Always developing
I’m writing a short series for Delicious Brains on building reactive style frontend WordPress plugins. Part 1, which uses Backbone.js on the frontend, just went live.
This first article is rather long as it introduces the plugin and its backend as well as how to use Backbone.js. Follow up articles should be shorter as each one will concentrate on building the frontend with a different technology, and won’t deal with the backend so much.
Over on the Delicious Brains blog I’ve written about a couple of ways to use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate when using a Linode NodeBalancer.
It was a fun exercise, and will no doubt come in handy for a couple of projects I have in mind.
There’s been a number of times when I’ve wanted to quickly check the value of a record in the wp_options table of a WordPress site’s database, but not had easy access to the database, usually when the site and database are on a remote server. I’ve tried using the /wp-admin/options.php page, but it’s not ideal and does not show the contents of serialized values, which of course is where so many interesting values lie in wait.
There are of course a few existing WordPress plugins for working with the wp_options database table, but none have quite fit my needs, either by not showing values in a usable way, not having good search and sort, or simply throwing a million errors when in debug mode (which you always seem to want on when the need arises for checking your options records).
Although I’ve been developing WordPress plugins for Delicious Brains since mid 2014, I’ve never actually released a plugin of my own. That doesn’t seem right, especially as most of my team mates have excellent plugins of their own.
So I’ve scratched my itch as they say, and have developed and released my first open source WordPress plugin called Options Pixie.
Actually, as I write this, Options Pixie has been released and available from the WordPress plugins repository, GitHub and my own business site for over 7 months, as I released it at the beginning of July 2015. I guess the fact that I haven’t spoken about it here, only once on twitter, is a testament to my awesome marketing skills. Maybe not.
I’m not sure why I haven’t been jumping up and down and shouting about Options Pixie, as I’m really quite proud of it. It works very well for what I need it to do, and I went to great pains to make it a very high quality and robust WordPress plugin. Maybe I can just blame my natural and very British reserve?
Regardless, I’ve finally finished off this post (I started it just a few days after releasing Options Pixie, 7 months ago), and encourage anyone that finds themselves in the position of needing to check the contents of their WordPress site’s options table to search the WordPress plugins repository and install Options Pixie. It’s currently at version 1.0.1 having had a few bug fixes, and there’s a new version in the wings which improves some of the behind the scenes functionality, enhances working with base64 encoded values, and is tested with the latest versions of WordPress.
Options Pixie on wordpress.org
Here’s the highlights of what Options Pixie offers:
List, filter, sort and view options records, even serialized and base64 encoded values.
With Options Pixie you can find out what is really going on with your WordPress options. I’m also working on Options Pixie Pro, a paid addon that adds bulk actions such as delete and fix serialized, add, edit and delete functionality, and of course priority email support.
Recently in a Slack chat we discussed how we try and stay healthy while working from home. We all have different methods, some have been consistent and dedicated to staying fit and healthy, some not so much. We’ve all decided that we’re going to “air our laundry” with this post, whether it’s clean or not, …
Delicious Brains Blog
Across on the Delicious Brains blog I gave a sneak peek, including screencast, of an ultra cool feature I’ve been working on for the Multisite Tools addon for WP Migrate DB Pro.
Update 2019-10-26: Missed Three is no longer available from the App Store, sorry.
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Today I had an email from Apple to say that my first iOS game, Missed Three, had entered In Review status, which I thought was pretty good as it’d only been submitted for review a week ago. Then, just 30 minutes later I received another email to tell me that Missed Three was ready for sale through the App Store.
I guess when you make what is probably the simplest game on the App Store, it doesn’t take very long to review! 😉
It really is a very simple game, keep tapping the targets as they appear, when you’ve missed a total of three the game is over. Of course, it starts off at a reasonably slow pace, giving you a little while to tap a target before it disappears, but as the game goes on the targets disappear in an ever shorter time. It really does get pretty hectic if you’re doing well.
If you get a new high score, you get an opportunity to share it with a friend by sending them an email. I intentionally did not add sharing by Twitter, Facebook or any other social media as I don’t like seeing those kinds of things pollute my timeline, so why would I make it easy to do that in my game? Just challenge your friends directly, you know who will or will not take up the challenge, so why annoy anyone else?
If you’re looking for something short and sweet to challenge friends with, you can purchase Missed Three from the App Store.
I reviewed a great little plugin called GitHub README across on the Delicious Brains blog.
My fourth blog post for Delicious Brains is a review of the Extended CPTs library for WordPress.
I wrote a post for Delicious Brains to give a Preview of the Multisite Tools Addon for WP Migrate DB Pro. Apologies for the video that accompanies the post, in my defence it was my first ever screencast!
Another article for Delicious Brains where I guide the reader through contributing to WordPress for the first time: A Developer’s Guide to Contributing to WordPress Core.