Sweet new WYSIWYG editor

I came across a new WYSIWYG editor today. Looks pretty sweet. I plan to play around with integrating it with WordPress and/or Meteor in some way.

http://getcontenttools.com/

Keeping tabs on WordPress actions

If you’ve ever needed to see if an action has been fired and/or how many times it has been fired, there’s a handy function that will return the amount of times an action has been fired.

https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/did_action/

This function can come in handy when building things that could be extended by other developers that may want to filter out something.

I noticed it use in the WP-Shortcake plugin (https://github.com/wp-shortcake/shortcake/blob/7c9f5483b9ca10d38fa9412b264a2e6d1e12d528/inc/class-shortcode-ui.php)

The plugin introduces a Shortcode Interface on post edit pages, but only if a specific shortcode ui has been registered.

To register a UI for a plugin, an array of settings must be passed to the “register_shortcode_ui” action, but if that’s not done, the Shortcake UI is never loaded, all because of the “did_action” check.

This is a handy way to make code extendable, but avoid unnecessary bloat.

Helpful Command Line Aliases for OS X

I started a new job this week and with that comes setting up a new computer.

To help make things easy on myself, I like to set up some Aliases in my .bash_profile so I can get things done in the command line a bit quicker.

If you’re looking for shortcuts for the command line, here’s some helpful ones I’m using.

# See http://www.shellperson.net/using-sudo-with-an-alias/
alias sudo='sudo '

# This helps me edit files that my user isn't the owner of
alias edit='SUDO_EDITOR="open -FWne" sudo -e'

# The alias that takes me here - to editing these very aliases
alias edit_profile='open -e ~/.bash_profile'

# I do a lot of web development, so I need to edit these non-owned files fairly often
alias edit_hosts='nano /etc/hosts'
alias edit_httpd='nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf'
alias edit_php='nano /etc/php.ini'
alias edit_vhosts='nano /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf'

# This alias recursively destroys all .DS_Store files in the folder I am currently in
alias killDS='find . -name *.DS_Store -type f -delete'

# This alias reloads this file
alias reload_profile='source ~/.bash_profile'

# Mac get stuck very often and are extremely slow and unstable on shutdowns. This forces a shutdown.
alias poweroff='sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now'

# Setting for the new UTF-8 terminal support in Lion / Mountain Lion
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

# Color listing
alias ll='ls -lGaf'

## Colorize the ls output ##
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

# Show open ports
alias ports='netstat -tulanp'

 

Got any other cool Aliases that you use? Let me know.

Automatic Featured Images from Post Title

As I’ve been starting to post to my blog more often, I’ve struggled with how the design of my site should be. . .I want it to be visually appealing, but I don’t have the time or desire to work on images for all my posts. . .this could be an interesting solution to add more visual appeal with little work.

I’ve yet to check it out, but I’m saving the link here to check out sometime soon.

http://www.wpmayor.com/featured-image-plugin/

EasySearch 2.0

When I was first tinkering with Meteor, I played around with EasySearch and it seemed to be a great package that was easy to use. I didn’t have much need for it, but the more I work with Meteor, the more I feel like I will be needing a good solution for search, so I plan to check out EasySearch 2.0 and see how it might work with some projects I’m working on. It’s looking sweet.

https://atmospherejs.com/easy/search