One of our local WordPress group members asked how to begin and where to start learning WordPress. I thought it was just a simple question. But somehow I looked around and as someone who has a bit of experience with this platform, where would I direct those who are starting out?

If you have a bit of budget for trainings:

• Lynda – WordPress Training
• Treehouse
• Skillshare

My personal bookmarks:

• WordPress TV
• Pippin’s Plugins
• Post Status
• WP Tavern
• Sucuri
• WordPress Core
• Engineering Best Practices (for WordPress and beyond)

Lastly…

• Join (your nearest) meetups
• Attend WordCamps

And by the way, welcome to WordPress ❤

I’m finally going for my first ever WordCamp. Not only I am attending, but I’ll give a talk as well. In WordCamp Singapore, you will hear me talk about the advantages of utilizing WordPress hooks. How they can massively help pushing features into a large codebase/theme become almost a cinch. When is the best time to add a hook and where you can usually best place a hook. Ultimately, I hope to give you an idea on how actions and filters work in the WordPress ecosystem.

Please checkout the WordCamp Singapore site for other amazing talks and schedule — https://2016.singapore.wordcamp.org/

There’s a huge difference between merging master into feature and merging feature into master. So please for those who’s starting learning git – don’t ever make the mistake I made. Don’t disregard the use of --no-ff. In my case, I didn’t disregard it completely, though. I missed adding the flag as I perform git in terminal.

One easy way so you’ll never have to type it again and run the risk of missing it is update your global git config:

git config --global merge.ff false

When merge.ff is set to false, this always creates an extra merge commit, thus it is equivalent to adding --no-ff flag.

One golden use case:

When you revert to your merged IN master, this commit reference is the one you revert to to pull out the changes from your feature.

Following the guide How To Downgrade Droplets, I have successfully downgraded my server in Digital Ocean. As every other guide, the scenario is almost always not exactly the same so I did my part of researching to resolve issues that have arised along the way.

I’d like to note important things tailored to my needs that the guide never mentioned.

• Export the database manually. The guide only covers copying of the files, not the database. When you have the exported file, use it to bring back the database into the new/smaller droplet.
• Re-install openssh-server if you encounter close connection.
• Purged and re-install mysql when couldn’t connect to local MySQL server.
• Indeed, pay attention to warnings when reading!!
• Overused command ssh-keygen -R [hostname]:port

My expertise isn’t lie on system or server administration but I certainly enjoy doing this stuff every once in awhile. But man, it’s hot. Don’t play with it unless you’re ready to get burned!

I’ve been wanting to attend conferences for developers and on November 13-14 the biggest developers in the Philipines held its second summit and it’s a plane ride away from home—I was on high again.

What I’ve learned from the conference (aside from handshaking and saying to speakers that they did a good job):

• thechangelog.com
• Prepare business cards (lotsa!)
• Constantly talk your ideas
• Why open source prevails? Because human is kind by nature; we’d rather contribute for the goodness than making the cause of someone’s downfall.
• “Great support, great communication that translates your knowledge to the clients.”
• Your dorm mate might be one of the speakers!
• Docker!
• Mantra in development: “Immutability, decomposability, distributed, continuous”

It was a nice experience overall despite that…

Why no WordPress in the dev community lists? We need to seriously step up the community of WordPress in the PH. We’re the 25% u know.

— Dreb Bits (@drebbits) November 13, 2015

In the recent real estate project, I got to finally play with Genesis Framework and I can’t deny the newly embraced fact that it’s dang “sweet”. I always wanted to try out this framework ever since but clients are requesting to build their websites with other frameworks. So I always hit it in that direction. This time, I happened to suggest this tool to a client and had the chance to give direction on how to build the website that meets their business goals, timeframe and budget. The first time I felt like an engineer and manager in that process.

Well, I couldn’t get enough of the overwhelming hooks and filters around this framework. It’s like a bed of roses for child theme and some plugin developers. The lego of the WordPress frameworks world as it can be taken out part by part without even touching the core. The thought of it before that this might be another “everything but the kitchen sink” has been ruled out. The fat is there but it’s the good amount of fat that makes your website healthy.

I can see now why everyone is talking about it. I don’t even need to elaborate that as the summary of it’s superpower has been laid out here. There’s a huge number of developers that are into it as well becoming access to solutions to a probability that you may encounter issues even easier. So far the experience was superb but I can’t wait for the unimaginable hurdles that I may encounter along the way of using this sweet little thing.