth tutorial on how to create a Gravity Forms add-on.

With over one million WordPress sites running Gravity Forms, there’s already a sizeable install base and a healthy ecosystem is emerging of third-party developers providing high-quality add-ons, themes, mobile apps and custom line-of-business solutions. If the feature requests from customers are anything to go by there’s plenty of room for new ideas and growth.

In response to this dramatic growth, at Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, we’ve been working very hard over the last couple of years to consolidate on this early success with a laser-like focus on stability, scalability and extensibility. The tools we’ve been building provide the common foundation for the development of all our 17+ add-ons and simplify their maintenance. Essentially what we’ve built is an application framework for WordPress and now we’re engaging with third-party developers and end-customer IT departments and helping them use Gravity Forms as a platform for their own projects.

In Steven’s example, he walks through using the Gravity Forms add-on framework to create settings pages, results pages, adding form entry meta, using their web API for storing data on a remote site, and their API for managing data automatically.

If you’re ever in a situation to do relatively complex manipulation and extension of standard Gravity Forms behavior, this tutorial is highly valuable.

On being (or not being) a “dev” →

Zé Fontainhas has written a post that needed writing, and we need to read it. Too often, we pre-judge people’s capabilities based on false assumptions.

Being a contributor to non-developer centric aspects of WordPress doesn’t make someone not a developer. Also, talking a lot about development stuff doesn’t guarantee a developer’s skills. Even moreso, skills with certain types of development are not the only metrics of a developer’s abilities.

In Zé’s more eloquent words:

What is really, really annoying are the assumptions, a disease I see rampant in the WordPress community at large. A disease that fosters the calcification of perceived skills on the one side, and which cements a false sense of authority on the other. It encourages people to say of you “He’s a (this or that)”, and, even worse, it encourages you to describe yourself as the “master of (this or that)”.

…

Success is first of all a factor of skills prior to WordPress, really: a commitment from the board, an adult planning and follow-up, and a competent team that doesn’t shy away from asking and learning, among many others. It goes without saying that all other skills, prior to those, are a given: manners, grace, humour and patience. And, of course, the least common of skills: common-sense.

Hyper-VVV on Windows →

Believe it or not, some WordPress developers code on Windows. This can cause problems with Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) using VirtualBox if Hyper-V is also enabled. I’ve taken the time to implement a VVV setup on top of Hyper-V to reap the benefits of both local WordPress development and Windows’ native virutalization layer.

Results of the first WP-CLI user survey →

Daniel Bachhuber has just published the results of the first WP-CLI user survey. The results should provide some guidance for Daniel and others working on the project, as they shed some light on how people are using WP-CLI, and perhaps some features that may be under-utilized, such as community packages. Predictably, the most common uses cases are installing, updating, and migrating WordPress.

Many respondents requested better documentation. Conveniently, all of the docs are generated from the source code, so if you use WP-CLI, consider submitting a pull request to improve the current documentation.

My personal plea to Daniel: add a wp make bacon command.

Version 1 of the WordPress code reference is online →

In case you missed it last Friday, Siobhan McKeown announced that version one of the new WordPress code reference is now live. The code reference provides for easy exploration of core functions, classes, methods, and hooks, as well as the various core APIs. It also provides a reference list of new items added in each version of WordPress.

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