Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for Web Development WordPress

Setting Up a WordPress Development Environment with DesktopServer and GIT for WP Engine

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One of the challenges in using WordPress with an external hosting environment and multiple developers is the creation of a local development environment with version control that will work seamlessly. Fortunately, using a combination of DesktopServer from ServerPress, an industrial-strength WordPress host like WP Engine and Git, you can have multiple development environments up and running relatively quickly. In this tutorial, I will explain how to create and set up a local WordPress development environment on a Mac, using DesktopServer by ServerPress, using a WP Engine backup point and then set up Git for version control. If you don’t use WP Engine, this tutorial probably won’t be very helpful.

I highly recommend WP Engine for reliable, secure WordPress hosting. They provide excellent customer service, daily backups and an easy restore process, a staging environment, git for version control, and much more! I like them so much that I would recommend them to anyone (even if I wasn’t part of their affiliate program, which I joined after using their service).

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Posting From WordPress to Google+

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Google+ WallpaperI’ve been working for the last few weeks to try and figure out an easy way to automatically add posts from my WordPress blog to my Google+ page. Hoping that someone else had already created a plugin, I searched in vain both in the WordPress plugins directory, as well as other WordPress sites and forums. I thought I had finally found a way, however, convoluted to be able to semi-automatically add a blog post to my Google plus page. However, it seems like every time I almost figure it out, there’s still one piece missing.

A cool thing, though, is that if you use the Google+ badge on your site, you can +1 your post (which you should do anyway for all of your posts, right?) which then allows you to share the post on your wall. It’s an extra step, but it makes it easy for you to easily share your latest post on your Google+ page.

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Removing the /blog Slug in WordPress MultiSite

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Wordpress LogoI ran into an interesting issue at work today. We’re setting up a company blog using WordPress and we’re using the multisite functionality to manage how different sections of the blog work. This may not be the most efficient way to do it, but in the corporate world, you want to make sure that the right people have the right access to the right sections so everyone can work in their own happy little space.

Everything was working fine until we started setting up permalinks according to the instructions provided by our SEO expert. The issue we ran into was that WordPress automatically adds a /blog slug in front of the permalinks. My understanding is that this slug is to avoid conflicts between permalinked categories on the main site and sub-sites that may have the same name. That makes sense. At the same time, though, there should be a clearly explained way to change this in the network admin section of the site.

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Manage All of Your WordPress Sites in One Place With ManageWP

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WordPress

If you’re like me and have a lot of blogs that you manage, either for yourself because you have a lot of different ideas for what you want to put out on the Web or for multiple clients if you’re a web developer with multiple clients, ManageWP is a godsend.

DISCLAIMER: While I don’t currently have an affiliate relationship with ManageWP, I hope to have one in the future (once they get their affiliate program up and running).

ManageWP makes the work of maintaining and updating multiple blogs simple. When you log in to the site (after you have set up all of your blogs), you can instantly see which sites need WordPress updates, plugin updates, theme updates and have outstanding comments and spam. Then, with a click you can either see exactly which blogs need what updates, or you can just update everything automatically.

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