WordPress News: How to use GIT for WordPress Development

Do you like Time Travel? Do you also like saving your work files? Well now you can do both at the same time by using Git to save your files while keeping track of each change, to each file along the way. Once you’ve saved (committed) a file in the project, the old version is saved forever allowing you to travel back through time to make changes or revert back to old files when needed.

Imagine your just uploaded your beautiful new custom theme to your WordPress site and you realize that you forgot to save your old CSS file and you’ve just overwritten the old one on your web server. You now have no way to revert back to your latest version of the old layout in case you have problems with browser compatibility in the new layout.

Git is a very powerful version control system that allows you to keep track of all your files during a project so losing file version along the way will never happen. This requires a few extra steps during your saving process, but it has saved the skins of many programmers from all over the world every day. Now, we should all try to save backups of our projects and files to protect from data loss and keeping old versions. Git takes that idea but saves each version of that file since it was created. It also protects someone from editing a file at the same time someone else is, preventing overwriting of each others new version.

Let’s take a look at the Git structure to get a clear picture of how the system checks out and references each file.

Git file reference structure

This table shows us how Git associates each file to the master project. Each time a change is made, a “snapshot” of the entire file structure is made. This allows us to see our project in front of us, while old versions are saved and hidden from view unless we physically use our time travel capability to revert. Additionally, if no changes were made to a file in a new commit, the old version will automatically be referenced instead of uploading the unchanged file into the project commit. These basic features are why Git is so powerful and efficient, that might explain why 42.9% of professional software developers reporting that they use Git as their primary content version control system.

To learn more about Git the features and the benefits, please refer to these links from which this article was sourced.

• Beginner Tutorial: How to use GIT for WordPress Development
• Git Basics
• Git: Community Information Article
• Eclipse Community Survey 2014 Results

Interview with Danielle Baldwin: Social Media/Content Strategist, WordPress Developer

This is L. Danielle Baldwin. She is a Social Media/Content Strategist, WordPress Developer and The Founder of the very first WordCamp RDU in 2009.

Why did you start using WordPress?

I started using WordPress back in the day when it was called b2 cafelog around 2002. From there I have just followed the application and was able to watch it morph into what WordPress has become today. I started using it initially as a blogging tool but very soon after I got the hang of it, I started using it to create blogs for other people.

Interview with Daniel Payne

Daniel Payne of Tualatin Web has been developing commercial web sites since 1995 and programming since 1975. So it made sense to me to get some key insights from someone who has been in the business for a number of years.

Q: What made you decide to become a member of the WordPress community and to become involved in organizing the PDX WordPress meetups?

A: I first heard about WordPress in 2008, after I had already created and sold my own content management system, it become clear that the team at Automattic had a much superior product so I decided to focus on customizing WordPress for business users. Later on I signed up at MeetUp.com and then discovered the Portland WordPress Meetup group. After attending a few meetings I started to get more involved, and eventually became an organizer. I wanted to give something back to the WordPress community, and also at the same time raise awareness for my own web development company, Tualatin Web.

Q: How long have you been working with WordPress?

A: My first WordPress install was in 2008. I started coding web sites in 1995, and computer coding in 1975.

Q: What made you choose to use WordPress‘s CMS over other methods of content management systems?

A: I also looked at Joomla, Drupal, Concrete, Wix, etc. It seems like every month we have yet another CMS. WordPress was the most intuitive CMS to learn, use, and develop for. WordPress is also the #1 CMS in the world, so it makes most business sense to specialize on the leading tool.

Interview with Duane Baumgartner: City Ranked Media Founder

I recently seized the opportunity to interview Duane Baumgartner of City Ranked Media, Vancouver, WA. Duane is a Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing expert and founder of City Ranked Media. He has 15+ years experience assisting small business owners in obtaining positive results with their internet advertising. He is a dedicated student of the SEO world and Google AdWords certified. Duane was raised in Oregon and is a resident of Vancouver, WA today. His passion is being directly involved in seeing his clients grow their business through the services City Ranked Media provides and takes pride in providing innovative, out of the box ideas to build and grow on.

Adam: Tell us how City Ranked Media got it’s wings.

Duane: I remember running across an article that projected business owners in the next year were going to spend 40% more in Search Engine Optimization services than the previous year. At the time I had been working for a large advertising company selling print and some internet based products, including PPC campaigns. I had become proficient on the internet side and believed that was where I could make the largest impact in helping small businesses and decided to go out on my own and start City Ranked Media. I began using drag and drop editors and was really in the dark trying to make my way through it. I came to the realization that this wasn’t going to fly and I had to find a long term solution.

Installing WordPress on Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services  (AWS) offer a way to host your own WordPress sight with no hardware and little to no expense on a small WP blog site. This is ideal if you want to start working with a self hosted WordPress site for developmental purposes, monetization of your blog, or just good ol’ bragging rights.

In this article I will go into an overview of the EC2 service and the various Virtual Machines (referred to as instances from here on out) that are free and paid. Some may be free to download and initially spin up but may incur an additional cost to the AWS price tier even if you are in the Free Tier. Even though I discuss the free tier exclusively and micro-instances it should be mentioned that the AWS allows for scalability of your WordPress site so it can grow as your site(s) grow.

There are various pre-made instances for use with your AWS account that are configured for just about “one touch” configuration. Some are free, others are free to upload to AWS but incur a usage cost, and others cost for upload and usage. A few of the providers are; Bitnami, JumpBox, and Turnkey Linux. If you do choose to go with these “one click” solutions be sure to read all the print to verify if there are any charges for the instance or use of and how the charges are calculated.

Domain Name Services: Postman of the Internet

Domain Name Services (DNS) is a service which exist to help us humanize the addresses of networked resources. Humans remember words as a whole easier than numbers representing octal based Internet Protocol addresses of those same networked resources be them across the Wide World Web or just an arms length away on our local network.

That was a mouth full. Essentially through DNS you can type in a URL into your favorite web browser and through the process of name resolution your system contacts a server acting in your behalf to find the correct IP address that matches the human oriented address you type in.

Sounds simple but a lot of chatter between various servers near and far may happen just to pull up that favorite site that you wish to view. First your own system will see if it has the particular IP/URL pairing locally in it’s own tables. On your computer this information will be kept in a host.txt file and depending on the operating system the location varies.

Interview with Troy Uyan: Developer in the Making

Browsing ClarkWP Magazine you have surely ran across a good few articles by Troy Uyan, but do you know Troy past his profile pic and awesome articles? A student here at Clark Collage, he is studying web development, but leaves in his wake much more than required assignments.

A primary example of Troy’s contributions to the web is his work helping develop Shulnak Village, a project that supports education and literacy in rural Tibet. Though his is contributions alone make a grand statement, you would be amazed to discover that this site boasts many hidden features supplied by Troy. These features include not only a fully responsive layout but also use of WordPress as a CMS. He accomplished all of his work for Shulnak Village before even finishing his classes on responsive design or WordPress.

Troy finished those classes on responsive design and WordPress and put his new found skills to work immediately. He created his own personal site, Troy Uyan, and had this to say about the process:

Interview with Chris Martin: Professor and Web Developer

Chris Martin has been a web developer since 1997. Chris is also a documentary film maker, writer, speaker and professor here at Clark College. Chris started teaching about a year and a half ago, which has inspired him to learn even more about the subjects he teaches: Web Design, Web Multimedia Content, and Web Video Production.

Chris loves people. He loves listening to people talking about their passions. Chris believes first and foremost that stories matter. Because of that his mission is to tell stories about people, businesses and organizations that are positively impacting others throughout their communities and around the world.

“In Internet years, I am ancient and have had to redefine my skills and abilities several times based upon changing technologies and amazingly smart people who have developed open source projects such as WordPress.”

Here are a few sites that Chris created with the use of WordPress:

• Oregon National Guard Association
• Help 4 Cancer
• 360 Safety Solutions
• Emmaus PDX
• East Vancouver Eye
• Holiday Light Squences

WP Weekly Podcasts: An Untapped Resource

If you’ve been looking for a fun and informative source for WordPress news and info checkout WordPress Tavern: WP Weekly Podcasts, a great resource for WordPress news, reviews, and interviews. Contributor Jeff Chandler is the host of WP Weekly Podcasts provides community members with great advice from WordPress developers, contributors and other web based companies, who provide insights that you would not have access to anywhere else.

Extending Your WordPress Plugin

Ian Dunn discusses different ways to customize WordPress plugins without losing your changes after upgrades. The main takeaway is to use the functionality and Code Snippets plugins to create and manage changes. Additionally users are encouraged to get in touch with the plugin creator.

For more information checkout Ian Dunn’s article, “The Right Way to Customize a WordPress Plugin” and WordPress Tavern’s article, “How To Extend A WordPress Plugin Without Losing Your Changes.”

Interview with Eric Mann

I recently had the chance to interview Eric Mann of 10up.com, a web development company that specializes in WordPress. Without further introduction, here is the interview:

JB: Who are you and what kind of work do you do for 10up?

Eric Mann of 10up.com

Mann: First and foremost, I’m a web developer. My actual position at 10up is “Senior Web Engineer,” a role in which I write code, review code, and train other developers. Most of my projects are heavy on the back-end with PHP but I’m also fairly adept with JavaScript as well. At the moment, I’m working on the development and refinement of a few WordPress themes and two different advanced plugins.

Interview with WordPress Developer, Jeremy Wilson

By Isobel Lennox

For the Clark College WordPress class, each current student was assigned to give an interview regarding WordPress to any persons of our choice. I chose WordPress developer and cat enthusiast, Jeremy Wilson. The interview has been modified into a comic strip. You can also read the text version of the article.

Enjoy!

How to Become a Professional WordPress Developer

“How To Become A Top WordPress Developer” by Smashing Magazine’s WordPress writer, Jonathan Wold, was written in 2012 but still holds true today.

…becoming a top WordPress developer is hard work — very hard work. It’s going to take a lot of time, energy and determination. If you’re looking for an easy checklist or some “fast pass” to the top, you’re going to waste your time. Being one of the best is hard, and statistically speaking, the odds are stacked against you.

The article covers the basic steps and practices you need to take to earn the name “WordPress developer.”