Edward Caissie » WordPress

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.

WordCamp Toronto 2011 Takeaway

Edward Caissie — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:50:03 +0000

Although WordCamp Toronto 2011 was last weekend there were several ideas I will be taking away from it in regards to future development, best practices, as well as some interesting concepts and discussions. To keep it simple I’m just going to list these items (with their inspiration):

Install MultiSite for use with Theme Demos (Ron and Andrea Rennick)
Look into PhoneGap to make HTML5 WebApps for the iPhone * Review Sencha Touch as well (Trevor Mills)
Review all of my Themes to add a ‘description’ parameter to the register_sidebar and register_sidebars definitions * Update the codex, too, if it is not done yet (Jeremy Clarke)
Monetize What You Do (Christopher Ross)
Develop “site” plugin(s) (Rick Radko)
Use inline documentation * PHPDoc (Chip Bennett)
Review do_action and apply_filters in place of conditional function checks (Chip Bennett)

There were many more ideas and great pieces of advice, as well as some really sound tips and suggestions through the day (which I simply made myself comfortable in the Developer track for the duration).

The above were just the ones I specifically made note of (literally using the “Sticky Notes” program). Don’t ask me why I didn’t use EverNote at the time, but all of the above are now listed in an EverNote list for future reference and recollections.

Some of these ideas I am already putting into action, such as the inline documentation in a PHPDoc style; some items I had already been looking at; and others are more as reminders to keep thinking about what can be done.

Just like my site tagline at WPFirstAid: It’s WordPress … anything is possible!

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.

Add WordPress Required Version and Tested Up To Version

Edward Caissie — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:17:45 +0000

I just made my second submission to the WordPress Core Trac with the summary above. Here is a link to the new ticket #16868 … and here is the description:

The premise of this idea is for Theme authors to be able to add a reference to the version of WordPress their Theme requires to work correctly; and, the version of WordPress the Theme has been tested up to. This idea comes from the the plugin readme.txt file and some of the data that is expected to be found there.

Once implemented, further enhancements to the Appearance tab in the Administration Panels can be added to better inform end-users on the compatibility of the Theme with their current WordPress installation.

This is essentially an extension of my previously submitted ticket #16395 to “Add ‘Template Version’ for use with ‘Template’ in Child-Themes” I wrote about here.

Automattic = dot-wp?

Edward Caissie — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:32:02 +0000

Yesterday this post was made by Matt Mullenweg regarding the recent accreditation of Automattic as a domain registrar.

I think this leads to a real possibility of dot-wp top level domains (TLD)! As I have recently fallen to the little known affliction of IDA I am quite concerned that this may create a unscratchable itch?! Will this create a digital land-rush for .wp domains?

There is also the potential for a dot-blog TLD that may be more appealing to the Internet in general. As it is, for more general details regarding the creation of a new TLD, head over to ICANN and read this article

Time Flies

Edward Caissie — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:11:56 +0000

I cannot believe it has been 10 days since I last made a new post here. I do not even have the excuse of being busy posting on my other sites although there have been a few posts made.

I wrote about the lastest release of one of my plugins, BNS Featured Tag version 1.8.1 on October 3, 2010. It was more or less my standard announcement post when I release a new version of a plugin.

A few days later, I wrote about the latest version of Ground Floor, 1.6, on October 6. Again, a simple announcement post for one of my free WordPress Themes.

The following day I posted an article at WPFirstAid.com under my nom de plume for that blog of The Doctor. The gyst of the article was how to Extend the WordPress Menu, referring to adding content to the wp_nav_menu() function output. I started writing the post on October 6 and published it on October 7 as I found it a bit more involved to explain the technique for everyday use after it had been sorted out.

Yesterday, October 12, I wrote a post for the just opened domain WPTRT.com. I registered the domain a little while ago for any potential uses the WordPress Theme Review Team (WPTRT) may need that were not readily available. The post itself was a summary of the First Meeting the WPTRT held on October 9, 2010 (via IRC).

It seems I have been busy doing a great many things I enjoy over the past 10 days which proves the old adage:

time flies when you’re having fun!

Manna and Music

Edward Caissie — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:33:56 +0000

These items just struck me as having a great photogenic and blogging potential: my Filthy Chai Grande; and, a brand new Apple iPod Nano. The picture was taken with my iPhone and uploaded via the WordPress app.

Starbucks Filthy Chai and Apple iPod Nano

I used my Starbucks card to pay for my Chai, it was pre-loaded earlier this week. The hand-written drink order on the side of the cup just looks so naturally part of the design, its as though the cup was printed just like it appears. Quality penmanship is becoming more and more rare in these days of digitality that when you come across fine example such as this one it should be shared. Also to note, Starbucks in Canada also offers free wi-fi to everyone.

My wife and I used Airmiles to get the iPod Nano for our daughter, Jackie. It arrived at my desk this morning; I had not thought about seeing it anytime soon as the confirmation suggested it would be two to three weeks before we would see it. It’s soooo small! … and, it still has a serious “cool” factor about it. Besides, we had to do something with all those airmiles.

Just looking at the two items on my desk made me think what a great picture this would make … the rest of the post is just my usual musings.