Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

WordPressOKC Meetup Notes: 31 March 2014

These are my notes from the March 31, 2014 WordPress OKC Meetup group. Since our church session generally meets the last Monday of the month (when the WordPress OKC meet up is held) I haven’t been able to attend for the last year and a half. Our session met last Tuesday because of scheduling conflicts, so I am able to attend tonight! MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS TO THESE NOTES ARE IN ALL CAPS. Tonight’s agenda was a presentation on “Git” and then a variety of different tips shared by attendees.

Wordpress Day by Andrew Abogado, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  Andrew Abogado 

Several different WordPress frameworks for building websites:

Now presentation by Ryan Tvenge (@rtvenge) on Git

Ryan presented tonight with reveal.js, which is a free javascript presentation framework
– the website http://slid.es/ uses the same thing but is a bit easier for newbies to use (also has limited free options, commercial versions available)

The laws of the United States are available on GitHub: https://github.com/unitedstates
Siobhan McKeown is writing a book on GitHub about the history of WordPress (using issue tracking, etc – see “Writing the WordPress Book”)

Andy Clark has “the contract killer” on GitHub

“GIT is an open source, distributed version control system designed for speed and efficiency”
main site: http://git-scm.com/
– this is basically versioning your files so you can roll back and restore versions of your code

Problems with not using version control
– can overwrite or delete a file, lose history
– problem can be exasperated when working directly off a server
– coding tends to ‘comment out’ code as a form of rolling back changes
– time can be wasted re-creating files

GIT is different than CVS / SVN (subversion) / P4
– free and open source
– no network needed
— can create a local repo without a remote repo
– faster
– it’s the go-to version control system (thanks mostly to GitHub)

WordPress theme/plugin repository uses subversion
– you can use the “git svn” command to push to a Subversion repository
– use can still use Git to track your own changes

GIT vs GITHUB
– this is very confusing to many people
– Git is the technology (version control system) that GitHub uses
– GitHub is the website
– it held you host and share your repository
– adds a web interface to your remote repository
– adds features like GitHub issues, forking and pull requests
– they monetize by offering private repositories and other features

GUI options:
Tower is commercial Git client for Mac
SourceTree (free for Windows and Mac)
GitHub for Mac (free, Mac only)

MORE ON THE OFFICIAL GIT WEBSITE

You do a “commit” to make a change and then you “push” it up to the repository to save code on GitHub
– it is NOT realtime by design

GitHub “issues” are for posting problems so that developers can identify and fix bugs

Git tracks changes not only in files but by line

Also offers great rollback capabilities
– can rollback a single file to a given commit, or an entire repo to a given commit

GIT terms
– repo = repository (project or folder that is under version control)
– local repository lives on your computer
– remote repository lives on a server somewhere
— GitHub/BitBucket (cheap and easy)
— Beanstalk (expensive and easy)
— your own server (cheap and robust but not easy)

How To Set Up Automatic Deployment with Git with a VPS

Where to start with Git:
1- create a local repository
2- Create a remote repository for collaboration
3- deploy a website via a remote Git repository

Homebrew is a package installer for Mac (THIS IS GEEKER THAN ME… BUT LOOKS INTERESTING)

Tonight we’re sharing tips from other attendees:

From @morganestes
f.flux is free adjustment of your computer’s color to time of day
– I use Wistia for video embeds
Wistia oEmbed example
– picks the right version of the video based on your browser
– this is the same thing YouTUbe does, YouTube in fact uses oEmbed

Wistia lets you specify which specific domains / URLs are able to stream/embed your videos

I (@wfryer) shared two things tonight with participants:
– my recent post “4 Free WordPress Plugins to Reduce Comment Spam
– the free WordPress plugin ListBuilder from SumoMe to create mailing list widgets and popup screens, integrates well with MailChimp as well as Constant Contact (I recommend Mailchimp since lists with less than 2000 members are free)

Eric shared make.wordpress.org where you can see the WordPress development roadmap

AT THIS POINT I HAD TO LEAVE TO PICK UP MY SON AT SCOUTS… I’LL TRY AND ADD ADDITIONAL LINKS LYNN DYE (@LynnToTheRescue) WAS ALSO WRITING DOWN TONIGHT….

THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR A GREAT MEETUP, I CAN’T WAIT TILL MY SCHEDULE WILL PERMIT ME TO ATTEND AGAIN! ALWAYS LOTS TO LEARN AT WORDPRESS MEETUPS!

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