All The Things... | Keeping it clever...

How I Wrote My First Bash Script to Implement WP-CLI on Managed Sites

They say if you want to learn something, teach.

Or scratch your own itch.

Or just do it.

In any case, I had an itch that I have been wanting to find a fix for for a while.

If you are a developer like me, you began figuring this “WordPress thing” out through tutorials, trial and (mostly) error, and trying a lot of different things out.

Also, if you’re like me, you got into this for several reasons, one of which is the joy of helping people out and getting them a website setup and launched. I love the satisfaction of getting that project launched and the joy these folks have when they realize they can manage their own publishing.

And of course, if you’re a developer like me, you have a shared hosting account with at least a dozen different websites that are small personal projects or folks on the “friends and family plan” (read “free hosting” 🙂 ). This means I have a dozen or so sites I want to make sure I keep updated, but don’t want to spend a lot of time updating.

So, I decided to learn enough bash to write a script that would execute WP-CLI commands on my local environment as well as my shared hosting.

Here’s how I did it…

Filed under: Blog, WordPress Tutorials

Tips for Small Business Owners Getting Started with WordPress

A couple months ago, I was asked to contribute to an article for business owners on getting started with WordPress. The article was just published and I made slot #4 (I don’t think there’s anything special about that, btw ). There was some great advice in the article, especially #1:

Don’t be afraid to get it wrong the first time…

So true!

However, since only a little bit of what I contributed was shared in the article, I wanted to post the rest here.

Just in case any business owners are wondering about getting started with WordPress, please know:

You’re not alone in this.

There’s a lot of help available.

Don’t be afraid to seek help if you don’t understand something.

It’s all going to be ok.

Here’s the rest of what I recommend when getting started with WordPress.

Filed under: Web Development, What I Learned

My First Open Source Code Contribution

A lot of developers have stickers on their computers. Sometimes the stickers are like pieces of flare. Sometimes, they’re like merit badges. Still, other times the stickers are like a signal flare. Whatever the case, I geek out about them a bit. I see the stickers somewhere in between a merit badge, a piece of flare, and that signal flare.

I have one sticker on my laptop:

Filed under: Blog, Life, What I Learned

July Checkin, Goals Update

I’m big on setting goals and areas of focus for the short term. My general goals and mantra for 2017 are summed up in the post Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger… I usually like to see where I’m at halfway through the year and adjust accordingly to either get back on track or set some different goals.

So far, 2017 has been crazy busy and a lot of fun. We celebrated the birth of our daughter January 11th and the fun (and work!) has not stopped. Being a parent has been awesome, and our daughter is an exceptionally easy infant. I know others don’t have as easy of a time, but this gal is already sitting, standing, eating pureed food, and smiling ear to ear. We love her a ton!Continue reading

Filed under: Blog, Snippets, Web Development, What I Learned

How to Use a Filter on TinyMCE to Add Buttons

Recently, I was asked to add a button to the visual editor for posts and pages on a WordPress install that would insert the  code for article pagination . I had done this before, but wanted to write about it here, since I’d totally forgotten how to do it, and wanted to make sure I had a snippet or two for reference.

Filed under: Blog, Snippets, What I Learned

How to Pass Information from One Page to Another with Forms and JavaScript/jQuery

This is a quick post, just to share something I learned.

Recently I got a request to create a simple submit form with a an email input that would direct to another page and take the email address and pre-fill a more complex form with email, name, address, etc.

Below is the code I used for it.