I’m so glad that I’ve found Wordpress; not only for my hobby of blogging but it really has been such an educational experience over the last few years for my development.
As far as personal web development; I’m not even close to what I want to know about web development or web programming, I’ll probably never get there, but developing for Wordpress or around Wordpress has led my progression of web development. Only 5 years ago I was using using Dreamweaver for everything, now it’s TextMate. That’s not a measurement of know-how, to me it shows that I’m comfortable.
For project development it’s what I use to development almost any site. It’s just too good of a platform not to develop around. The plugin system allows for such great extensibility and the community of great developers gives you almost everything you’ll need a a project or allow for you to extend another’s work.
The 2-3 plugins I use for the majority of freelance projects are to manage what the client sees on the backend or what s/he can do. I advise anyone using Wordpress to develop websites for clients for it hide the fact Wordpress was built initially for blogging. There are ways to get around with some of the terminology with plugins or localization, never ever edit the core system unless you don’t care about upgrades and eventually security. My favorite plugins and strategy will have to wait for another post, maybe part 2.
Current development: A few weeks ago I took took the task of getting Ventura DUI site online with the goal of it being at the top of Google for the search term “Ventura DUI” or “Ventura DUI Lawyer“. The development was easy, the design took a while and is still not complete but easy to implement because of Wordpress themes system. As expected getting the site to the top of Google will be tough but with plugins like WPSEO and WPsitemaps made/make the standard SEO tasks easy. It’s now just a waiting game for Google to rank the site above the others who have PRs of 0.
My other projects waiting in the wings will also get the Wordpress makeover and I can’t see myself ever using anything else for a client, even basic splash pages.
Mobile Admin 1.1 has been released. I mentioned earlier what the new features and fixes are. If you’re a 1.0.x user this is a huge update.
Oh yeah, we also support the iPod Touch.
No not the 1.1.1 firmware update that must have just been released after I left the house this morning, I’m talking about Mobile Admin for the iPhone.
Jared and I will be releasing a major update to the UI, some key updates:
While working on the CSS today I notice one major property that the iPhone does not support, even though Safari 3 does, contrary to what this article states, appearance does not work on iPhone’s Safari even with the webkit prefix. It was a big deal for me because it would have solved a lot of the issues I have with our approach to skinning the admin UI.
Jared and I were talking last night and he’s got some great plans for the plugin and I’m looking forward to how it unfolds.
[Updated 10/5]
Version 2.0 was just released.
Version 2.0 – multiple mobile browsers supported
After a week and a half of hard work Jared and I committed Version 1.0.2 to Wordpress Extend. we lapsed and forgot to test the plugin on the 2.2 branch and now we’ll need to pull it back for a later release when we get everything straightened out for the majority of users.
Mobile Admin started it’s development shortly after Matt requested on the [wp-hackers] mailing for the community to create an iPhone Admin theme in response to the MovableType iPhone beta theme released just a days prior.
Jared did the majority of hard core coding and I centered around the interface and CSS. Since I was the one with the iPhone I was the lucky one to exhaustingly check in and test new CSS changes for testing on the phone, since there aren’t any good development tools for iPhone devs; iPhoney is phony before anyone suggests it.
Here’s the current trac project home for bugs and management.
Here’s the support and suggestion forums. If you have an iPhone we really need your suggestions so please throw them out to us there.
Or if you have any contributions or changes you’d like to make directly just contact us.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Details:
iPhone / Mobile Admin UI for WordPress?
The plugin home page is on WordPress Extend.
Contributors
Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron
Gives a mobile-friendly admin UI to browsers by User Agent. The iPhone is the primary supported device for the first release.
Description
Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress? admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones. The iPhone is the primary target (and only supported device) for version 1, with more to come in the future.
Most common WordPress admin features are supported:
… with more to come in later revisions.
Other resources
Please submit all usage questions to the support forums
The Trac server can be used for viewing changes and submitting tickets
SPECIAL NOTE – Testing and bug reporting is especially encouraged, as only one of us currently owns an iPhone.
I love the wordpress community, except the guy ranting/trolling about the security/privacy in 2.3. After sending an e-mail out to the [wp-hackers] list about the issue I had last night early this morning they not only showed me this in the codex but someone just updated it with full instructions.
FAQ Installation « WordPress Codex
How do you force a database upgrade?Under certain situations, it may be necessary to cause a database to pass through the upgrade process again. To do that, you need to lower the db_version value in the wp_options table that corresponds to the version you want to upgrade from. For instance, if you want to force the database upgrade that happens from 2.0.11 to 2.3 you would change your db_version to 3441. To force an upgrade from 2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.2, or 2.2.3 to 2.3, change that value to 5183.
”’db_version”’ for WordPress releases:
2.3 = 6124
2.2.3 = 5183
…
It never fails me, no matter how “easy” I try to make the wordpress upgrades with SVN and supllying my own repos there’s always something that goes wrong.
This time when setting up my sites with my own wordpress repo that I apply updates to I mistakingly overwrote the wp-contents folder, taking it out of checkout and then resulting in the svn update to bomb when it got to that folder.
It shouldn’t have been a big deal, just delete the folder or rename it then do another update. Well I ended up running some of the update.php scripts prior to noticing the problem and the upgrade when bad. I’m not sure how they became related but my guess is there were some files in the includes or the admin folder that weren’t included.
I ended up having to restore two dbs, including this one and rerunning the script (again) after a proper checkout. Argg, and I also had to stay up this late messing around when I should be sleeping.
I’m going to suggest that the wordpress devs include a force upgrade script, since that would have alleviated the restores. I wonder what and where get_option(‘db_version’) checks or is it something else I could have reset to force the reinstall.
This somewhat requires you’ve followed my suggestions on not committing yourself to a certain host or your own DNS or mail servers, if not the extra steps might take you 10 more minutes, maybe days.
There are plenty of ways to migrate to a new server depending on how you’ve setup the server or your host, these are just to show the simplicity of my migrations after following the post linked above.
Step 1:
Rsync your other server’s files to the new one.
SSH into your new box and run rsync to connect to the old machine through ssh. It’s going to pull over every file to the new host that you specify.
rsync -avz -e ssh root@[OLD MACHINE IP]:/home /
example
rsync -avz -e ssh root@64.13.227.XX:/home /
This is probably the most important time saver, it will help dramatically in a planned migration since you can run this multiple times after the initial sync. The purpose of rsync is that it will only pull over changed files since the initial rsync.
Step 2.
Run a mysqldump your DB and either use scp to grab the file from your old host or use wget after placing the dump in an accessible place on your webserver. Then just import it after receiving it on the new host.
Step 3.
For people running their own server you’ll now just need to reconfigure apache, which shouldn’t take long since there will only be slight changes in the new httpd.conf file.
There has already been a long debate about hosting your own DNS servers and mail servers but I’ve found once again relying on Godaddy total DNS management and using GoDaddy e-mail forwarding has made my three migrations over the last year a breeze. So I suggest to everyone:
Suggestion One:
Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.
For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.
This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.
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I’ve completely neglected this site over the last week or two and I’m disappointed I completely brok my goal of posting every day. And it’s not that I don’t have much to post about either; I bought an iPhone, I’ve got a lot of tutorials for CentOS on Media Temples (dv) plan, I moved off of Trac and went with Warehouse for all my repos and there are some great projects I’m working on mostly all on Wordpress. There’s just so much for me to type and review. Even today, I’m using the Grid from (mt) again for a client, the same client that allowed me to spend money on a Xacti HD2 from eBay and a Casio SD7500 I just came home with from Circuit City, so I hope I catch up and when I do it shouldn’t stop again.
I have to if I intend to keep pushing the revenue I get through this site into gadget reviews and hosting tutorials.
Jared, Sara and I ran in the Oasis Triathlon today. I tried to give up a few days ago when I ended up being sick for 3 days but my plan to finish the triathlon with no training ended with me running through the finish line, not crawling. This was our first triathlon, and I didn’t know this but after biking it’s impossible to get off your bike and walk. My legs just kept going for some strange reason until I had to force myself to stop, or the pain did. My legs are extremely sore but I’ll survive.
.
Thanks to all the volunteers, it was great.
