Microsoft IIS goes down

My beefs with Microsoft are many, however, I will tip my hat to Bill Gate’s many generous donations to charity. That’s really the most remarkable thing about Microsoft: it gave birth to one of the most magnanimous philanthropists of an entire generation, and no words can express thanks for that.

BUT…. historically, Microsoft’s products have typically been poor knock-offs of existing technology. You get an inferior product AND you have to PAY for it: it’s the worst kind of insidious lose-lose situation imaginable.

Let’s take a quick waltz through history and review products that Microsoft has ripped-off (thank you David A. Wheeler):

• BASIC: Microsoft’s BASIC was released in 1975, but BASIC itself had been invented back in 1964
• MS-DOS: 1981 Microsoft released this hastily written knock-off of Unix.
• Windows: Released in 1985, clearly inspired by Apple’s Macintosh (which, in turn, had been inspired by Xerox PARC).
• Windows NT/2000: finally provided limited multi-user capability by liberally borrowing ideas from the pre-existing VAX VMS and Unix systems.
• Word: Microsoft’s 1983 knock-off of a word processor was based on Lexitron and Linolex (1972), and WordStar and WordPerfect (1979)
• Excel: Microsoft’s product borrowed from the original VisiCalc (1978) and Lotus 1-2-3
• Access: uses Codd’s models, which were developed in 1970 (before Microsoft even existed)
• Internet Explorer: an extension of the older NCSA Mosaic web browser.
• Active Directory: a re-implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), with Microsoft’s proprietary variant of MIT’s Kerberos often being used for identity authentication.

Mr. Wheeler sums it up nicely:

All major Microsoft products are essentially re-implementations of previous products; none are fundamentally innovative.

So, who is dumb enough to pay top-dollar for a second-rate product? Simple: CORPORATIONS. Big businesses are Microsoft’s last stronghold. They are inefficient, bloated organizations incapable of rational thought. Instead of getting stuff done, corporations are designed to feed you coffee and harvest your pee. And these legal “people” are demonstrably psychopaths who buy Microsoft products.

The thing that is fundamentally wrong with some of these products is that they waste enormous amounts of time. Take Internet Explorer as an example (ah yes, bring forth the whipping boy): how many hours, days, weeks, months, or YEARS of man-hours has that browser wasted for web designers and developers? I’m reminded of the burning of the library at Alexandria or the destruction of non-canonical texts by early Christians: how many hundreds (or thousands) of years did that set back civilization? What a waste. And I have to wonder, how many years has Internet Explorer set back our technological civilization? A similar comparison could be made for IIS.

So to wrap this up, I salute NGINX: may their momentum snuff out the IIS’s inefficient bloat-ware once and for all.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Microsoft takes another hit: NGINX tops IIS

Yes, this is a rant. My beef today is this: the WordPress manager might be easy to use, but under the hood, it sucks. There, I said it. It’s awful architecture and it has taught thousands of web developers that it’s Ok to write piss-poor code. This has single-handedly dumbed-down a whole generation of developers by setting a bad example. WordPress is the junk food of coding standards: ubiquitous, tastes good, but lacking any nutritional value.

I’ve ranted about WordPress before but what put me over the top today was the Suffusion Theme. It looks like a clean layout, so I thought I’d give it a try. Holy flaming monkey balls, was I in for a shock!

Holy Smokes: The Suffusion Theme is not just a Theme

This theme not only has a metric-crap-ton of options, it also does the unthinkable: it allows you to register custom post-types and custom taxonomies. Does that sound like something else? Why, yes, it does: THAT, my friends, is A PLUGIN. Now, no offense to the theme’s author — it’s a clean interface and he obviously takes a lot of pride in his work — but this type of thing should never occur. A theme should never introduce extra functionality. What happens when you change the theme? Your whole site could collapse.

The conclusions that I have to draw about about the architecture here are pretty negative: WordPress allows (or even encourages) the polluting of application layers in very unhealthy ways. It’s a very serious black mark for an application to allow a theme to get away with that. The view layer should be static: no logic, no functionality, it should merely determine how data is displayed.

This is hardly the end of the architectural infractions WordPress is guilty of, but it is perhaps one of the most obvious. I’d better leave it at that: the way WordPress is built allows for severe architectural flaws that make development difficult or impossible. Buyer beware.

Post from: TipsFor.us


How WordPress Destroyed the Internet

A lot of developers, designers, students, and even web-hobbyists have a lot of items on their to-do lists for any particular site or project. You have to remember to fix that one CSS glitch, or rewrite a page to use some new function… the lists can be long and daunting. If you’re like me, you’re likely to forget half the stuff you need to do, and if it weren’t for project management software, I might as well stay in bed.

To put it mildly, there are *a lot* of applications out there that help you track bugs and manage projects, and this article only looks as a handful of them. Although the general purpose of these web-applications are similar, there are substantial differences in the pricing models, features, and usability, and hopefully this article will help you identify an application that is right for you. Or, if you’ve never really thought about using one before, maybe this article can help show you why project management / bug tracking software is good to have around.

This post only covers project management. I’ve discussed invoicing softare in another post. Some of these packages include time-tracking and invoicing, but that’s just a “nice-to-have” for the purposes of this article.

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with any of these companies. None of the links in the article text are affiliate links; I don’t get a kickback or commission on referrals, I’m merely sharing my opinions and experiences using the software in the hopes that it’ll help inform the decisions of others.

Here’s the list… some of these are hosted solutions (software-as-service), and some you have to download and install.

Zoho

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: This suite of Apps seems like they were hoping to get purchased by Google Apps… kinda similar, but more labored somehow.

My Intervals

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users:4

Wiki?:yes

Notes: You can get 1 project for free… but the functionality is limited.

Bit Bucket

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: 5

Wiki?: yes

Notes: yet another solution…

Unfuddle

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: 2

Wiki?: Yes, called “Notebooks”

Notes: This is one of my favorites for hosted solutions. I recommend Unfuddle — it’s not a silver bullet, but Unfuddle is a great tool for maintaining sanity: clean, simple, and easy to use. If you pay a little bit, you can unlock the best features.

Code Spaces

Cheapest Option: $3.99/mo

# Users: 2

Wiki?: yes

Notes: I felt the manager here was heavy… sorta Windowsy in a bad way, as in the interface needs to lighten up, but did have a good set of features.

Feng Office (Formerly OpenGoo)

Cheapest Option: $59/mo

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: this is a popular solution for its thoroughness. — you have to install it on your servers, which is actually a good thing for people storing sensitive info.

Achievo

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?:no

Notes: This one you have to download and install on a server that runs PHP and MySQL — it includes features for sales teams. It’s built using the ATK framework.

Project Pier

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: you gotta download and install this PHP/MySQL app. This is like the PHP cousin of Redmine, so if you don’t have the ability or resources to work with Ruby on Rails, this is a nice option.

Collabtive

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: Yes

Notes: This is a clean app — another one you have to download and install yourself. It’s a nice option (try the demo). The only thing I didn’t care for was that the app relies heavily on icons, so it’s hard to get your bearings. Good German engineering!

Redmine

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: Unlimited

Wiki?: Yes

Notes: This is my favorite. It’s not perfect, but it’s a clean interface and easy to navigate. The major downside is that you have to install this yourself. Can you install Ruby on Rails on your server? No? Then this might not be for you.

BaseCamp

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users:unlimited, but only 1 project.

Wiki?: Yes

Notes: although this is hugely popular hosted solution and it’s well integrated with many software projects, this does not have a good ticketing system, and it does not tie into code versioning (e.g. SVN), so I don’t fully comprehend its popularity. It’s pretty good, but it seems over-hyped.

FogBugz

Cheapest Option: $25/mo

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: This integrates with their Kiln product to tightly integrate bug tracking with code revisions. There’s another product Trello that does visual project organization, but to be honest, I’m kinda confused by these interrelated projects.

Pivotal Tracker

Cheapest Option: $7/mo (free for non-profits)

# Users: 3

Wiki?: sorta

Notes: This is a serious app from the boys in Boulder for agile development — they’ve really thought through the way that large projects should be managed. It’s a hosted solution, but they can install it in on-site if needed.

Lighthouse

Cheapest Option: Free (for open source), otherwise $15/mo

# Users: 10

Wiki?: yes

Notes: another clean app. This is a hosted solution.

Google Code

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: This option is available ONLY for open-source projects. It’s clean, with an easy interface. Updating wiki pages and bugs seems to triggers errors not infrequently, but I recommend this for any open source project.

Trac

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: A lot of projects use this (e.g. WordPress): You download and install it. It’s written in Python and can run on several common databases.

Mantis

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: yes

Notes: It’s functional, but the UI/UX is pretty crusty. Sorry to poo-poo the hard work of the devs here, but I never felt like I could get clients to use this app… it’s a bit disjointed.

Jira

Cheapest Option: $10/mo

# Users: 10

Wiki?: Yes

Notes: This is popular with big corporations. The biggest disadvantage of this is that it’s HEAVY: you gotta have a rock-solid sysadmin to setup Tomcat on your server to install this behemoth.

Bugzilla

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: no

Notes: this is a powerful Perl application used by Firefox that can be the public face of your app. You have to download and install this.

GitHub

Cheapest Option: Free

# Users: unlimited

Wiki?: Yes

Notes: this thing is on fire — GitHub is THE thing right now. It’s wiki is a pain in the ass compared to Google Code when it comes to formatting special characters. Paid plans get private repos.

Hopefully that’s a good list to help you narrow down your choices. If that’s not good enough for you, check out Wikipedia’s comparison of issue tracking systems

Post from: TipsFor.us


Review of Web-based Project Management Software

You may remember my earlier comparison/rant of VPS Hosting Providers. GoDaddy was on that list of hosts to avoid, but recent events have loaded my arsenal with rant-fuel and I cannot contain myself any longer: GoDaddy is a horrible web host and a terrible company that not only wastes your time and money, it may actively be trying to F you in the A!

The Technical

First, the the technical stuff. This is stuff that actually happened. These are facts, and I invite any other developer to share similar experiences. I got a call late Friday night from a frenetic client with the horrible words: “THE SITE IS DOWN!!!”. Any developer who has heard those words on a Friday night knows that they can kiss their weekend goodbye, and so it was.

The site in question was hosted on a GoDaddy shared host. Ok, so what happened? Well, it’s an eCommerce site that required that a certain port be open for incoming and outgoing requests in order for the site’s software to communicate with the credit card processing (hosted on secure site somewhere else). Without warning, GoDaddy changed their firewall rules and they closed that port. Oops. That prevented the site from doing any business.

So what’s more frightening here? The fact that GoDaddy shut down this port without any warning, or the fact that they denied ever having that port open in the first place? In a separate incident, I had another GoDaddy server upgrade its version of PHP from 4 to 5. Any application developer will know that such a dramatic change in the underlying code can be catastrophic. And it was: the application completely broke because much of the code was not compatible with PHP 5. So the point of the story here is that I have personally experienced massive server changes on GoDaddy servers without any warning and sometimes without any acknowledgement. This is just not acceptable for any web host, and to date, I’ve only experienced this with GoDaddy.

And then it gets worse. The client wanted to keep his GoDaddy account, so he forked over the money to get a Linux VPS with GoDaddy. Man. The provisioning took over 12 hours and several calls to tech support. The GoDaddy dashboard is awful, and their ticketing system is equally poor: you can’t see your open tickets (!!!), so you have no idea what status they are in. You can chat with the techs (if the chat window doesn’t crash before you get through to somebody), but you cannot see any updates or add any information to your requests… you have to call to get information, and this can take a looooooong time.

But eventually GoDaddy got it up (heheh), and I started to configure the Linux Server with Plesk. Now the site required PHP 5.2.4 or greater, but the server shipped with PHP 5.1.6 (CentOS). There was no option to select different distros or different setups other than Plesk or cPanel on CentOS. So I started to get the server ready for take-off by updating packages and compiling a new version of PHP. I tried to download core updates… but out of the box, the repos were not correctly defined, and the VPS could not update itself. So I tried to run some updates by hand — we just needed PHP 5.2.4. So I tried to download and compile it. But the damn thing kept hanging. After some googling, it turns out that GoDaddy intentionally spikes the CPU which causes memory allocation failures. So the Plesk setup as offered by GoDaddy could not even put its own pants on.

So we had to pay an extra $10/month to get a WHM/cPanel server. So it was another 12 hours of provisioning (turns out the process hung, but without the ability to see the status of the ticket, I only got this info when I phoned in). But basically the same thing happened with the cPanel server: EasyApache could not finish executing due to memory/CPU throttling (not even on the command line). Something on those servers was completely F’d. As usual, GoDaddy techs denied everything, even when confronted with error logs. It was ridiculous and a waste of time for me and for the client (who hadn’t been able to sell anything on his site for about 48 hours at this point)

The final bit of ludicrousness was when we requested a separate IP address for the server so we could install the SSL certificate. With LiquidWeb, getting an extra IP address takes about 60 seconds. With GoDaddy? It took about 6 hours. Blink blink.

So the final solution here was to move this site over to my own server, which only took an hour or so. Instead of taking all weekend, it took only an hour. The conclusion is that GoDaddy is really good at creating billable hours, but not at actually having a working product.

The Non Technical

The non-technical stuff here is a bit more subjective, but it’s equally unflattering. You may remember the controversy when GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons bragged about shooting and killing an elephant and a leopard. Mr. Parsons tried to play it off as some kind philanthropy because “elephants are destroying Zimbabweans’ crops”. In my opinion, anyone arrogant and/or stupid enough to justify their actions with a statement like that really deserves a punch in the dick. LEOPARDS DON’T DESTROY CROPS. And if Bob Parsons really cared about the plight of Zimbabweans’ crops, he’d do something more effective like fund charity organizations in Africa or help them build a fence. I mean, seriously… have you seen his Video Blog? Arguably, the elephant and leopard got treated more humanely with bullets to the face than those of us who watched a 61-year-old man ogle the scantily clad women grinding against him while he lectured us on “hiring great employees.”

Bob evaluates his employees greatness

And remember my disgust with QuickBooks? Looks like Bob had a hand in that as well: apparently, he sold his accounting software to Intuit in 1994.

And now with the internet censorship laws coming up in relation to the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA), we see that GoDaddy is a political animal. First they came out in support for SOPA. Then after a “maelstrom” of internet backlash, they later discontinued support for SOPA. But what bothers me is the casual internet citizen is fooled by this token gesture. It seems that it was a calculated move by GoDaddy where they make a public statement to placate the sheople, but behind closed doors, they still are working to game the system for personal gain and the expense of public freedom. This article about a judge forcing domains to be transferred to GoDaddy was alarming. How much does the system have to be corrupted if the legal system is ORDERING domains to be transferred to GoDaddy? Why does this sound like Iraq under Saddam Hussein where oil companies were ORDERED to do business with Saddam’s relatives. It just stinks to high heaven.

What to Do

Get your sites off of GoDaddy. They are Ok as a registrar if you can tolerate their idiotic dashboard and general ineptitude, but you’re wasting your life and your money if you host with them. Gotta love developers: here’s a good reference for how to move your domains off of GoDaddy: Moving Domains off of GoDaddy, but really, if you want to stick it to GoDaddy then you should call them and tie up their phone lines as much as possible. Have them walk you through how to transfer your domains…. step…. by…. step.

Sign up to boycott Godaddy here.

Find another registrar. NameCheap offers pretty much every TLD you can think of, and they at least as cheap.

If you need some good VPS hosting, I still have some space on my server: you get more horsepower than you’d get on your own VPS, and you don’t have to spend all the time setting the thing up. Contact me if you’re interested.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Why GoDaddy is a Horrible Host

Ease of Updating

WordPress has done a fantastic job of making its product easy to use: each time there is a new version of WordPress, it takes only the click of a button to update your site. MODx still requires an FTP connection and an FTP client that can merge directories, otherwise, the upgrade can be hairy indeed. Unless you’ve got a really nice FTP client like Coda or you’ve got SSH access and you’re comfortable using cp -fr, then MODx can’t compete… MODx-ers will have to wait until version 2.2 or 2.3 when MODx will offer seamless upgrades.

WordPress also lets you easily upgrade all your plugins with a single click. MODx Revolution introduced package management, so you can see which plugins need updating, but it’s still not as streamlined as what WordPress offers.

Customizations

Although WordPress at times is boneheaded and backwards in how its code is built, it is almost always extendible. MODx, especially Revolution, represents some code that is much more mature. If you are a PHP hobbyist or even a junior level developer, there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to follow the core MODx code because it’s so much more complex. MODx has areas that simply are not easily customizable — for example, the MODx manager is just flat-out hard to programmatically modify. At best, customizations of the MODx manager can be accomplished via configuration, but customizations via plugins can be complicated, and at worst, they may not be impossible. The WordPress manager, by comparison, is nearly always customizable via one event or another, so with a working understanding of PHP, you can usually trick things out to how you want them. WordPress may be completely low-brow in how it implements certain functionality, but as long as you can find an appropriate action or filter to hook into, you can usually customize the dashboard to how you want it.

Some of the more-experienced readers might be raising an eyebrow here as I compare MODx and WordPress in this area, because the MODx architecture is built so much more sensibly and because MODx is entirely object-oriented, it is by definition easier to override behaviors. But my point is that for “Joe Coder”, there are many tweaks that are simply easier to carry out in WordPress. It’s a bit like having a Volkswagon and a Jaguar in your garage: you can carry out most repairs on the VW with a wrench and a screwdriver whereas the Jaguar requires special tools, experience, and patience.

jQuery

WordPress’ manager is built using jQuery. The MODx Revo manager is built using Ext JS. Although Ext JS offers way more options when it comes to building an application, the experience of using the MODx manager is that it is sluggish and more difficult to customize due to the steeper learning curve. The WordPress manager may not represent the most mature architectural principles, and jQuery may be simplistic for certain uses, but WordPress is generally much faster to use — jQuery has a much lighter footprint so it loads more quickly and doesn’t require as many resources from your server.

Secondly, jQuery, like WordPress itself, is much more widely used than Ext JS. There are lots of jQuery plugins available and it’s generally easier to customize. No, jQuery isn’t going to be the end-all-be-all of your web application, and it isn’t going to scale well when you start demanding more and more complex user-interfaces, but it really fits the bill for a huge number of sites and interfaces.

Post Types

Any good content management system has to be able to store different types of content. In general, MODx is far better at this from an architectural and from a templating standpoint, but from the viewpoint of the average manager- or editor-user, WordPress generally makes more sense. MODx lets you define custom fields (called Template Variables in MODx parlance), and you associate them with a template. It makes good sense architecturally, but it is a bit… weird.

For example, you may create a “Book” template with custom fields for “Title”, “Author”, and “ISBN”. So the work flow in MODx is that you add a generically-named Document, then once you select the “Book” template, the “Title”, “Author”, “ISBN” custom fields appear, suddenly making the document a “Book” document. That works, but many users just don’t get it: they want to add a Book to their site. WordPress 3 allows for post types, which accomplishes just that — the built-in implementation is very primitive in comparison to MODx, but once it’s up and running, you won’t need to lecture your users about how a “Document will become a Book once you change the template”. If that explanation is confusing to you, then you can appreciate why WordPress’ implementation of this concept is easier to work with as an end-user. The Custom Content Type Manager plugin fixes many of these WordPress warts.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article explains a bit more of WordPress’ strengths: it’s not the best solution for every project, but it can be the right choice for a lot of projects. I still have a long list of gripes about WordPress, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its strengths.

Post from: TipsFor.us


MODx vs. WordPress (revisited)

* Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

FreshBooks

Freshbooks offers a very clean interface that made a lot of sense to me right off the bat. It was easy to add clients and recurring monthly expenses (holy %!**! I didn’t realize how much I was spending on server hosting!). It integrates right into my PayPal account, so when a client pays an invoice, POOF, that invoice automatically updates and marks itself as paid. I used to have to do that manually with BillingManager.

FressBooks Menu

The price was a bit high for what I got, so I’m sorta waffling on that, but what really sold me on FreshBooks was the nice desktop timetracking software, ChronoMate. It’s $1/month more to use it, but I can clock stuff while working offline, then it syncs directly with my FreshBooks account, so I know (and my clients know) exactly how much time I’ve spent working on a project. Throw me a bone (affiliate link)

Harvest Invoices

Harvest

Harvest is a solid application, and they are actively developing improvements. The menu organization here was also very similar to FreshBooks and Invoicera.

Harvest Menu

I have nothing but good things to say about Harvest: this is really a well-crafted application, and its pricing and features offer a superb value: unlimited Clients, Projects, and Invoices for all plans. They offer some really nice integrated time-tracking features, so I’m eyeing this very seriously: the ChronoMate integration with FreshBooks is pretty good, but it has some shortcomings that Harvest doesn’t have. I have to give a big tip of my hat to Matthew Lettini (one of? their Designer) for his detailed responses to my questions. Harvest gets massive bonus points for its commitment to good communication and taking their customers seriously, so if you want to work with a company that works with you, I don’t think you could ask for more.

invoicera

Invoicera

Invoicera also offered a really nice application. It too offered a very similar set of menu options, and it was very easy to navigate. I can’t think of anything wrong with this software.

Invoicera Menu

It was easy to set up invoices, both one-offs and recurring. The expense management was a little bit confusing to me, but I got the sense that with a little bit more time spent using the software, it’d become really clear — they too were responsive to my questions about the software. The user interface was somewhere between Harvest’s and Freshbooks.

Probably the biggest draw here is what you get for the price: you and 2 additional users (e.g. your accountants) get logins for free with the default package. You have to pay for that with the other systems.

quickbooks

QuickBooks

Originally I thought I would end up going with QuickBooks because I was already using its little brother: BillingManager. Wow… that was a bad assumption. All the simplicity and ease of use that was present in BillingManager was completely gone in QuickBooks… gone as in “scorched earth, salted ground.” The supposedly “automatic” transfer of data from BillingManager to QuickBooks was completely botched: half of my data from 2 years ago made it over, the rest… who knows. And nobody over there seemed to know what was going on. BillingManager was sort of treated like Intuit’s bastard child that nobody knew what to do with. It would have saved me time if they could have just deleted the partial data.

QuickBooks Menu

If you look at the menu closely, you can see that it’s WAY more complicated: QuickBooks offers features not offered by its competitors, but the price you pay is dealing with a wonky application and befuddled responses from the support hotline. To boot, most of the features that might justify this complexity (e.g. time tracking, integrations with online banking and credit card statements, and bill management) comes only with the beefier packages starting at $24.95/month.

The biggest waste of time with QuickBooks is that they offer NO email support and NO public ticketing system of any kind (one of their pages says they offer email support, but their support staff said they didn’t, so who knows what’s going on there… they don’t even know it seems). Compare the time it takes you to fire off a 2 line email identifying your problem with the software to the time it takes to wait in the call queue and finally get transferred to someone who might know what you’re talking about. That’s lost money right there: your time, wasted. It made it worse that I’m living abroad while trying to set this up, so figuring out the time differences of when I could call them, and then paying international calling fees to wait in their call queue is just poor. I wouldn’t recommend using QuickBooks unless your accountant demands it.

Summary

This was really close: pretty much a three-way tie in many ways between FreshBooks, Harvest, and Invoicera. Look at their menus: they are all very similarly structured. Honestly, I think that Freshbooks, Harvest, and Invoicera are all great products, and I would have been happy using any of them. QuickBooks is the only one that annoyed the piss out of me: having a site that runs on pop-ups and forcing all their support requests to take place over the phone were just nails in their coffin. QuickBooks may be the “industry leader”, but I think they’re ripe for unseating because their site and their software were just painful to deal with. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a comment on this post asking me to “please give us a call to discuss”, but meh… I’ve spent too much time on the phone with them already.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Comparing Online Invoice Software

I’m going to walk through a series of areas and compare and contrast both how both CMSs work in those areas. The comments here apply to WordPress 3.x and (mostly) to MODx Revolution, but MODx Evolution is mentioned where appropriate.

Basic Stuff

System Requirements

*Source: WordPress requirements, MODx requirements

If the requirements for MODx Revo look insanely detailed, ask yourself this: “do you really want to be guessing whether or not your server will support a given app?” MODx Revo does a pretty good job of testing for the necessary requirements during installation, so you don’t have any unexpected surprises.

Installation

WordPress offers its “famous” 5-minute install, and I give them credit where credit is due: WordPress is a simple web app to install, but to be fair, installing MODx Evolution is also very straightforward.

MODx Revolution has beefier requirements, and it’s far more likely you’ll run into troubles setting up your webserver permissions or PHP extensions (e.g. PDO). Moving a Revolution install to a new server is also a tricky operation that requires some patience (see this how-to).

Templating

Hands down, MODx offers the gold standard in templating. Expression Engine is a healthy second place, but only in my days of doing Perl development with the venerable Template Toolkit did I encounter a templating system that followed good MVC architectural principles as well as MODx.

What does that mean? It means that if you’re a front-end designer who likes to roll your own HTML and CSS, then MODx will grant you total freedom to implement the designs you want, whereas WordPress may result in headaches and holes punched in your walls (no comment on the convoluted mess that is Drupal and Joomla templates). I’ve posted previously about creating templates in MODx Evolution and how to import existing layouts into MODx Evolution, and the process in MODx Revolution is nearly identical (the only difference is the format of the placeholders).

In MODx, you can easily have multiple templates (i.e. layouts), and use any one of them for any page. In WordPress, the ability to use a specific template is possible only with pages, not posts. The thing that really gives me convulsions is understanding how WordPress formats its special pages, e.g. a category page, or an author page. See the image below as a reference for how WordPress formats page requests.

WordPress Template Hierarchy

See the official WordPress docs for Template Hierarchy for more information. I honestly have a hard time fathoming that this is the solution that actually got implemented… what other crazy ideas were on the drawing board?

Menus

MODx offers nearly infinite menu flexibility through use of menu-generating PHP Snippets, primarily WayFinder, but it’s not aimed at the average user. WordPress has a built-in GUI for creating menus, but I have experienced some bugs with it when using custom content types. Your WordPress theme may not support more than one or two menus, so in the end you may end up writing some code in your tmeplates (e.g. using my Summarize Posts plugin) so you can list the posts that you want to see.

In a nutshell, WordPress offers an easy GUI, but if you need more customization MODx’s flexibility here is far greater.

Plugins

WordPress has a huge number of user-contributed plugins available, whereas MODx has relatively few. The sheer number is not a good comparison, however; I downloaded and tested hundreds of plugins in the process of writing my WordPress book, and the number of plugins that are unusable due to sophmoric errors or plain-old bad coding is huge. I estimate that at least half of the plugins in the WordPress repository are unusable, and perhaps only a tenth of them are worth using. There are crufty plugins in the MODx repo to be sure, but the playing field is more even than you might think.

The real difference here comes when you have to write your own code: MODx is a lot easier to work with with a shorter learning curve for a majority of code, whereas learning the ropes of WordPress plugins requires more guidance (hey, did I mention we wrote a book about that?).

Architecture

This is an area that is hard to discuss unless you’re a geek, but in a word, MODx offers a robust and well-architected MVC framework under the hood that can make writing custom plugins (Snippets, manager pages, et al) a breeze. The work done by Jason Coward and Shaun McCormick is really astounding.

Some of the limitations to WordPress are really staggering: it is basically a stateless application, so by default it does not use sessions, and nearly all of its API functions exist as procedural functions in the main namespace, so naming collisions are a big concern when authoring plugins. This makes certain functionality damn near impossible in WordPress. For example, creating a WordPress application with a login portal and access to custom data models would require an enormous amount of time. Even accessing WordPress’s posts and categories is difficult at times; I basically had to rewrite core WordPress functionality with another plugin (Summarize Posts) just to get the menus and summaries I needed for one recent site.

Another severe limitation is WordPress is that all extensions to the core occur via plugins that are triggered by system events (confusingly they are loosely categorized into “actions” and “filters”). This construct can be awkward at times, and the WordPress architecture is showing its age as the number of events exponentially increases, whereas the amount of documentation for them continually wanes. Realistically you can get WordPress plugins to do just about everything you need using only a handful of events, but debugging someone else’s plugins is a nightmare: there is no centralized location listing which events are being hooked into, and new events are often created and executed on the fly. Debugging WordPress plugins is like Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole: majorly trippy,and you don’t know if you’ll ever come out.

User management is another area where MODx dwarfs WordPress: Revolution can handle totally granular control of permissions, but it is admittedly overly complex for 90%+ of use cases. Evolution offers a much more sensible permissions scheme that covers most use cases.

MODx offers much more sensible implementations of custom code: like WordPress it uses event-driven plugins, but it also uses custom PHP snippets which can be placed anywhere on a page or in a template.

Another impressive feat is how MODx Revolution has abstracted the database into a separate coding layer — that means it is relatively easy to interface with custom database tables (or even to other database engines) using code that is completely database agnostic (support for SQLite and PostGREs is in the works). That’s some seriously geeky stuff that has kept me awake at night trying to comprehend how they accomplished that. MicroSoft has even worked directly with the MODx team because MODx’s architecture is flexible enough that it can run on an all MicroSoft stack (i.e. IIS and MS-SQL). I can’t think of a single other system that switch-hits as well as MODx.

Dashboard

WordPress offers a clean manager dashboard for its administrators which relies on the jQuery JavaScript library to provide AJAX functionality and smooth user experience. It’s pretty easy to find your way around.

WordPress Manager dashboard

MODx underwent a huge change in its manager dashboard between Evolution and Revolution, and the Revolution dashboard is overwhelming for many. Evolution’s dashboard is cleaner and snappier.

MODx Evolution Dashboard

MODx Revolution’s manager dashboard is still being optimized. It’s based on ExtJS. For those of you not familiar with ExtJS, it was based on YUI (the Yahoo User Interface library), and it offers some fatastically powerful features for building interfaces for web applications. My only complaint with it is that it’s heavy: the MODx Revo dashboard can take a long time to load, and sometimes clicking on buttons and links feels unresponsive.

MODx Revo dashboard

Blog

Everybody wants a blog, just like everybody wants a shiny new car. Authoring blogs has been a core competency of WordPress, and they get massive props for making them very simple to setup: out of the box, you can get a blog up and running with integrated tags and categories and comments within minutes. It’s really what WordPress is all about: blogging. WordPress even has some nice security features in place with its Akismet spam filter.

Contrary to some of the on-line murmurings out there, both versions of MODx can run blogs, but until MODX 2.2, the process to set them up was painfully laborious in comparison. The Articles extra for MODX gives you a quick and easy blog — it can even import your posts from WordPress, so the gap between the two systems is closing quickly. The only thing it doesn’t do as well as WordPress right out of the box is its taxonomies (tags and categories): you still have to do some configuration to get those configured how you want them, but as the docs say:

“MODx Revolution is not blogging software, but rather a full-blown Content Application Platform, it doesn’t come pre-packaged with a cookie-cutter blogging solution.” 

Custom Content (CMS functionality)

If blogging is where WordPress shines, then CMS functionality is where MODx clearly has the upper hand. WordPress does support custom fields for its posts and pages, and in version 3.x, they support additional “post types”, so finally WordPress is getting some traction as a CMS, but it’s still a bit of a toy in comparison to MODx.

One of the biggest problems with WordPress as a CMS is its lack of support for sensible custom fields: for each post or page, you have to manually add the same custom fields over and over again, and by default, the custom fields are always simple text fields. I have attempted to rectify this in my Custom Content Type Manager plugin, and my plugin does a lot to give WordPress CMS capabilities, but it still represents a series of awkward workarounds that stretches the WordPress core nearly to its breaking point.

One related area here is how MODx can manage and serve static files via what MODx calls “Static Resources”. This is a great way to enforce permissions on viewing, streaming, or downloading static files (e.g. PDFs or Flash movies). WordPress just flat out can’t do that.

Although MODx offers greater flexibility, WordPress’ integration is a bit cleaner for the manager user (it’s a holy pain in the ass for the developer, but if you download my plugin you should avoid this unpleasantness). When WordPress registers a new “post type”, you get a nice menu icon in your dashboard and it’s really clear to the manager that he/she is adding a new post, page, or movie (etc). For example, if you want to add a movie post, you’d click on “Add Movie”. It’s really quite logical. In MODx, this same type of distinction occurs at the template level. Architecturally, this makes sense, but it’s confusing for the manager user, because it may not be at all clear that they need to add a “normal” page (i.e. resource), and then choose to use the “movie” template. I’m planning a MODx plugin to help rectify this UI “wart”.

A custom post type in WordPress

SEO

SEO is the an cyclical buzz, and at the moment, a lot of SEO guys are hailing WordPress as the holy grail of search-word wad-shooting. To be blunt, I think SEO is largely an over-hyped crock of crap. If you build a well-structured site with good content, your pages will show up in search results: if there is a site out there with awesome content that is not showing up in relevant search results, I have yet to see it. Search engine optimization is often a pseudo-science practiced by get-rich-quick marketeers who are convinced that they can turn lead into gold by over-hyping a site with various gimmicks. 90% or more of SEO should have to do with creating good content, and perhaps the last 10% of your efforts should go into polishing your site. It can be used to improve search results, but it tends to fail when you try to make search results come out of thin air. Too often I have seen companies do this the wrong way around: they spend 90% of their time publicizing a site that is a vapid cesspool instead of spending their time making a site that’s worth visiting. At best, SEO techniques are constantly changing as Google updates and refines their indexing algorithms. If you optimize your site today and Google farts tomorrow, all of your work may be for naught. Do your due dilligence, but it’s just not worth spending inordinate amounts of time tring to beat Google at their own game.

Rants aside, both systems offer ample ways to do search engine optimization. Assuming that you have good content, the rest of the process boils down to having well structured HTML (which relies on a solid templating system), and the ability to effectively index your pages. WordPress offers built-in taxonomies (categories and tags) for flagging your posts, and MODx can be set up to do this rather easily by using an Auto-Tag custom field (a.k.a. a MODx “Template Variable”).

MODx offers a much more flexible system for generating URLs (basically you can use any URL you want for any page). WordPress does offer flexibility here, except for its special pages (e.g. category listings or author pages).

Security

No system is 100% secure. MODx has had relatively few serious exploits; WordPress has had many, no doubt due in part to its popularity. For what it’s worth, I have had WordPress and MODx Evolution sites hacked, but not yet a Revolution site. It’s hard to quantify how secure an application is… I’d love to see the detailed forensic results of a penetration test against default installations of both CMS’s. In general though, the WordPress architecture is primitive and more ripe for being hacked: it’s more difficult to lock down spaghetti code. WordPress also offers many more plugins, and the plugin authors tend to be less experienced, so their code is more likely to have security holes.

There are many fingerprinting utilities out there that will attempt to locate known weaknesses in plugins, and WordPress is more easily fingerprinted; MODx Revo allows you to change default locations for the MODx manager or to even remove it from public view altogether. There are some discussions in the MODx Forums about how to harden MODx, but I haven’t yet seen a detailed how-to on how to eliminate the most common attack vectors. There are also good posts out there for hardening WordPress.

I reported a nasty vulnerability in phpThumb that affected MODx and numerous other CMS’s (phpThumb is a popular image manipulation library), but the MODx Revo architecture prevented the exploit from succeeding on Revo (good job to Shaun and Jason for architecting the connectors in the way they did).

Support

This is another area that is pretty black and white in my opinion: WordPress support sucks. Although WordPress is more popular if you look at the numbers, you wouldn’t know it if you post questions in the WordPress Forums. I have rarely gotten any useful answers (if I got answers at all): anything beyond simple inquiries tend to go unanswered, leaving me alone in the dark reverse-engineering damn near everything.

My other gripe with WordPres is their weird distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. You can host your blog at WordPress.com, and then you get more support, but it is effectively software as service: you can’t upload plugins and you can’t modify code, so the interface suddenly becomes a bit like BlogSpot.

By contrast, the MODx Forums are full of helpful people. It’s a great place to be: it’s not uncommon to get responses from the core team on almost any level of inquiry, from trivial to cerebral meltdowns. There are some superstar participants, such as Susan Ottwell and Bob Ray, who have both contributed immensely helpful posts and tutorials on how to use MODx. MODx also offers commercial support; it’s still in its infancy, but for a yearly fee, you can get access to a kind of “MODx hotline” and get help resolving MODx issues on your sites.

Documentation

In the same breath as support, I must mention documentation. In general, documentation for both systems is lacking, in some areas painfully so. While using WordPress, I have often I have searched for hours trying to find a way to do a certain thing, only to end up grepping through the code base and deciphering the raw code myself. Frequently the official documentation has holes or in some cases, it’s just plain wrong. The best resources for some advanced WordPress features are blogs written other developers.

MODx’s documentation is also frustratingly AWOL on a number of topics, but least the MODx code base is integrated with a standard documentation publishing system so if needed you can see for yourself how the functions are structured without having to grep through the code base. The vibrant MODx forums fill in a lot of the holes in the documentation, and that’s a huge benefit for any open-source project.

Scalability

WordPress can handle a huge number of posts, but it does get bogged down with a large number of pages, and there are lots of whisperings about this (e.g. here). I suspect it has to do with WordPress’ convoluted templating system (see above), which makes me wonder what the limits are on custom post types.

MODx Evolution suffered from a limit of approximately 5000 resources (in MODx, pages and posts are types of resources), but that limit has been corrected in an upcoming release thanks largely to the efforts of Charlie over at ProWebscape.com.

MODx Revolution has no such limits: it offers a great built-in caching system that allows it to serve pages very quickly. It has been benchmarked as twice as fast as Expression Engine (see this blog post).

More importantly, MODx Revolution was built with scaling in mind: it stores session data in the database, so it is easily deployed on load-balanced servers. This is hugely important if you are building a site that might one day get massive amounts of traffic; WordPress can be deployed like this, but such usage is not generally anticipated. I don’t know of many large commercial sites running WordPress (in fact, I only found one: 9rules.com).

Conclusion

I do like both systems, and I use them both daily. WordPress has a much lighter footprint and is easier to use for a large number of use-cases: if you just need to get a site out the door fast, then WordPress is really hard to beat. WordPress is plug-and-play for just about everything and that saves you hours of setup time, so it can be the right solution for a majority of sites. But the more customizations you require (particularly in scripts or in layouts), then the more appealing MODx becomes: WordPress has thousands of plugins available, but if those aren’t meeting your needs, I’ve found certain types of customizations to be extremely difficult in WordPress whereas most often, MODx handles them with ease. Doing things like building web applications with strict formatting requirements is much easier in MODx because it’s built more as a launchpad for customizations: it’s really more of a content management framework (CMF). MODx Evolution is the best system I’ve used for building small to medium sized informational/brochure sites, WordPress rules as the blogging king, and I’ve been very impressed with how easily I can build web applications using MODx Revolution. There isn’t one tool that’s right for every job; the more projects you complete, the better idea you’ll have as to which system will accomplish your requirements more easily, and hopefully this article helps you spot more of what each system is good at.

Post from: TipsFor.us


WordPress vs. MODx

These aren’t affiliate links unless otherwise indicated (hey, if you want to throw us a bone for saving you the pain of experiencing these guys yourself, then please, feel free to click the affiliate link: it costs you nothing and it is your way of saying “thanks for saving me the trouble of learning this stuff the hard way”).

LiquidWeb

LiquidWeb has impressed me with its clean integrations and its “heroic support”. That doesn’t mean they’ve been able to fix every problem I’ve had, but to be fair, a lot of the tricky stuff was weird 3rd party installs that *I* struggle with greatly. But they have been very responsive in their tickets and I’ve never felt abandoned or in the dark.

The standard VPS’s offer a good value, but if you need more horsepower, their SmartServers offer a nice combination of virtual/cloud and dedicated qualities, and it’s a good combo for many folks. These come by default with WHM/cPanel, so it’s easy to set up sub-accounts with their own logins. Throw me a Bone (affiliate link)

Media Temple

This is a popular option, although I’m not sure why… their cloud servers go down frequently, they’ve had several pretty severe security issues, and using SSH on their servers is a holy pain in the ass because SSH dumps you in some foreign directory miles away from your home directory, whereas FTP takes you to your home directory. What? Yes, it is obnoxious and confusing, and they disconnect your SSH session after 5 minutes, which is approximately 1 minute less than the time it takes you to RTFM through your notes and emails to find where the hell your home directory is or which command you need to run to escalate yourself to the proper user to be able to do anything useful. MediaTemple uses Plesk to offer control panels to their clients, and Plesk is a nightmare if you ever try to do any sysadmin work on the command line. I’ve had a couple clients on MediaTemple, and it just seems like it’s a rocky road with bumps in the service and difficulties in doing basic tasks. It’s not the worst out there, but I wouldn’t rate MediaTemple as anything better than mediocre.

VPS.net

I do not recommend these guys. They do have a nice looking site and what looks to be a nice product, but my experience with them was wholly negative. “Jeez”, you might be thinking, “don’t flame a brother in writing!”, but sit down around the campfire and let me tell you why I feel completely comfortable doing so….

It all started when I set up a VPS server with VPS.net and I signed up for their paid snapshots knowing that I was liable to screw up my server at some point and I’d want to roll back to a snapshot image. Sure enough, I borked my server by removing the sqlite package, which completely destroyed the functionality of my yum utility (don’t ever do what I did, by the way). “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just roll back.” Well, the restoration process had a fatal flaw, which completely toasted my server. After using their “restoration” utility, I didn’t just have a server with a broken yum utility, I had a completely fried server (ooo… that’s a bad code taco on that one). The people over at VPS.net were completely unwilling to admit the problem. I wasted about 2 days waiting for them to either fix the problem or to just come clean and say “hey, we’re really sorry, but we had a glitch in our snapshot utility so we only have partial backups of your server.” No. They hemmed and hawed and wasted my time for 2 days until finally one of the techs admitted that there had been a problem. I think he was probably later executed by firing squad for insubordination and refusing to tow the party line. I needed to clock in about 40 hours (all un-billable, by the way) to rebuild the server from scratch, and they acted like the Soviets when Chernobyl blew up: in typical fashion they denied anything happened until European scientists started measuring massive amounts of radiation and said “uh, comrades… did something happen at your reactor?”

While waiting days for a response (all while my server and all of its sites were completely down), my patience got exhausted, so I finally threatened to make a blog post like this one. The CTO jumped in saying “I was approaching this in the wrong way”. I listed the several tickets that I had filed that had gotten no response for 48 hours (even ones that *he* had initially responded to). And then even the CTO stopped responding to my requests for information (read: he must have known how badly they screwed up). His response was literally an advertisement: he blabbed on about how awesome their servers were and what great new offerings were available. I felt like he had just run over my dog, and instead of apologizing for killing my best friend, he was yammering on about awesome his car was with its dual-hemi’s, turbo-charged engine and high-performance tires. The final “kiss my ass” message they sent me was a legalese “F-U” which basically stated that none of their services, including backups, were guaranteed. Seriously, I don’t often say stuff like this this in writing, but VPS.net can go french kiss a donkey’s ass. I gave them every opportunity to respond to my questions or to justify their actions, and they ignored me, so I feel I’m being more than fair.

So dealing with VPS.net cost me several thousand dollars, it almost cost me a client, and their ineptitude set me back on several high priority projects, and their response to a completely legitimate issue was childish and unprofessional, and my requests for just basic professionalism were ignored. So there you have it: my rant against VPS.net. Use their services at your own risk.

VPSlink.com

These guys offer a simple no-frills hosting package, and I’ve used them for several dev projects over the years. Nothing fancy, but they are responsive to the requests, and I’ve only had minimal fuss with their servers and their control panel is easy to navigate. They may not give you as much RAM as some for the price, but they do give you lots of CPUs (like 16!). I like these guys and I give them a good thumbs up. There is no cPanel type dashboard for sub-accounts, so this one is only for command-line sysadmins only.

ServerAxis.com

This is another no-frills VPS system that offers some pretty nice stats for the price: lots of RAM and a good amount of CPU. They offer a few more options than VPSLink (e.g. you can pay extra to get an external backup volume mounted to your server), and they are a bit more scalable, but I didn’t find their admin panels very intuitive, so I’ve lost time fumbling through them. There is no cPanel type dashboard for sub-accounts, so this one is only for command-line sysadmins only, but still a solid thumbs-up with these guys.

GoDaddy

Ah yes, now even GoDaddy is offering VPS services (hey, we said this stuff is becoming a commodity). The prices there look competitive, but my experiences with GoDaddy as a host have been mindbogglingly poor. Their shared hosting is a complete disaster — hands down, it’s the worst I’ve seen… they arbitrarily limit functionality, it takes hours to complete tasks that take only minutes on other hosts, and all for a cost that is higher than their competitors. I even had one of their techs tell me that the MySQL dump was “working perfectly” when the log file showed clearly that there was an error. Blink. Are they blind? Or just stupid? They also had zero understanding of how DNS records worked, so they weren’t able to offer any assistance in configuring a custom zone file. Furthermore, their dashboard is impossibly confusing to navigate. Do you know that weird castille soap by Dr. Bonner? I’m pretty sure the intern that did the layout for that soap is the same person who did the UI for GoDaddy’s control panel because I always have to dial their support # when I have to do anything in there.

Layout designed by GoDaddy: Worst Layout Ever

I mean seriously… can you read that?

So even though these look like competitive prices, I have severe reservations about using GoDaddy as anything more than a registrar. Hey, I want to jump on Danica Patrick as much as the next horny guy, but maybe if they spent some time cleaning up their site and services instead of Super Bowl ads and models, they’d have a product worth recommending, but as it stands, you should pass on GoDaddy as a host.

Amazon cloud EC2

This is a popular option because hey, it’s Amazon… but I’ve found EC2 cloud stuff to be a pain in the ass to use simply because you get lost on the command line. It’s worse than MediaTemple from a command-line standpoint. In my opinion, being on the cloud means your data theoretically is always there (there are outages), but if you’re coming in via SSH, then you can’t find it. Haha. Only sort of kidding there. In general, this isn’t a very nice option for those people doing simple web hosting types of services. It’s more appropriate for companies doing persistent application deployments.

Other Providers

I feel obligated to mention the following 2 providers because so many people I work with recommend them highly:

• Linode.com
• SliceHost.com

I don’t have first hand experience with them, so I can’t comment directly.

Conclusion

There are a lot of options out there, but with enough time, patience, and trouble-shooting elbow-grease, you can find a web host that works for you.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Comparison of VPS Providers

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below is the short summary of what is presented in the video.

How to release updates to your WordPress plugin (quickie version)

1. Make the updates to your code, fix any errors, add new features.
2. Update your plugin’s main file (the one with the information header) so that it references the new version of your plugin, e.g.
   Version: 0.5
3. Update your readme.txt file to describe the changes you have made, but DO NOT change the Stable Tag. This number must point to an existing directory inside your repo’s tags directory.
4. Save your files, then commit your changes to the SVN repo, e.g. svn commit . -m "My new version is ready"
5. Tag the new version using the SVN copy command to copy the trunk new a new numbered directory in tags, e.g. svn copy http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/your-plugin/trunk http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/your-plugin/tags/0.5
   Remember: the tagging operation is just a copy operation.
6. By performing the tagging (i.e. copy) operation, a new directory has been created inside the tags directory. So only now can you safely update your readme.txt file’s Stable Tag, e.g.
   Stable tag: 0.5
   
   That number acts as a pointer to the corresponding folder inside of the tags directory (it would point to http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/your-plugin/tags/0.5 in this example).
7. Commit your changes to the readme.txt file. This will ensure that the Stable Tag attribute points to the newly created version: svn commit . -m "Updating the stable tag"
8. You should be done now, but the WordPress SVN repository has been so problematic…. keep an eye on your plugin’s download page and verify that the changes get picked up. The changes should be picked up within 15 minutes or so… if they don’t get picked up, look at the downloaded zip file carefully… does the link say one thing but the name of the zip file says something else? It’s easy to mix things up, so if you get stuck, try reviewing the steps here.

How to release updates to your WordPress plugin (Long Version)

Ok, that was too quick? Well, we left out some important geeky points. The way WordPress’ download page works is that it looks at the readme.txt file at the HEAD of the repo, and then it follows the value listed there for Stable tag. If the Stable tag lists version 0.8, then the information from tags/0.8/readme.txt is used to generate your plugin’s information page and the files in tags/0.8 are packaged up into a zip file and that’s what downloads when the user clicks the download link.

Can you see the problem with this setup? Normally, when you tag a directory in SVN, that copy is treated as a read-only reference, but in this setup, it is frequently easier and less prone to errors for you to go into the tags directory and make your edits. This is normally a bit no-no for version control!

So the safer way to do this is to develop your plugin normally inside the wp-content/plugins directory and submit to the trunk as you normally do. Once you’re ready to publish a release, go to a new folder somewhere on your hard drive and checkout your ENTIRE project, trunk, tags, and all. Then you can do your tagging operation locally, e.g. svn copy trunk tags/0.9, and that will give you a new directory. You can update that directory’s readme.txt file and your plugin’s information header, then commit all of your code (trunk and all tags folders).

Hope that helps los dudes.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Releasing New Versions of your WordPress Plugins

If you’re an old-timer like me, you may not have noticed the Get Started tab when you log into your Dropbox web account. Click it and walk through the basic usage tutorial that it presents. When you’ve finished, you may receive a free 250 MB storage upgrade. It worked for me. More storage space is always appreciated.

If you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, you can receive two gigabytes of storage for free plus an extra 250 MB by using this signup link.

Post from: TipsFor.us


Get a Free 250 MB Upgrade by Clicking the “Get Started” Tab in Dropbox