Moving to WordPress

So, you’re interested in contributing some code back to the wonderful Internet community. Well, your first stop should surely be Github. If you’ve been a student in Computer Science, or pretty much any discipline where you need some code or libraries to accomplish some task, then surely you know that 1) Github is your primary go-to, and 2) you better have set up an account, and started sharing some examples of code for your future employers and collaborators to see what you do.

For some of us, however, we want access to a platform that can give us a bit more flexibility to be able to be a bit more reflective and educational with the code we share, and not simply just share code. And, of course there are dozens of options out there for doing that as well. For me, I spent years just managing my own site using Adobe Dreamweaver. However, it was becoming a bit overkill for what I was trying to achieve. I’ve used WordPress for various classes I teach, but not for my own endeavors. Well, as of 2019, that has changed. I narrowed down my search between Medium and WordPress, and concluded that both would have worked. However, I ultimately decided on WordPress due to convincing myself that it had a bit more flexibility to do some cool things.

Plugins

At some point, I’ll start a log of plugins I use…

There is one plugin that is one of my favs…

WP Pusher

One plugin I’ll mention right off the bat is WP Pusher. While WordPress manages a pretty rich set of plugins, some developers have complained that it takes a bit of time to get their plugins available through their API. Also, you’ll quickly notice that there are a lot of outdated plugins still available that may not necessarily work properly on your version of WordPress. Instead, you can deploy plugins directly from GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab.

It’s quite simple to install WP Pusher:

  1. Go to WP Pusher
  2. Download the zip file (wppusher.zip).
  3. Go to your WordPress dashboard, and select Plugins -> Add Plugins -> Upload Plugin. Upload your zip file.
  4. Activate it!

You should now notice that you have a new menu item available called WP Pusher.

That’s it! Find a WordPress plugin on GitHub, and readily install it using WP Pusher! All plugins you install and activate from WP Pusher will then be available and managed from your standard Plugin interface. Very cool.

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