WordPressOKC Meetup Notes: 31 March 2014 – Moving at the Speed of Creativity

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.

by Andrew Abogado

Several different WordPress frameworks for building websites:

Builder (developed by iThemes from here in Edmond, Oklahoma)
PageLines (this is the one I use on my primary blog / WordPress site)
Genesis
Headway (rumored to be easier than Builder)

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)