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.

I Am Guilty of Blog-Neglect

Something I discovered at WordCamp San Francisco over the weekend shouldn’t come as a great shock: I’m not the only developer/designer who can’t / doesn’t keep an updated blog. Who’s got the time?

I made a sort of promise to myself the other day and that was to try to blog at least once a week. With all of the troubleshooting and tinkering that goes into any Web project, it shouldn’t be that difficult for me to outline the problem and solution right here on WerdsWords. So that’s the plan, we’ll see if I can follow through. Call me out though if you start to see weeds growing up between the cracks.

WordPress On the Brain after WordCamp San Francisco

Wow, OK, so this is a random collection of thoughts after #WCSF last weekend.

Never before have I dreamt, thought about or immersed myself in so much WordPress in such a short amount of time.

#WCSF proved to be ample opportunity for networking, learning, eating and traveling. I met a lot of really passionate people out there from bloggers to developers, designers, entrepreneurs, web hosts and many of the people behind the mammoth that WordPress has become. It really was a fun time.

So here’s a shoutout to Adria Richards, Theme.fm, bluehost, Dream Host, the guys over at Media Temple, Matt Mullenweg, Brad Williams, Jeff Kropp, Lou Anne McKeefery, Pete Mall, Brian Tickler, Dan Ross, the guys over at StudioPress, Adam Chew, Linda Sherman and many others.

Probably the best-spent 3 days I’ve had in the 3 years I’ve been developing and designing for WordPress. Until next time!