How To Create A Twitter Widget for your WordPress Themes . Twitter needs no introduction.Wordpress Themes It has become the way to reach audiences for some people and companies and a place to hang out for others. Placing a Twitter feed on one’s website has almost become compulsory. Embedding a feed isn’t all that difficult if you are comfortable with Twitter’s default widget, but making your own will enable you to blend it into your website seamlessly.Wordpress Themes
The Result
The result of our effort will be a WordPress widget that can be placed in a widgetized sidebar. It will display the user’s details on top and the latest few items from the user’s feed. You can see it in action in our Musico theme, although the screenshot below says it all.Wordpress Themes
About The Twitter Terms Of Service
Because this is a custom widget, you control what and how elements are displayed. Make sure to read Twitter’s “Developer Display Requirements” to find out what you need to display. I will be breaking some of the rules for simplicity’s sake, but bolting on stuff will be a trivial matter once you’ve finished this article.Wordpress Themes
Note that conforming to the requirements is a must. If you do not, you run the risk of your ID being banned which means that your widget will not display any tweets.
First Step: Create A Twitter App
Before writing any code, we’ll have to get our hands on a Twitter app or, more appropriately, Twitter API credentials. The process is explained in a video that I made:
In case you prefer reading to watching a video, here are the basic steps:
- Log into Twitter’s developers section.
- Go to “My Applications,” and click “Create a new application.”
- Fill out the required fields, accept the rules of the road, and then click on the “Create your Twitter application” button. You will not need a callback URL for this app, so feel free to leave it blank.
- Once the app has been created, click the “Create my access token” button.
- You’re done! You will need the following data later on:
- consumer key,
- consumer secret,
- access token,
- access token secret.
-
WordPress Themes
Add Our App’s Details
To add some options to our theme quickly, we’ll be using the theme customizer, introduced in WordPress 3.4. Smashing Magazine has an exhaustive article on it, if you’re interested to learn more. For now, we’ll just add the bare necessities.
Adding the code above to your theme’s functions.php file will generate a link to the customizer in the “Appearance” section of the admin area. To add some options, we’ll need to create a class. Add a file named MyCustomizer.class.php.
from : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06/27/create-twitter-widget/
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How To Contribute To WordPress Themes Community
WordPress is built by volunteers. People from all over the world collaborate to create the core software, write the documentation, provide support, translate WordPress, organize events and generally keep the project running. Individuals work on WordPress in their free time, and companies ask their employees to get involved.
Part of WordPress’ success is that the community consists not only of developers, but of designers, user experience experts, support volunteers, writers, users, accessibility experts and enthusiasts. This diverse input strengthens the project. It also means you have more space to get involved. Whatever your skill set, the WordPress community has room for you.
A bunch of WordPress contributors.
In this article, we’ll talk about the different contributor groups and how you can take part. I spoke with the current team reps and project leads, who have offered advice on how to get started with their contributor groups. But first, why should you get involved with WordPress?
Why Get Involved?
I had a chat with Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding developers of WordPress, about contributing to the project. We started off talking about the mix of people who contribute to WordPress. There are contributors who are sponsored by businesses that use WordPress, such as Automattic, Dreamhost and 10up, and then there are passionate individuals who dedicate their own time to the project.
“People who use WordPress are passionate about open source, want to democratize publishing and like to learn. I would say that’s the number-one biggest characteristic, because contributing to open source, and particularly the WordPress project, is probably one of the best learning opportunities on the Internet.”
Matt chats about the future of WordPress at the WordPress Community Summit 2012. (Image:konsobe)
For Matt, this is the greatest benefit you will get from contributing. You get to be part of a large, supportive community that has an impact on the lives of millions and millions of people. Something you do in an afternoon can have an effect on people all over the world.
“You can’t knock on the door at Google and say, “Hey, do you mind if I help you out with your home page? I have some ideas for you.” But you could come to us and say, “Hey, I have some ideas for your dashboard, and here are some patches.””
A number of challenges face the WordPress project:
- Contributor balance
Currently, the number of contributors is skewed towards people involved with code. Plenty of opportunities lie in other areas — support, documentation and marketing, for example — but not so many people are getting involved. - Mobile
Not enough people are getting involved with mobile. Most of the people involved with mobile are currently sponsored by Automattic. Because mobile is fast becoming the way that people interact with the Internet, this is a crucial group and currently has a dearth of contributors.
With that in mind, let’s look at the ways you can get involved with WordPress.
Core
Mark Jaquith is an independent developer and one of the lead developers of WordPress. These days, he is a jack of all trades in the project, working closely with younger and newer developers, helping to point them in the right direction. He was also the release lead for the 3.6 release cycle. The core team comprises all sorts of developers and designers — PHP and JavaScript developers and front-end developers and designers. These are the people who build the WordPress that you install on your server.
Being a lead WordPress developer makes Mark Jaquith happy. (Image: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)
I asked Mark how the the core contributor team works. He describes it as a set of concentric rings:
“You have the leads in the inner sanctum, and then you have the people with permanent commit access, and then you have the people to whom we give temporary commit access for release, and then there are the people whose patches are implicitly trusted and go in without too much inspection. It just keeps going out from there. Those are very fluid boundaries, so people flow between them.”
CHALLENGES
As much as possible, the core team tries to work by consensus. Issues are discussed, publicly if possible, although anything contentious may be addressed in private discussion.
One of the biggest challenges facing WordPress is that not everyone is on the project full time. Even Automattic employees have other responsibilities within Automattic. This means that people can contribute varying amounts of time. If a lot of people see a dip in their free time, this can cause problems for the project. The core team tries to mitigate this by having more contributors and more people who can commit. However, a balance has to be struck because if there are too many committers, no one would know what’s going on.
GET INVOLVED
You can start getting involved in a number of ways:
- Live chats
Tap into the weekly live chats (Wednesdays 21:00 UTC, irc.freenode.net, #wordpress-dev). Before diving in, you should gauge at what point in the release cycle the project is at:- Early stages
Planning the next release. - Middle stages
Guiding the features and checking on progress. - Final stages
Bug scrubs. - After a release
Mostly an open forum, a good time to ask for advice on moving your ticket forward.
- Early stages
- Firehose
You can subscribe to trac notifications and get notified of every comment in every ticket. It’s a lot of data to process, but you should get an idea of how the project works, various people’s roles, how much authority they have, and best practices. - Ideas
If you have an idea for a feature or anything else WordPress-related, a good place to start is to write a blog post about it. There is an ideas forum, but it’s not very well used. If you have a concrete idea, with a vision of how to implement it, a blog post may well get you more traction. It will give you space to flesh out the idea and provide an opportunity for other community members to comment on it.
Ready to get involved with WordPress core? Other than development skills, I asked Mark what skills someone should have:
“The number one skill you need for just about any job, but specifically working on open source, is communication skills. You need to have clarity, consistency, compassion, relatability, a little bit of a thick skin and a decent sense of humor.”
from : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/27/a-tour-of-wordpress-4-0/
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To Improve The Deployment Of WordPress Websites As WordPress matures into a full-fledged CMS and more and morelarge online publishers come to rely on the platform, the practice of developing and deploying websites becomes increasingly important. High-profile members of the WordPress community, such as core developer Mark Jaquith and Cristi Burca, have spoken on the topic and built tools such as WP-CLI and WP Stack to improve the professionalism of our administration and deployment.
But what I’m really interested in is the current state of WordPress deployment: how an average developer manages the deployment of their websites, and how can we improve as a community?
In late July 2012, I conducted a short survey to help me answer these questions. The survey was open for three months and drew a modest but not insignificant 327 respondents. This article documents the results of the survey and draws some conclusions about where education is needed and how we can help each other become more professional when deploying our WordPress websites.
The Demographic
In my survey, I asked a few questions to establish the demographic that’s working with WordPress; this was obviously already done in far greater detail with the WordPress user and developer survey, but I felt that getting a sense of who was responding to this survey was important. Of the 327 respondents, 43% self-identified as developers, 10% as designers, 40% as both designers and developers and 7% other.
The vast majority were located in the North America (50%) and Europe (38%), with the following continents also registering: Asia (6%), Australia (4%), Africa (3%) and South America (1%). I also asked respondents how they would categorize the businesses they work for. Here’s how they responded:
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of freelancing (46%), with small businesses (19%) and small agencies (17%) taking a close second and third place, respectively. These figures back up accepted knowledge that WordPress is largely used by small internal Web teams, regional Web agencies and freelancers. Finally, as with the WordPress user and developer survey, I asked respondents whether they made their living from WordPress. This was relatively evenly split, with a small majority of 59% saying yes.
That said, of those who identified themselves as developers, 67% said they earn their living from WordPress, which suggests that WordPress developers are generally more inclined to stick with one platform than designers, who are perhaps more agonistic.
Deployment Practices
Now we get to the meat of the survey, how respondents actually deploy their WordPress websites. Combined, the 327 respondents maintain 6,378.5 WordPress websites — yes, someone maintains half a WordPress website. The majority of respondents manage a fairly small number of websites, with 46% looking after fewer than 10. That said, an impressive 8% manage between 30 and 40 websites, and, incredibly, one person is responsible for 700. Below is a breakdown of the numbers.
WEBSITES MAINTAINED BY SURVEY RESPONDENTS
| Number of websites | Number of respondents |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 10 | 149 |
| 10 – 20 | 109 |
| 20 – 30 | 26 |
| 50 – 100 | 7 |
| 100 – 200 | 4 |
| 200 – 500 | 1 |
| 500 – 1000 | 1 |
VERSION CONTROL
I asked all respondents whether they use version control and, if so, which software they favor. Astonishingly (at least to me), 45% of respondents said they do not use version-control software at all as part of their workflow. Of the remaining 55%, Git was by far the most popular, taking 41% of the vote, and Subversion surprisingly accounted for only 9%. Drilling down a little deeper, 28% of those who identify themselves as a developer stated that they do not use version control, and 48% of those who are both developers and designers said the same. Here’s a breakdown of overall responses on version-control software:
Next, I asked respondents what method of deploying websites they favor. These I broke down into FTP, SFTP, SCP, SSH + version control, SSH + version control + Capistrano, and other. Again, somewhat shocking for me was to find that FTP took 49% of the vote, followed by SFTP (20%) and SSH + version control (17%). My preferred method, SSH + version control + Capistrano, got only 3% of the vote; but even with so low a number, I was pretty encouraged to hear that people out there take the time to work in this manner.
ENVIRONMENTS
I asked respondents whether they maintain different environments for their WordPress websites — that is, whether they set up local, test, staging and live environments. Answering yes didn’t require that they run all of these environments, but simply that they differentiate between the website they develop on, the website on which they show changes to a client and the live website. The vast majority of respondents (75%) indeed do this, which is great news.
An important facet and constant pain point of running multiple environments is the need to alter URLs in the WordPress database when migrating the database from one environment to another. I asked respondents how they typically deal with this problem and gave them an open field to type their answer. Here are some answers that came up repeatedly. These aren’t actual responses, but rather my representation of groups of similar replies.
“I don’t migrate between staging and live databases.”
“I don’t touch the database. I just export and import posts out of and into WordPress.”
“I use Dave Coveney’s PHP script for finding and replacing URLs in the database, including those in serialized data.”
“I do a find-and-replace on the SQL dump and the website’s files.”
“It’s a massive pain in the arse, and I steer clear of it.”
“I dunno. What is the best practice on this?”
COWBOY CODING
Finally, to gauge how strictly people adhere to general best practices, I asked respondents whether they ever cheekily edit code on the live server. Let’s be honest: this question is only ever going to yield one outcome. As expected, a whopping 76% owned up to having tweaked some WordPress production code in their time.
What We’ve Learned
In reviewing the lessons learned, it’s important to say up front that I am not criticizing the development and deployment practices of the survey’s respondents. The goal was to identify the areas where we, as a community, can become more professional and to draw some conclusions on how we might achieve that. You’ll find no finger-wagging or hyper-critical feedback for developers — just broad conclusions drawn from the responses.
VERSION CONTROL
First, clearly not enough of us are using version control in our everyday workflow. This is a fundamental tool for any developer, and for 61% of those who self-identify as a developer or as both a designer and developer to say that they don’t use version control indicates that effort is needed in the WordPress community to educate developers on the importance of source-control management.
Still, while not enough WordPress developers use version control, that so many who do use Git is very positive. I prefer the decentralized approach of Git, and while WordPress’ core team still uses (and will likely continue to use) Subversion, Git brings many benefits. Suppose a few teams are working on a project. Each team could write to its own repository, and then a senior member of the quality-assurance team or an administrator could merge changes from all of those repositories into a protected repository before deploying the website. This approach makes a lot of sense if the website you’re working on is large and members of your team are dispersed, and it’s why I favor Git.
ENVIRONMENTS
While a lot has been done to grapple with the issues arising from WordPress storing URLs in the database, the problem goes beyond WordPress’ core and extends to plugins and even to the pesky URLs ending up in serialized data. This is a pain in the arse at best, and a complete time-suck at worst. There are many options for overcoming this, but the most common choice is either not to migrate data from environment to environment at all or to use Dave Coveney’s PHP script. Both have their problems. For me, the first just isn’t viable, and the second, while perfectly acceptable, isn’t automated enough and is pretty time-consuming. There has to be a better option.
Free and premium tools and plugins offer solutions to this problem. One that came up a lot in the survey’s results was BackupBuddy and its migration feature. I’ve played around with its functionality, and, while it works perfectly well, it does not (as yet) work with Multisite, and I actually found the process more arduous than using a find-and-replace script. One project of mine that has emerged from this survey is to automate the find-and-replace process with a tool for Capistrano.
from :http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/15/wordpress-deployment-survey/
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