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I used to be all open source minded when it came to development tools, frameworks and systems. I loathed Windows and more specifically, the price associated with it, but the longer I stay in the field, the more I start to understand the benefits in certain occasions, with using closed source app’s & services.

It seems the more software and services make an exception for me &/or the people/organizations I support, the more I start to make an exception within myself to use software and services you should pay for. Below is a list of examples of these app’s or services I have or am currently considering paying for:

• Coda
• Navicat
• TextMate
• Pandora
• Araxis Merge
• VM Ware
• Versions
• Amazon s3
• MediaTemple
• Windows Home/Media Server (which as I typed this every hair on my body cringed)
• iWork
• Adobe Web Developer Suite

There’s probably a few others I’m leaving out, but for me, these all would be worth having a paid version / account for.

Ok, so on my “terminal” window (I’m on a mac, but pretty sure it’s the same for any other *nix machine, with maybe just a few variances in syntax), I type the following:

scp username@remote.server.net:archives/somefile_012710.tar.bz2 ~/Desktop/

Also, I’ve never tried it yet, but supposedly, if I ssh into the remote server with the -A flag (??? correct me if I’m wrong, please), it will copy my private secure key on my machine into my session. This would be useful, so that if i want to skip my local machine & copy a file directly to a second remote server, it would let me.

echo "<pre>"; print_r($wpdb); echo "</pre>";

But, let’s say the plugin you’re working with in WordPress isn’t in the $wpdb object & you still need to grab a list of non-standard tables, I’ve been using the below code to grab the information I need.

class BlogTables {
	function selectNames() {
		global $wpdb;

		$prefix	        = "qdf_"; // other non $table_prefix prefixes
		$sql		= "SHOW TABLES LIKE '".$prefix."%'";
		$avail_tables 	= $wpdb->get_results($sql);

		foreach ($avail_tables as $tables) {
			foreach($tables as $key => $table){
				$blog_tables[] = $table;
			}
		}
		return $blog_tables;
	}
}

You can grab the dirty output from the above code with

$tables_avail = new BlogTables;
$tables_avail->selectNames();

From there, you should be able to use it for whatever it is you need to use it for. If you have a better way of doing things, I’d be interested in knowing.

For us, the two most common settings we change are found right under the General Settings sub-heading; uploader type and post/page autosave. For many of you that work with WordPress day in & day out, you can imagine how handy this may be, but for others who don’t know, I’ll explain a little further.

The first one, Uploader type, will allow you to change from a flash uploader (for items such as images, pdf’s, etc) to the default browser uploader. Now, for many, this would actually be a step backwards, but in our case, where our server config is just specialized enough so that the flash uploader doesn’t work correctly, it’s a very nice feature. One that’s solved a lot of headaches for us & has simplified image uploading.

The second one, Post/Page autosave, is also a very handy feature. Often times, when working with multiple authors, editors and admins (esp. in WordPress MU systems), users will click on the wrong post, but stay on the edit page/post page long enough for the autosave to engage. This causes a red banner across the top of the page to alert the next user that they’re working in an auto-save version & often times results in a post/page version conflict, often times being escalated to a top level admin to resolve (meaning me).

Now, both of these cases come in handy for our situation, but isn’t necessarily for every one or every development shop.

To enable WordPress debugging on either MU or the standard version open up the wp-config.php file.

Add the code around line 100 (actually, this part doesn’t matter, but just a suggestion to keep wp-config.php organized):

// Turn Debugging On
define('WP_DEBUG',true);

To turn off debugging, just comment out the define line or change it to false (should work, never tried changing it to false yet).

——————————————
Keywords: WordPress, WordPress MU, Enable Debugging, Disable Debugging, Debug, WordPress PHP Error, PHP Error’s, PHP Errors, Turn on php error debugging

As much as it hasn’t been fun to go through this process, it has taught me the importance of making sure all your “T’s” are crossed and “i’s” are dotted. I’ve heard from multiple developers at various firms that say “Develop in Firefox, and when the site is completed, debug your IE(6)”. The problem is, as true as that is for CSS and formatting your site, it’s becoming increasingly difficult (and will continue to be as the web develops and IE6 stays the same) to hold that philosophy when it comes to functionality (and I believe a lot of the developers that made that statement would or will start to agree in the next few years, if not already).

What we’re finding as an overall trend is that a lot of data is being pulled through the web through client side scripting, as opposed to server side. While libraries like jquery and mootools have done a tremendous job at making IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) work, I still find a lot of quirky things I have to work around in development. And although, most of it still comes back to CSS preferences, I still waste a tremendous amount of time at the end of the project going through and trying to figure out why IE6 doesn’t like a particular div, span or more recently <body> tag (dealing w/ graybox – which could be it’s own post in bashing how they decided to structure their iframes), than I would had I just debugged IE along the way.

The other benifit would be as a particular site enters into our clients QA process and the client is chomping at the bit to get their hands on the site, we’ve had and have taken time to make sure IE (and really, all the major browsers) have going through multipule QA tests, over a period of time. The payoff is that if you’ve only been given 10 days for developement, by doing QA along the way, you also have 10 days of QA. Now we can’t really fit 20 days of work into 10 days (although at Blend we seem to do this on a regular basis), but knowing when and how a particular issue arrose is extremely valuable when it comes to debugging, esp when it comes to IE (which doesn’t have firebug (it does have a development tool bar, but I find many times it is less helpful than just adding a 1px solid red border to the <div>’s of a particular section I’m working on.

All in all, QA is and has been knocking on my door, and I cannot strees how important it is for those developers out there to go through some sort of QA process. It’s ok to do your QA at the end (and I still recommend for some projects, esp larger, longer deadline ones), but if you’re in the type of business where your deadline typically doesn’t allow for the nessesary QA time, doing QA all throughout the development life cycle may prove benifical to you.

Let’s say you have in your WordPress install 5 or more categories, but to the general public, there’s only two categories you want to show (such as the case with http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/). In this blog there’s multipule categories, some of them for a public post / Q&A section and the other for the author blog posts and still, some more for the sidebar featured products section. Well, to the general public, they don’t need to see the Featured Products or the Q&A section in the general feed, but rather just the blog posts, from the various authors partisipating. So let’s say they post to the category ID’s 22 & 23, well in your link tag in the header place the following tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed"

href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>?cat=22,23" />

Which outputs in html as

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="Mid Market Innovators RSS Feed"

href="http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed/?cat=22,23" />

In the case of Mid Market Innovators, the feed was placed into a feedburner plugin, which redirects the http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed to the feedburner link. But, this should still work if you’re not using feedburner. If you run into any troubles, post a comment.

I’ve come across a problem when building out a template where we need to display one post one the home page, but it needs to be a single view (so that it displays comments on that post) but cannot impact the query that shows a list of blog posts below. So, here’s a solution:

<?php $wp_query->is_single = true; ?>

    <?php $post_count = 0; ?>

    <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>    

        <?php if ($post_count == 0) : ?>

            <?php the_content(''); ?>

        <?php $post_count++; ?>

    <?php endif; ?>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Below is a wireframe pic

Hope that helps – let me know if you have any questions.

Amendment:

I left something out, in order to display the rest of the posts I had to output an additional query. Something like the below code should work:

<?php $additional_posts - new WP_Query('cat=1'); ?>

<?php if ($additional_posts->posts) : ?>

<?php while ($additional_posts->have_posts()) : $additional_posts->the_post();  ?>

<?php the_content(); ?>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

What happens is that Google, will crawl through the web, looking for the key words that you set up. Well these spammers sites have these same key words, so when Google crawls the spammers site, Google flags it as an alert and sends the spammers website url/address to your email, saying it’s found a site that’s met your criteria.

Well, when you click on the link, it brings you to the spammers site, which then will do anything from collect stats to redirect you to another site that looks like it’s scanning your harddrive. Below are a few screen shots of what happens when it scans your harddrive (even though it’s not really scanning).

The below pic is what happens after you click on the window. It asks you to install this virus scan (even though it’s a virus) – It’s an exe file, so on a mac (which doesn’t know what to do with an exe file), it doesn’t do anything. Notice my little Mac symbol in the upper left corner.

The sad this is that many fall for this – don’t you be one of them!

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap