Edward Caissie » News

WordPress GTA

Edward Caissie — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:26:06 +0000

There’s a new Meetup group in town … the WordPress Greater Toronto Area Meetup group, or WPGTA for short. I have been considering starting a Meetup group focused more on WordPress design and development for the last several months but I have also felt there was never enough time to devote to organizing it.

Now, although I have not magically added more time to the day, I also feel if I do not simply get started the ideals I have envisioned for this group will never see the light.

Ideally this Meetup group will also serve as a complimentary one to the growing number of WordPress related ones in the area. The Greater Toronto Area, or GTA, itself holds a large percentage of the population and spreads over a very wide geographic region⁽¹⁾.

Although there is no established agenda, or a first meeting scheduled yet (keep an eye on the calendar one will be announced soon), I look forward to being able to share my experiences and knowledge; especially that gained working with the WordPress Theme Review Team as well as the knowledge I have gained creating and releasing WordPress Themes and WordPress Plugins into the WordPress Extend repositories.

Also, look forward to the WPGTA Meetups to take place in the Mississauga and/or Oakville area. One, I live in the area; and two, to be quite honest, I’m not a fan of driving “into the city” … and hopefully this will allow others interested in attending a WordPress Meetup group easier access.

We will probably start out meeting in coffee shops or other WiFi hotspot locations⁽²⁾; moving into a community center, library meeting room, or other larger venue is well within possibilities as the group grows.

… and remember to bring your “tools of the trade”⁽³⁾

To see the footnotes click here.To hide the footnotes click here.

Footnotes:
(1) 2006 Census data as noted on Wikipedia
(2) Starbucks comes to mind first but there are other eateries and venues that may work well for small gatherings.
(3) Bringing a laptop is probably a good idea … you can write good code anywhere but not if you don’t have the tools to do it.

Goodbye Klout

Edward Caissie — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:49:02 +0000

Although I was quick to jump on the Klout wagon when I first came across it, this is just a quick note more than anything else about my just as quick decision to stop using the service.

I would expect no one should see any more unsolicited tweets et al. to use the service from me; and I also believe I have clicked enough buttons and disconnected all of the services that were attached to Klout as well.

I didn’t find any “close my account” or “cancel my service” options but then again Klout really does not seem all that interested in having your permission to assign a “score”.

So long and thanks for all the +K.

New < 140

Edward Caissie — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:45:33 +0000

I just updated my < 140 block to:

I am Cais: WordPress junkie and blogger; maker of fine themes and plugins; WP Theme Review Team admin; Guitar player; and, mischief manager

For consistency purposes it’s the same “bio” details I use on most (all?) of the social networking services I belong to; which, sadly, are simply too many to remember at the moment.

Although my primary social media site is Twitter (@JellyBeen) I can be found most places if you search for Edward Caissie … look me up; and let me know you saw this post, too!

WordPress 3.3-beta1

Edward Caissie — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:41:31 +0000

Although it was released yesterday, I am following my normal routine of using it live now.

If you are interested in following along and helping with the beta testing, you can read my post on WPFirstAid.com on how to “Start Using WordPress Beta“, or you can download the “Nightly Build” at WordPress and start from there.

A New Workflow

Edward Caissie — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:54:01 +0000

After an interesting discussion on twitter with @curtismchale, @ericmann, @mikeschenkel, and @rarst I have decided its time to have another look at “local development”.

The basics so far have been the following downloads:

Tortoise SVN and Git are for the version control aspects of this project; WampServer (since I am testing on a Windows PC) is for the “local” environment; and PhpStorm is a recently discovered IDE that ties all of these together.

The next step was choosing a plugin and theme as well as setting up WordPress, my preferred CMS for development. I chose to go with the Nightly Builds version of WordPress, keeping it up to date via the core subversion access.

The plugin and theme are respectively ‘BNS Theme Add-Ins’ and ‘NoNa’. The first, a new WordPress plugin I recently released; and the second, one of my WordPress Themes due to be updated. To test the version control aspects these are now being maintained via github.

Although it has been a bit of a stumbling, grumbling affair I am finding the mix of these tools to have some interesting potential. I have been doing most of my current development work on “live” test servers (all I need is access to the Internet) and have always found everything goes quite well.

Transferring an existing project into the new process goes along these lines:

Download existing project via FTP into the local environment folder.
Share the new plugin/theme with GitHub.
Develop and test in local environment.
Deploy to a test server for online testing.
Commit/push changes to GitHub.
Repeat steps 3 through 5 as needed.
Release to the appropriate WordPress repository.

Starting a new project would work in a similar fashion … maybe.

The discussions on twitter gave me reason to reconsider local development so I will give this some time, namely the 30 day demonstration period attached to PhpStorm. If all works out I may just spend the $99 for the application and make this my new workflow.

BNS Theme Add-Ins 0.1 Live

Edward Caissie — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 22:49:02 +0000

Sometimes I look for any reasonable excuse to post; this one is just to hard to pass up as a new “status” post.

The following is from one of the newer Plugin repository enhancements: an email notification when an update is made to a plugin you contribute to.

Revision

445926

Author

cais

Date

2011-09-30 22:30:33 +0000 (Fri, 30 Sep 2011)

Log Message

Added Paths

bns-theme-add-ins/tags/0.1/

bns-theme-add-ins/tags/0.1/bns-child-theme-add-ins.php

bns-theme-add-ins/tags/0.1/readme.txt

bns-theme-add-ins/trunk/bns-child-theme-add-ins.php

bns-theme-add-ins/trunk/readme.txt

Diff

Property changes: bns-theme-add-ins/tags/0.1

Added: bugtraq:number

Added: bns-theme-add-ins/tags/0.1/bns-child-theme-add-ins.php (0 => 445926)

Long story short: the first iteration of “BNS Theme Add-Ins” is now available on the WordPress Extend Plugin repository.

BNS Theme Add-Ins

Edward Caissie — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:35:03 +0000

Although it started more as a “Mallory-Everest” idea, I just submitted to the WordPress Extend Plugins repository the “BNS Theme Add-Ins” plugin. My 11th submission!

It is a collection of functions and code that can be used to extend the capabilities of WordPress Parent-Themes and Child-Themes. Current functions:

* Add BNS Extra Theme Headers
* Add BNS Child-Theme Version Control
* Add BNS Readme Menu Item
* Add BNS Changelog Menu Item
* Add BNS Child-Theme TextDomain and i18n (translation) support

Although I did offer to release each of the above functions individually, how I optimized this initial release (read: alpha version) requires the code to remain intact.

I usually make these announcements on BuyNowShop, but this plugin quickly became very special as I utilized more advanced code techniques as well as core functionality I have not implemented in the past; and I just didn’t want to wait until it get subversion access.

Besides, this seemed like a great “Aside” post to make.

Enjoy!

WordCamp Toronto 2011

Edward Caissie — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:34:48 +0000

It’s Official!

WordCamp Toronto 2011 is now listed at WordCamp Central!

We have a date: November 5 & 6, 2011

We have a venue: George Brown College

We need sponsors! We need speakers! We need volunteers!

Most of all we want you to come out and enjoy a great WordCamp and learn more about WordPress and the Toronto WordPress community … and remember, even if you have never heard of WordPress before, you are more than welcome to come out and enjoy the time with us.

Google Wishes You a Happy Birthday

Edward Caissie — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:01:35 +0000

Although it was actually a day early according to my calendar, it was still a nice surprise to see the Happy Birthday image when I arrived at the Google home page.

It’s just a little something from Google that happens if your profile has your birthday information. I had read this earlier in the week from one of the fine folk I follow on twitter and had not really thought much of it … but there it is: Google wishing me a (early) Happy Birthday!

Helping Hands

Edward Caissie — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:19:12 +0000

It always seems to get the busiest when you least expect to be busy. Where has all the time gone, I have not posted here in just over a week and before that it seems I was not to be found nearby either.

Let’s call this another update post and I will relate what is new in the last little while …

I have acquired more domains, I think I am getting to be a little addicted to buying domain names … is there a 12-step program I should be looking for? The latest domains are:

Although I am the person of record for these domain names they really are for one of my wife’s, Terri, pet projects. The RatTrain.com site will be used primarily as a hub of information for the transportation of fancy pet rats from one place, typically a rescue operation, to their forever (sometimes foster) home. The volunteers that we hope to see get involved in this are in no way restricted to just moving rats but are also encouraged to move any breed they are comfortable transporting as well.

The idea of helping all animals, especially those found in animal rescue organizations prompted the idea to also register the RescueRelay.com name (which will be temporarily “parked” on the RatTrain.com servers).

My thoughts are as the RatTrain expands to other breeds of pets, we will easily be able to open up the RescueRelay site to help with consolidating that information into one central hub, too.

In the meantime, if you are able to help, by all means please do. There are many animal resuces that could always use more help; food, supplies, transportation … even your time … all donations would be welcome.