Chris K Designs

One of the most common things I get asked about when talking about developing WordPress plugins is my tools and development environment. Now, developers have all kind of tools and setups that they feel is the ‘Best’ way to do things. It’s all a matter of opinion really. It all boils down to needing a few things though, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that you are comfortable with, an LAMP, MAMP, WAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP), SVN, and a download of WordPress. I’ll go through these 1 by 1 and show you how to get setup.

First off, a good book on development with your desired platform is NEVER a bad thing to have. I recommend Professional WordPress Plugin Development. They just released a new version of it and it’s a fantastic resource.
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You have no idea how hard it was to refrain from using the command ‘sed’ in a totally ridiculous homophoned title. Have you found yourself wanting to change the domain on an established WordPress installation, or even trying to replicate many times over the same exact WordPress database on a different domain? Yeah, me too. I’ve found while doing plug-in development, it helps to have the same database information copied over when I start with a new branch. Luckily, Linux comes to the rescue with the sed command. It’s a 3 step process. Export your source/current database. Search and replace with sed, and then import the database. Here’s a step by step for you.
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The 404 – File Not Found error. Its the darkest corner of your website that you probably don’t encounter too often, but do you know how often others are getting them on your site? Odds are, you don’t. One way to increase visitors (and more importantly keep visitors) is to avoid the 404 error, or embrace it by planning for it. Part of development is to always test the ‘negative case’. The case in which you know your code will fail. The same holds true in URLS. What happens if someone goes to a page or URL that doesn’t exist on your site? Go ahead, try it…I’ll wait. – There, that wasn’t so hard was it? What did you find? For most of you using WordPress, it’ll be a standard 404 page that your theme is using. Not too bad, but how many people are actually seeing this, usually content-less, page? Let’s find out.

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