Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

WordPress Plugin : WP-CFM – manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes

WP-CFM is a WordPress plugin which helps to manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes between different sites.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks super useful as it allows to separate the configuration options from the content, both of which are stored in the database.  The cherry on top here is the support for WP-CLI, command line interface to WordPress, which is frequently employed for automatically deploying WordPress to different servers and environments.

I have a feeling this plugin will be making its way into our project-template-wordpress setup pretty soon.

How to handle configuration in PHP

Kevin Schroeder has a blog post about the tool that he is building for configuration management in PHP.  The library is still in the early pre-release stage, but it looks like it solves quite a few problems related to configuration, like nesting, inheritance, and environment/context variation.

Here’s the YouTube video that provides a bit of introduction into how to use the tool, and what to expect of it.

The only thing that dials down my excitement in this implementation is the use of XML, even though I understand why he opted for this choice.

I will need a PHP configuration management solution soon, but the priority hasn’t been raised high enough yet for me to jump into the research.  If you know of any other similar tools, please let me know – it all will come handy pretty soon.

MapFight – visually compare sizes of countries

MapFight is a fun little web application, which superimposes the maps of two selected countries to show which one is larger and by how much.  And the best part is that you don’t even to stick just to countries – the continents are in there as well, so you can compare Europe to Asia, or even Russia to Europe.

GitHub pricing : Business

GitHub has yet another update to their pricing options.  Business plans have been launched with support for SAML single sign-on, 99.95% uptime SLA, 24×5 support with 8 hour response, and more.

Unfortunately it still counts external contributors as users in the account, which makes it too expensive for my organizations, but it’s good to see them trying.

Moving files with commit history from one git repository to another

I’ve searched for this before, and I’m sure I’ll do that again (although the need is not that frequent), so here it goes.  It is possible to move files from one git repository to another, preserving commit history.  The following links provide a few examples of how to do this:

Basically, you need git filter-branch command, usually with the –subdirectory-filter parameter.

An example of where it is useful would be the extraction of some code from a project you have into a shared library or a simple plugin.