I always look forward to seeing the kind, intelligent and geeky people who attend them, and none more than Ian Stewart, the meetup’s modest and inspiring organizer.

Yesterday’s meetup featured an entertaining, inspiring and informative presentation by Ian, in which the word “Love” was prominently featured, along with Christmas-related pictures and a story about Ian’s personal journey through WordPress theme development. I think that every Winnipegger who is a web designer working with WordPress should use the opportunity to speak with him and learn from his experience.

Thanks Ian for a great year of meetups, and I look forward to another one!

Ian Stewart and David Pensato, two fellow Winnipeg WordPress fans commonly talk about the importance of owning the content you post to the web, and how posting content to Twitter or Facebook is not the best for ensuring you will always have access to that content in the future.

After a WordPress Portfolio Tutorial Matt Wiebe presented at New Media Manitoba, at which he’d mentioned the Social plugin, I’d installed it and decided I’m going to blog more often instead of just tweeting, then push out a tweet and Facebook post using the plugin.

The Social plugin has gone through some issues recently, and I was not able to push out content to Facebook for a while now. Also Automattic has recently released JetPack 1.2, which seems to have features that are similar to what the Social plugin provides (pulling comments on your blog post from Facebook and Twitter), although I am not sure that’s the case.

Now there is a 2.0 version release of the Social plugin, so if anyone has the scoop on the state of the two different plugins and where each is stronger/weaker, I’d be glad to hear it. Otherwise, just install one, the other, or both, and enjoy the features they add to your blogging experience!

It is especially important to give negative feedback in private. It might seem obvious, but I know I’ve been given negative feedback in front of others in the past, and it’s not pleasant.

If you’d like to use this opportunity to learn more about how to give feedback, I did a bit of Googling for the topic, and I was happy with the results for this set of keywords: giving negative feedback to employee . Let me know what you think in a comment!

Every few months they have a promotion by teaming up with another online company to bring this kind of a special. I’d ordered through Movember last year, in April 2011 through About.me, and this time it’s the Klout service.

p.s. Thanks to Terry Smith, a Winnipeg Front End Developer, @DesignCollider for tweeting out that she got the cards. Couldn’t have gotten them without you!

Making NetBeans aware of WordPress functions so it can suggest autocompletion

Working with WordPress, I often have to look up how to use a function I’ve used before, but have forgotten the order of parameters. The codex, and in particular the WordPress function reference and WordPress template tags reference pages are great places to look for such things. However, if you set up NetBeans to be aware of the WordPress functions, sometimes you can save yourself a trip to the codex. NetBeans is by default aware of any functions defined within any files in your PHP include path, as well as any functions you have defined in your project. One way to make NetBeans aware of the WordPress functions would be to have WordPress core within your project, but I would prefer to not have it there. When working on files on remote servers, main reason I would use NetBeans over vim, it is a little bit cumbersome to download all of WordPress core, and I usually only download what I need from wp-content. In such a scenario, you can teach NetBeans to also load a local copy of WordPress into memory. To teach it that, go to Tools -> Options, then PHP tab.

Code completion will then be enabled, and the PHPDocs in WordPress will be parsed shown when looking at the available functions. In the picture below, I typed ‘WP_Q’ and the autocomplete functions became available below it, as well as the documentation dialog above it.

WordPress Coding Style Adherence

The WordPress coding standard defines how your code should look so that it looks the same as the code in WordPress core. Adhering to a coding standard is a good idea because it promotes consistency and makes for easier reading of the code you write. I’ve prepared an export of the Netbeans configuration for the editor to adhere to the WordPress coding standard. I hope you find it useful! To import it, Click Tools -> Options in the top menu, then press the “Import” button in the dialog window that comes up and follow the instructions there.

What’s Next?

A nice feature that is not available to the extent of my knowledge would be templates for common WordPress files, like there are template for Java classes, and such. The way this would work is you could say “I’m going to make a new theme” and it would create all the files a theme requires. Or “I’d like to make a widget.”, “I’d like to write a shortcode.” and NetBeans would create the “boilerplate” code so you can get to coding right away.

Do you have any NetBeans tips you’d like to share with your fellow WordPress site builders? Do you know of a plugin for NetBeans that adds those templates I mention in the section above? Thanks for reading.

It turns out that JWPlayer for WordPress is using WordPress guids instead of using the wp_get_attachment_url() function that makes it safe to move your WordPress website between domains. In short, the guid column in the posts table stores the original URL of the video, and if you change domains, the only way to get the correct URL is to use the aforementioned function.

I wrote a little patch, notified LongTail Video, and it is on its way to being included in the plugin.

I tweeted about that, and the always friendly Web Development Instructor at Red River College, Kyle Geske, replied with a link to his GitHub resume.

A GitHub resume, based on a history of code commits that a developer has made can be a valuable resource to use when looking for a new job, because it shows the ability to develop software.

Create yours and link it here if you please! Oh, and you can fork the code and contribute enhancements.