Responsible developers don’t work live. Working on a local copy of a site and only pushing it live when it’s ready is one of those sensible development practices that everyone should follow, but it can introduce some hitches when working with WordPress. Luckily, wp-config.php is the one core file that’s never overwritten by a WordPress update, so it’s safe to rewrite it to be a bit more useful. The wp-config.php file is generated from wp-config-sample.php by the WordPress install script and anyone who’s worked with WordPress will be familiar with the contents so I won’t list them in full, but you can view the default contents of wp-config-sample.php in the WordPress SVN repository.
I moved my office this week. I didn’t move far (20 miles) and only had one van-load to move, so I scoured the local listings for a man & van service. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked for something similar on Gumtree or the like, but I’ll save you the trouble: an endless list of (often badly-written) ads ending with a first name and a mobile phone number.
The advantages of loading scripts from Google’s CDN are fairly obvious – for a common script such as jQuery, we’re on to a better-than-even chance that the user will already have the script in their browser’s cache from other sites, reducing the total download weight of your site. Even if they don’t, the file will be downloaded from their nearest Google CDN server, which will still be faster than downloading it from your site because it will be downloading in parallel from a different host.
In Part 1 of this guide, we covered how to set up a portable development environment with the basic set of software tools (a web stack, an IDE and a good text editor). Continuing on, we’ll create a project and make it portable. The instructions given are specific to Netbeans because that’s what we set up in Part 1, but can be easily adapted to your IDE of choice. Once again, you’ll need to follow the first part of this guide on both desktop and laptop.
Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ recent posts on his iMac plus Air setup, I thought I’d document how to set up a seamless development environment between desktop and laptop. If you intend to set up a similar environment, you’ll need to perform these steps identically on both machines. Part 2 of this series will deal with the basics of setting up a portable project, and Part 3 will cover setting up advanced tools and source control.
I read an article on Six Revisions today on the subject of a designer’s perceived arrogance versus the client’s better knowledge of their business. It could have been a good article; it had some very valid points, but it was completely spoiled by setting up the most egregious straw man it’s ever been my misfortune to read.
Before I start, let’s get some stuff out of the way: I’m no Khoi Vinh. Neither am I an Ethan Marcotte or a Jeremy Keith. I’m not a published writer on the subject of grid theory, or a speaker on the conference circuit. However, this is the Internet, where everybody has an opinion – and this is mine. This post was inspired by Mark Boulton’s post on designing from the content out, which I subsequently failed to discuss with him in 140 characters.
