WordPress Moving Forward

One of the biggest complaints about WordPress’ commitment to backward compatibility is that it’s hard to move forward when supporting old versions of PHP.

Recently (I became aware today) the requirements for WordPress have been updated to be php 5.6+ instead of 5.2.4+, which means some deprecated code can be dropped and new ways of doing things can be implemented much easier.

This is great news for anyone not running a version of PHP < 5.6, but ideally that should be most people running WordPress.

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/

Headway annoys me

I’ve had to help maintain a few blogs that were built on Headway and it’s unbelievably frustrating to work with. I’m sure there’s some great things about it if you spend the time to get to know the ins and outs of it, but it’s pretty annoying to work with.

Today I spent some time migrating a blog away from Headway, and realized it’s even more annoying that I thought. I was trying to move some SEO data (meta descriptions and titles) and hunting down where Headway stores data was frustrating.

Instead of storing the data for posts in ‘wp_post_meta’ or ‘wp_posts’ like one would expect, Headway creates a new option for each post in ‘wp_options’ and stores everything as a searialized array under that option. I’m sure there’s some explanation on why it’s done this way, but it’s frustrating to work with if you’re used to traditional WordPress standards.

Again, I’m sure there are great things about Headway. I know they’re successful and have a strong customer base, but I find it frustrating to work with, and can’t personally recommend using it.