Web Development Projects
Wordpress Booster
Status: On its toddler legs Development: Finished
Project Description
I wrote Wordpress Booster to allow developers to easily transition from a staging, or preview, directory to a live directory. Currently, due to the design of Wordpress, it's time consuming and difficult to move it even one directory away. Many of the paths in an installation are created as absolute(such as when an image is uploaded) and updating those paths requires quite a bit of work or some fancy dancing in the database.
To use WP Booster, you simply upload it into the staging directory in a folder named, "booster." Once there, it will find and access your database information and allow you to back everything up, copy the installation up a level, update the database, and remove the old files.
Important Things to Know About Wordpress Booster:
- It's written for PHP 5+ only.
- It is not an extension and exists independent of Wordpress in it's own subdirectory (So you have wp-content, wp-admin, etc. and "booster," in the Wordpress main directory.)
- In the screencast above the preview/stage directory is "wordpress." Don't do this— choose a more unique name because all the search and replace operations will grab anything with "wordpress/" in it and remove it (including feeds from WP's main site).
- It has only been tested in a LAMP environment (I have no idea whether it will work with IIS etc)
- Use it with care, it's a young script and I take no responsibility whatsoever for anything that should occur by using it.
- It's licensed under the GNU GPL v3 and you're free to modify it and use it commensurate with that license.
Download Wordpress Booster tar.bz2 Archive
Download Wordpress Booster tar.gz Archive
Portfolio Zen
Status: Live Development: Active
Project Description
Portfolio Zen is a Joomla extension that allows a developer to quickly set up an attractive portfolio that is easy for a client to manage. It does this by extracting an image and a paragraph from an article. Articles are organized into categories, which are the navigation headings for the component, and all categories within a given section are automatically pulled into the portfolio. Setting up Portfolio Zen is as easy as creating a section, with categories, and with one article per portfolio piece.
WuWi Lists
Status: In the development incubator Development: Active
Project Description
WuWi is a to-do list application that is inspired by Dave Allen's Getting Things Done system. The application's name, "WuWi" derives from the Taoist concept of Wu Wei, roughly translated as, "Effortless effort, action-less action." I built Wu Wei after looking for a web based GTD application. I used Nexty (another open source application) and found it to be adequate, but noticed that it focused more on organization than on enhancing flow. What I wanted was an application that didn't care so much about how I structured things, but was really good at keeping track of my next tasks.
Nexty was entirely PHP based, which originally drew me to it, because I love PHP. However, my goal was to create an application that the user would forget they were using and I knew that the page-to-page transitions caused by server-side only code were going to break that state of mind. Due to this, WuWi heavily utilizes Javascript and Ajax. In the process of uploading and installing WuWi there is only one page change, from the installation screen to the list management area.
List management is what WuWi is good at. You can create as many lists as you want and each list has a switch that will either feed it an item at a time into a main action list or keep it's items separate. If you complete items on a list, your main action list will reflect it. If you complete items in the main action list, they will update the lists that are feeding it. This simple little system streamlines the collection and processing of limitless items and because you're not waiting on pages to load, it's a pleasure to use.