A lovely article by Smashing Magazine pointed me towards a lovely plugin named Blackbox Debug Bar. Automatic, the creators of Wordpress have made their own debug bar plugin, but it doesn’t provide the complete picture that Blackbox does. Unfortunately Blackbox nuzzles itself to the top of the page, exactly as the Wordpress toolbar (3.1+) does.
Read on to see the Archonic update and download.
Eventpress is a proposed event management system which can be unobtrusive and provide a simple event publishing means or be very detailed and create complex nested events which can interact with a community. It borrows inspiration from software such as Autodesk Maya, GIT and redmine. It will be a wordpress plugin, following the trend of bbPress and BuddyPress.
The problem I wish to solve is that of creating events which interact with a community. That community could be members of Wordpress, bbPress (standalone or plugin), buddyPress or all of the above. By using a highly modular and object oriented structure, an event author can create very simple or very complex events with the same framework.
The ability to fully simulate your latest creation in a staging environment is what separates the best from the rest. Once endowed with such powers, publishing to a live site just to see how it looks seems about as smart as dipping your finger into boiling water to see if it’s the right temperature. Staging environments are not simple though – they require a unique install of Wordpress, a file comparison interface and a bunch of other things. Plug-in’s are a powerful thing but cloning the entire structure of it’s parent is not something plug-ins are capable of. If you run your Wordpress install from something other than a server you have full control over, setting up a staging environment is a near impossibility. Most Wordpress users don’t run their own server let alone know what “Apache” really is.
There is hope though! You can use Wordpress’s “preview” powers to create your own quick and dirty staging environment.
Joshua Mark is an experienced and enthusiastic designer and developer. Recently graduated from Carleton University with a degree in interactive multimedia and design, he is also founder and CEO of Archonic.
