Thinking: Our Blog
Olympic Press Box site the latest successful collaboration
As the 2012 Summer Olympics plays on in London, stories of inspiration and victory are being reported at breakneck speeds in what is surely a personal best for the sports media world. We’re proud to say we had a hand in helping NBC Sports achieve this win with the design and development of the NBC Sports Group Press Box site. Adhering to the gold standards of NBC branding, our team designed and launched a site using the WordPress platform and hosted on WordPress.com VIP that allows for quick, easy and complete content sharing across mobile, tablet and laptop screens.
July 14th marked the beginning of yet another successful WordCamp in the City on a Hill, making it Boston’s third time to host the event. Approximately 600 speakers, attendees and volunteers arrived at Boston University from all over the world to congregate around a common entity, our beloved WordPress.
Saturday morning kicked off with one of what I found to be one of the most well-presented and informative talks, How We can have Nice Things, by K. Adam White. The session was focused on demonstrating how the modern WordPress developer can spearhead new and upcoming web technologies such as CSS pre-processing, server-side Javascript, client-side templating, and source control. Doing so allows developers to expand and update their creative process outside of the traditional LAMP stack workflows. continue reading
Earlier this month, approximately 600 of my closest friends and I attended WordCamp Boston. This was my first experience at a WordCamp, and it did not disappoint. I attended several great talks, but one caught my attention: Aaron Jorbin’s “Developing an Automated Workflow for Front End Development“. This was a presentation packed with applications and utilites to aid in reducing development bottlenecks.
Mr. Jorbin suggests utilizing the command line, using dotfiles, and using tab completion to speed up the process. Taking advantage of hooks in git will help to automate workflow, or use your computer’s camera to take a photo of you on a commit.
For WordPress deployments, WP Stack and Capistrano can be a great help.
Mr. Jorbin crammed an almost overwhelming amount of information into the short amount of time he had to present. I have only scratched the surface. I strongly suggest reading through the blog post and trying out some of the tools he has listed there. I’m planning on incorporating some of them myself and I would love to hear what tools you have found useful.
WordCamp Boston is happening this weekend (July 14 and 15) at Boston University’s George Sherman Union building. After a booming start to our July, the Oomph team is energized and ready to attend, present and sponsor this long-awaited event that we know will leave you just as energized—and empowered—with new information, techniques and Camp friends to call on throughout your future WordPress endeavors. continue reading
Earlier this month over 800 fellow WordPress developers, designers, bloggers and sponsors assembled at Baruch College in New York City for WordCamp NYC 2012. The two-day event provided a unique opportunity to both learn from and network with other members of the global WordPress community.
Continuing on my recent WordCamp tour, I was lucky enough to be in New York City two weekends ago. Marking my seventh Camp in nearly as many months, I was privileged to be chosen to speak in one of its twelve tracks. Thankfully, I was scheduled to speak in the first timeslot, which gave me the rest of the day to attend some excellent tracks. After presenting my talk, Moving Beyond the Codex: Learning WordPress From Itself, to an engaged, if groggy, group of developers, I wandered back and forth between the Developer and Advanced Developer tracks.
Today at WordCamp NYC, I gave a presentation on how you can work with WordPress via a command-line interface (CLI.) This presentation covered how you can can poke and prod WordPress core and API by using WPSH, a custom script built on top of Facebook’s PHPSH.
Also covered were approaches to write command-line scripts for WordPress, using this knowledge to build tools for importing and exporting blog data, as well as some of the higher-level issues involved with processing bulk data.
One question that was offered after the presentation had to do with my familiarity with wp-cli, which I admit, I had none. It appears that the wp-cli utility is useful for atomic operations on the blog, like upgrading core, adding users, &c., whereas wpsh will give you an interactive environment to run any PHP / WordPress API code that your heart desires. I will be sure to give props to wp-cli in my next talk, and discuss how it differs from wpsh, and the advantages of each.
You can obtain the presentation slides at github.