Category: WordPress

New local-to-live deployment plugin falls a bit short

A new local-to-live deployment plugin called WP Live Server Deploy was brought to my attention last week by a post over at WP Force.

The plugin boasts an automated set of features to handle the menial tasks of MySQL dumps + find & replace, plus handling your file transfers. Out of the box it seemed pretty promising. I’d say the biggest disappointment out of the box is a complete lack of SFTP/SSH support for the transfer. You can only do so much over FTP alone and the plugin failed miserably to handle the MySQL part of the equation.

Along that vein, there’s a so-called “Manual” option for handling the MySQL dumps. This would be fine, except that it doesn’t work — it nets an empty SQL file. I’d say @sagetarian has some work to do yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing another iteration. You can download the plugin via the WP.org repo and/or follow development on Github.

Don’t Let Support Get Lost in Translation

I was lurking in the #wordpress support channel on IRC last night and noticed somebody getting the shrug off for a support issue because he wasn’t a native English speaker.

Now, the advice I initially gave him was ridiculed by others in the channel as stupid, but without really knowing the guy’s issue I was doing the best I could with what I could decipher from his broken English. And its not like anybody else was giving it a go, so I invited him into a private chat to get a better feeling for his problem.

We went round and round, him explaining in broken English and me trying to be as clear and concise as possible. Finally, I offered to use Google Translate so he could explain in Portuguese. He was floored that I would do this, but we tried it anyway. Turns out, it made all the difference in the world.

We went back and forth like that, me doing hyperspeed copy pasta with Translate, him doling out the Portuguese and after a few minutes we managed to get his issue resolved.

The problem as I see it is this: WordPress is all about contribution, whether it’s code, knowledge or time. Turning new WordPress users off by turning them away doesn’t really garner much support for the community, especially with the non-English-speaking crowd (who by the way make up about 2/3 of the worldwide community!).

Many users who seek support in IRC support are novice-level and they’re just trying to figure things out. It really doesn’t take all that much extra effort to meet them half way.

Fun?! with Subversion and WordPress

OK, so I’m a bit of a Cowboy Coder and after a session with Mark Jaquith the other week at WordCamp San Francisco, I’ve been mildly shamed into learning what I need to start using version control.

At home I have a pretty high-powered gaming PC and when I’m on the go I’m using a MacBook Pro. So the first thing I did using a (somewhat old but relevant) guide by Westi to setup TortoiseSVN on my PC and started hooking up my WordPress Trunk build repo using SVN. Prior to now, I’ve always sort of done it the hard way, e.g. a whole lot of downloading and ftp-ing a couple of times a week.

First impression: SVN is kind of complicated at first, but once you sort of get the hang of it, it’s a heckuva lot less work overall. After I got the hang of doing checkouts, updates and commits with my local repo, I got a little more ambitious and set out to get SVN setup on my VPS.

After an install, uninstall and re-install, I finally got all of the ra_* (See: Repository Access) modules in place that would allow me to checkout code from http & https URLs. Thanks to a very helpful guide by Otto, I managed to setup svn:externals and perform a couple of checkouts and updates directly from the WordPress trunk and my VPS. Pretty neat.

NoteToSelf: Next time: Read about it, read about it, try, fail, try, fail, fail, WIN.