Category: Beyond

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WT:Social And The New Age Of Social Networks

I've been following Jimmy Wales for years and I'm extremely excited to sign up for his latest project: WT:Social. If you've heard of WikiTribune before, WT:Social takes a similar take on social networks after the endless number of scandals around Facebook. The new social network just crossed 110,000 users and quickly picks up traction among the tens of millions of angry users of ad-populated networks, selling data to 3rd parties, overhearing conversations "by chance" and broadly, gamifying their experience around market domination, not human development. Are There Social Networks? Marketers know that content marketing for Facebook or Twitter is called… Continue Reading
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On WordPress and Working Smarter

Today I found two brilliant posts that I would like to share with as many people as possible. While everyone is focused on what the market says or what seems natural, occasionally there are many obvious factors that are left unnoticed and could affect our entire life and career. The first article that I've read was Morten's "WordPress is Not Easy and That's OK". It covers several perspectives from people outside of the WordPress community who have heard how easy it is to use the "5-minute install" and build everything with themes and plugins, and tried that on their own.… Continue Reading
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The Low Barrier of WordPress

Coen Jacobs wrote a post recently, asking Is WordPress Too Easy? I was about to follow-up on that, but due to time constraints, my thoughts flew away, but I felt the urge to do a part 2 on that series, with some other thoughts. What is WordPress? No, I'm not going to define that as most people are already in the industry. But I keep getting various mixed signals from other people around me. The casual one that you've already heard is: "but WordPress is just a simple blogging platform". I'm fine with that and I have a few canned… Continue Reading
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Git and GitHub for SVN developers

My latest post on contribution tips I learned from scribu was mostly influenced by his work on GitHub on projects such as WP-CLI or wp-posts-to-posts, and his setup over there. I also had a few related contribution-related posts before than (and several more to come in the next few months). Ajay commented on one of them asking for some tips for migrating his work to GitHub (while he has numerous plugins on WordPress.org now). I'll post some of my favorite links I send to fellow colleagues starting with Git. My first SVN-revisioned work was in 2006 and I started working with Git… Continue Reading
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Java is not JavaScript

Recently I've been taking notes on some tweets and job offers from different individuals and companies around the world and there are 2 common mistakes I see everywhere: WordPress is spelled exactly like this - with a capital 'W' and a capital 'P'. Please don't hire people for yourself if you are not aware of the correct platform name. JavaScript is not Java! As a developer with Java background myself I feel pretty much confused when someone is hiring developers with: "PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Java". Unless you're using a Java bridge to design a Java backend and a PHP… Continue Reading
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Xdebug on Ubuntu for WordPress

Turns out enabling Xdebug on Ubuntu for Eclipse PDT is easier than doing the same on Windows. The short version is installing the module as per this tutorial - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=525257 [bash] sudo apt-get install php5-dev php-pear sudo pecl install xdebug sudo updatedb locate xdebug (this one finds the xdebug path) sudo gedit /etc/php/apache2/php.ini [/bash] Adding this line (/w the path): [bash] zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20060613/xdebug.so" sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart (or sudo apache2ctl restart) [/bash] This install the xDebug and enables it. Then we need to add a few more lines of code in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini (as in here): http://holisticsecurity.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/php-xdebug-xampp-win32/ [bash] xdebug.auto_trace = 0 xdebug.collect_includes =… Continue Reading
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Idea: “Theme Check” for plugins

WPCandy published a great post on plugins and the numbers of plugins to be used per website. Recently more and more developers do complain about the number of plugins that a client is running. But nobody asks the real question: how many of these plugins are actually of  _high quality_? From what I've encountered through the years is that when my installation starts to become unstable at some degree, it is always a result of one or two plugins coded the wrong way. I could remove them two and add 15 more, it doesn't matter if they are okay. So… Continue Reading