My notes from this month's "WordPress Sampler" meeting of WPJax at Modis. Folks in our group range from business owners and students to advanced developers. Here are some of their recommendations and insights, primarily from Elizabeth, Clint, and Jonathan.

Themes and Development

• What WP Theme is That? is especially useful when dissecting what other webmasters have done in building their themes.

• BluChic has WordPress themes for sites, intended for a more feminine look.

• Creative Market is WordPress themes: Hundreds, nay thousands! At reasonable prices.

• The Avada multi-purpose, responsive theme. Comes highly recommended as being one of the most easily customizable and dependable. This is Theme Forest's best-selling theme.

• Canvas, WooTheme's "flagship" theme. Somewhat pricier than the other themes we discussed, this one is just as easy, but a little better for folks who aren't afraid to write just a handful of PHP statements to tweak the perfect theme's functionality.

• Cobalt Apps promises to break down some of the barriers that normally require a bit of coding. It builds child themes for the Genesis theme without having to dig too deeply into PHP or HTML / CSS.

Stock Photos and Shopping

• Death to the Stock Photo sends you free, royalty-free photos. you receive an monthly email. Or subscribe to their entire library for a small fee.

• The Dollar Photo Club has High-resolution and vector images, royalty-free, always $1.00 USD each.

• Embed items in your marketplace from "Square" (using an

Sites:

• Cafe bon Appetit is a site partly coded by Jonathan, showing how something built for large institutions like a university can still be attractive and appealing. The main page operates several sites inside, each catered to a college or corporation cafeteria. This ties together databases, design, and working through procedural and regulatory challenges.

• Jonathan also showed us the behind-the-scenes operation of a new site for a major office furniture designer/manufacturer. The site's theme and plugins enable functions in the WordPress admin screens that permit building nested database-driven detail boxes in the post/page composition process without any coding whatsoever.

Jonathan also shared his experience finding, tracking, and repairing a bug in the WordPress Core that has existed for years.

I encourage you to contact Clint, Jonathan, or Elizabeth for your WordPress design needs. And thanks again to Modis and to Tim and Rebecca for the venue and the refreshments!

Good questions and a bunch of tips from everyone else attending rounded out this excellent session. We've got a great group going, and much talent on the move here in the "Bold New City of the South!"

To compare the current working copy with other versions, or just to see what other tagged versions are available, it is handy to know the revision number, which is what svn bases all its operations on. The best way to do this is with the long (verbose) form of svn ls as shown below. Note, I am in the 'trunk' directory of my AutoNav project.

bill@charcoal:trunk$ <strong>svn ls -v ../tags</strong>
 327606 wlindley              Dec 31 11:41 ./
 175035 wlindley              Nov 18  2009 1.1.8/
 175037 wlindley              Nov 18  2009 1.1.9/
 187455 wlindley              Dec 27  2009 1.2.2/
 192298 wlindley              Jan 10  2010 1.2.3/
 193267 wlindley              Jan 12  2010 1.2.4/
 195857 wlindley              Jan 20  2010 1.2.5/
 283374 wlindley              Aug 31 14:03 1.2.7/
 287447 wlindley              Sep 09 13:31 1.2.8/
 307532 wlindley              Nov 03 14:52 1.2.9/
 308944 wlindley              Nov 07 12:57 1.3.0/
 311196 wlindley              Nov 13 16:28 1.3.1/
 312023 wlindley              Nov 15 22:33 1.3.2/
 320048 wlindley              Dec 07 06:34 1.3.3/
 320583 wlindley              Dec 08 11:05 1.3.4/
 327606 wlindley              Dec 31 11:41 1.3.5/
bill@charcoal:trunk$

The revision numbers are at left. Now I can do:

bill@charcoal:trunk$ svn diff -r 320583
Index: autonav-wl.php
===================================================================
--- autonav-wl.php      (revision 320583)
+++ autonav-wl.php      (working copy)
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 Plugin URI: http://www.wlindley.com/webpage/autonav
 Description: Displays child pages in a table of images or a simple list; also displays
attached images, or images from a subdirectory under wp-uploads, in a table, with
automatic resizing of thumbnails and full-size images.
 Author: William Lindley
-Version: 1.3.3
+Version: 1.3.6
 Author URI: http://www.wlindley.com/
 */
            <em>and so on</em>

It sure would be nice if there were a way to combine both local working copy and a remote tag in an svn diff command, but that does not seem to be suppported yet (as of svn 1.6).

see also Other svn tricks here [gnu.org]

Firebug 1.6, the plugin for Firefox, is newly released; for debugging or developing web apps, like Wordpress, it is simply indispensable.

A few of my favorite features:

1. Scrollable breadcrumbs, solves the one biggest thing that always drove me nuts, in dealing with Real World css.

2. Copy CSS from the inspection window by right-clicking on the declaration:

   

Strawberry Perl is a relatively new competitor to ActiveState Perl.

Strawberry includes MinGW (a port of the GNU compiler tools) and MSYS (a port of the bash command line) which run directly as Windows programs -- in contrast to Cygwin which is a separate environment. Yes that means you have 'make' and 'gcc' on Windows directly now!

Strawberry runs under 64-bit Windows 7; ActiveState doesn't yet. Strawberry installs even the latest modules from CPAN; ActiveState has precompiled 'ppm' modules which do not include the full CPAN complement nor the latest additions or updates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Perl