Plugin repo bookmarklet

Sometimes when I’m checking out plugins in the WordPress.org repository, I like to view the source before I download. So partly out of boredom and partly out of laziness, I decided to create a bookmarklet that jumps you from a WordPress.org-hosted plugin page to its subversion repository.

The bookmarklet: Plugin Repo

To use the bookmarklet:

  1. Drag the above ‘Plugin Repo’ link to your bookmarks bar
  2. Visit any plugin page (or plugin’s sub-page) in the WordPress.org plugin repository
  3. Click the bookmarklet and you will be sent to that plugin’s SVN repo trunk url
  4. Boom.

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.