Sweet new WYSIWYG editor

Jason Bahl on November 24, 2015

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

Jason Bahl on November 18, 2015

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.

WordPress Moving Forward

Jason Bahl on November 6, 2015

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

Jason Bahl on November 5, 2015

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.