A TECH PLACE

August 26, 2018

Welcome to the Gutenberg Editor

Of Mountains & Printing Presses

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

Beautiful landscape — If your theme supports it, you’ll see the “wide” button on the image toolbar. Give it a try.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

The Inserter Tool

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

Text & Headings
Images & Videos
Galleries
Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
And Lists like this one of course 🙂

Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Accessibility is important — don’t forget image alt attribute

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry
The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

Help build Gutenberg

Thanks for testing Gutenberg!

December 30, 2015January 1, 2018

Terminal 101 Basic’s

Getting comfortable with Terminal is extremely important for Rails development, and general administration needs.

Here are some of the common commands.

Show the logged in as user

$ whoami

$ whoami

List contents of the current directory

$ ls

$ ls

List contents of current directory and permissions

$ ls -li

$ ls -li

Change directory – go back one level

$ CD ..

$ CD ..

Change directory – go into directory “xyz”

$ cd "xyz"

1	$ cd "xyz"

Show your current path – print working directory

$ PWD

$ PWD

remove / delete a file “xyz.file”

$ rm "xyz.file"

1	$ rm "xyz.file"

remove / delete a folder and all of its sub contents (be careful with this one)

$ rm -rf "xyz"

1	$ rm -rf "xyz"

Create a directory – make

$ mkdir "xyz"

1	$ mkdir "xyz"

Create a file

$ touch "xyz.txt"

1	$ touch "xyz.txt"

copy a file

$ cp "xyz.txt"

1	$ cp "xyz.txt"

run as super user

$ sudo "your command"

1	$ sudo "your command"

clear screen

$ clear

$ clear

December 29, 2015February 3, 2016

Basic Rails commands on Heroku

Here are some basic commands for managing a rails project on Heroku

Push a project up to Heroku

$ git push heroku

1	$ git push heroku

Run a DB migration

$ Heroku run rake db:migrate

1	$ Heroku run rake db:migrate

Enter into the rails console

$ Heroku run console

1	$ Heroku run console

Attach to an existing Repo

heroku git:remote -a project

1	heroku git:remote -a project

Where project is the Heroku App name. This is for use with the heroku Toolbelt.

December 29, 2015March 5, 2017

Basic Heroku setup

First, create an account at Heroku.com

Basic commands:

Create a new repo

$ Heroku create

1	$ Heroku create

push you rails project to Heroku

$ Git push Heroku

1	$ Git push Heroku

Open your new project in a browser

$ Heroku open

1	$ Heroku open

View Heroku Logs

$ Heroku Logs

1	$ Heroku Logs

Restart you repo

$ Heroku reset

1	$ Heroku reset

The rename your repo to a more friendly name

$ heroku apps:rename newname

1	$ heroku apps:rename newname

December 29, 2015March 5, 2017

Create a Rails project with a postgresql database

If you already have Rails setup the defaults are to create a connection for a SQLite database.

To switch this to a PostgeSQL database.

First install a PostgreSQL database on your machine for dev and test.

For apple computers, I suggest the Postgres.app.

You also need the PG gem which connects PostgeSQL to Rails. To verify everything is ready to go, run

$ gem install pg

1	$ gem install pg

To create a new project with a PostgreSQL database run

$ rails new 'mynewproject' -d postgresql

1	$ rails new 'mynewproject' -d postgresql

This creates a new project connected postgresql

The connection settings for you new project are in the database.yml under config. Here are the default settings as of rails 4.2.4.

# PostgreSQL. Versions 8.2 and up are supported.
#
# Install the pg driver:
# gem install pg
# On OS X with Homebrew:
# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/usr/local/bin/pg_config
# On OS X with MacPorts:
# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/opt/local/lib/postgresql84/bin/pg_config
# On Windows:
# gem install pg
# Choose the win32 build.
# Install PostgreSQL and put its /bin directory on your path.
#
# Configure Using Gemfile
# gem 'pg'
#
default: &default
 adapter: postgresql
 encoding: unicode
 # For details on connection pooling, see rails configuration guide
 # http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#database-pooling
 pool: 5

development:
 <<: *default
 database: mynewproject_development

 # The specified database role being used to connect to postgres.
 # To create additional roles in postgres see `$ createuser --help`.
 # When left blank, postgres will use the default role. This is
 # the same name as the operating system user that initialized the database.
 #username: mynewproject

 # The password associated with the postgres role (username).
 #password:

 # Connect on a TCP socket. Omitted by default since the client uses a
 # domain socket that doesn't need configuration. Windows does not have
 # domain sockets, so uncomment these lines.
 #host: localhost

 # The TCP port the server listens on. Defaults to 5432.
 # If your server runs on a different port number, change accordingly.
 #port: 5432

 # Schema search path. The server defaults to $user,public
 #schema_search_path: myapp,sharedapp,public

 # Minimum log levels, in increasing order:
 # debug5, debug4, debug3, debug2, debug1,
 # log, notice, warning, error, fatal, and panic
 # Defaults to warning.
 #min_messages: notice

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
 <<: *default
 database: mynewproject_test

# As with config/secrets.yml, you never want to store sensitive information,
# like your database password, in your source code. If your source code is
# ever seen by anyone, they now have access to your database.
#
# Instead, provide the password as a unix environment variable when you boot
# the app. Read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#configuring-a-database
# for a full rundown on how to provide these environment variables in a
# production deployment.
#
# On Heroku and other platform providers, you may have a full connection URL
# available as an environment variable. For example:
#
# DATABASE_URL="postgres://myuser:mypass@localhost/somedatabase"
#
# You can use this database configuration with:
#
# production:
# url: <%= ENV['DATABASE_URL'] %>
#
production:
 <<: *default
 database: mynewproject_production
 username: mynewproject
 password: <%= ENV['MYNEWPROJECT_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>

# PostgreSQL. Versions 8.2 and up are supported.

# Install the pg driver:

# gem install pg

# On OS X with Homebrew:

# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/usr/local/bin/pg_config

# On OS X with MacPorts:

# gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/opt/local/lib/postgresql84/bin/pg_config

# On Windows:

# gem install pg

# Choose the win32 build.

# Install PostgreSQL and put its /bin directory on your path.

# Configure Using Gemfile

# gem 'pg'

default: &default

adapter: postgresql

encoding: unicode

# For details on connection pooling, see rails configuration guide

# http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#database-pooling

pool: 5

development:

<<: *default

database: mynewproject_development

# The specified database role being used to connect to postgres.

# To create additional roles in postgres see `$ createuser --help`.

# When left blank, postgres will use the default role. This is

# the same name as the operating system user that initialized the database.

#username: mynewproject

# The password associated with the postgres role (username).

#password:

# Connect on a TCP socket. Omitted by default since the client uses a

# domain socket that doesn't need configuration. Windows does not have

# domain sockets, so uncomment these lines.

#host: localhost

# The TCP port the server listens on. Defaults to 5432.

# If your server runs on a different port number, change accordingly.

#port: 5432

# Schema search path. The server defaults to $user,public

#schema_search_path: myapp,sharedapp,public

# Minimum log levels, in increasing order:

# debug5, debug4, debug3, debug2, debug1,

# log, notice, warning, error, fatal, and panic

# Defaults to warning.

#min_messages: notice

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and

# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".

# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.

test:

<<: *default

database: mynewproject_test

# As with config/secrets.yml, you never want to store sensitive information,

# like your database password, in your source code. If your source code is

# ever seen by anyone, they now have access to your database.

# Instead, provide the password as a unix environment variable when you boot

# the app. Read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#configuring-a-database

# for a full rundown on how to provide these environment variables in a

# production deployment.

# On Heroku and other platform providers, you may have a full connection URL

# available as an environment variable. For example:

# DATABASE_URL="postgres://myuser:mypass@localhost/somedatabase"

# You can use this database configuration with:

# production:

# url: <%= ENV['DATABASE_URL'] %>

production:

<<: *default

database: mynewproject_production

username: mynewproject

password: <%= ENV['MYNEWPROJECT_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>

December 28, 2015

Common Rake Commands

create databases

rake db:create

1	rake db:create

run a Migration

rake db:migrate

1	rake db:migrate

rollback a migration

rake db:rollback

1	rake db:rollback

seed the database

rake db:seed

1	rake db:seed

drop the databases

rake db:drop

1	rake db:drop

December 28, 2015December 29, 2015

Managing your Gem’s

To update your system gem’s run

gem update --system

1	gem update --system

To freeze all gem’s in a project

rake rails:freeze:gems

1	rake rails:freeze:gems

December 28, 2015March 5, 2017

Create a new Rails project with a specific version

To create a new project in rails with a specific version.

First make sure you have the rails version gem installed, then create your project.

gem install rails -v 'rails version number'

1	gem install rails -v 'rails version number'

rails _'rails version'_ mynewapp

1	rails _'rails version'_ mynewapp

example:

rails _4.2.4_ new mynewap

1	rails _4.2.4_ new mynewap