Category: Work

MWUG notes from Wednesday 21 January 2015

Some notes from last night’s MWUG meeting. Something I don’t get along to often enough, as Mike has mentioned on occasion. :)
Continue reading MWUG notes from Wednesday 21 January 2015

Business and Open Source

At WordCamp Europe 2014, I described how working with Open Source has enabled me to grow in business, and to grow my business. I talked about the tensions between Open Source and traditional business instincts, and shared how giving in to giving stuff away has powered my growth as a consultant working with WordPress.

If you’re interested in exploring these tensions further, and looking into the philosophical underpinnings of the WordPress project and the Open Source movement, I wholeheartedly recommend Siobhan’s talk: “WordPress: Bringing Ideas to Life”. Continue reading Business and Open Source

I have a dream, about development environments (presentation)

This is the presentation I gave today at WordCamp Manchester, 2014. There’s an embed of the slides below, and you can also download the version with my (fairly verbose) speaker notes. Continue reading I have a dream, about development environments (presentation)

A quick and dirty logger for Gravity Forms

Today I noticed pieces of code to hook into a logger scattered throughout Gravity Forms, when I was trying to track down an issue. Here’s some quick and dirty code which hooks into the logging methods and writes to the PHP error log: Continue reading A quick and dirty logger for Gravity Forms

I had a dream

The first post in a series covering how we currently control our development environments at Code For The People.

Back in 2013 I had a dream. I wanted our team at Code For The People to work within a consistent development environment, which we could jointly outfit with tools and functionality to help us do our job better. I wanted us to be able to assemble resources, plugins and themes and code libraries, as we needed them. I wanted us to be able to easily develop and easily deploy. I wanted something which would allow us to engage freelancers, or even clients, and get them started on development without having to go through complex sysadmin procedures. I wanted us to be able to jump in and help each other at short notice.

I think we’re well on the road to meeting these requirements now, and so I’m due to write up the travails which have got us to this point. Continue reading I had a dream

Testing HTTP redirects with Curl

We’ve got a really complex redirection setup for the current project at work, a mix of some general rules (http://blog.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/blog/), some oddball domain redirects (http://blog.example.jp/ to http://www.example.co.jp/blog/), and some more esoteric ones thrown in there for luck. I started off briefing my colleague with a description of what I needed, but this very quickly became too complex and I realised I really needed to give him a set of initial URLs and expected results. Why not express these rules in a quick test script? My colleague could run the script against the redirects as he wrote them, and see the successful ones and the failures, along with detail about why they failed. Continue reading Testing HTTP redirects with Curl

Human readable Gravity Forms exports using XSL

We have a client who needs to review a very complex form created in Gravity Forms. The form has many fields, and to make things worse the labels displayed to the user and the labels displayed to the administrator when someone submits the form are different. Because Gravity Forms has an XML export, it occurred to me that I should be able to create some transformational XSL to turn that XML export file into a human readable description of the form. Continue reading Human readable Gravity Forms exports using XSL

Alfred Workflow to open a directory in Sublime Text

I’ve recently switched to development in two Vagrant virtual machines (VMs), one VM running Nginx and one running Apache. This means that are two locations I might need to open files from, with two sets of directories representing the document roots of my various development sites. Eventually I got bored of using the terminal to “subl ~/Vagrants/nginx/www/wordpress-whatever/” and decided to write an Alfred Workflow. Now I just trigger Alfred, hit “v client“, and Alfred shows me all my projects in directories with “client” in the name. Continue reading Alfred Workflow to open a directory in Sublime Text