TL;DR: I totally landed a dream job with WebDevStudios! It’s late, I know….

2007, I download WordPress

When I downloaded WordPress to create my first site with it, I had no idea it would become such a huge part of my life. It was easy, it had plugins, it had themes, it was something I could work with. That’s how it all started. As the years went on I would go on to push WordPress as “the future,” and it was, especially for me. I would use WordPress to build many sites, it’s in everything I would build.

2007+

For almost a decade WordPress would be the center of most of the things I did. I can’t express enough how happy I am that WordPress is Open Source. My love, and of course need, for Open Source software is what pulled me to WordPress in the early days.

During this time I’d work building WordPress sites for lots of people, friends, and even family. Towards the end I would finally start working on my own WordPress themes and plugins.

…2014, I meet WordPress addicts

I attend my first WordCamp (#wcphx) and see all these WordPress addicts, thinking how lucky they are to get to do WordPress day in and day out and work with other WordPress people.

I decide to make a change. I need to work with these people, I needed to be a part of a community who are crazy about WordPress like I am. I set out to find a dream job, one of those “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life” deals.

I aim high hoping for anything I could get my hands on. Let’s just say it was a trip and I learned a lot along the way. But I noticed WebDevStudios needs a front-end developer. I think it’s a long shot, but knew this would be huge if I were able to get a job with these guys…

2015, …and I did!

It was a big deal when I got the call from Dre telling me I had got the job. I’m pretty sure I said something in reply like, “This is great. I can’t wait!” But what I was really thinking was, “Holy shit! I got the job!”

It’s been an amazing couple of weeks. WordPress is now what I do and I’m excited to work and learn with the great people I’ve been getting acquainted with over at WebDevStudios. They’re a crazy bunch, but that’s right up my alley, and I’m honored to be associated with such a prestigious company.

Thank You’s

A lot of people helped me along the way, especially family and friends with their encouragement and support. They truly know the “journey” I was on trying to make WordPress what I do, especially my patient and very understanding fiance Ashley.

But, most of all, as cliche as it will sound, I do owe a lot to the WordPress community itself. Because they make a great open source platform like WordPress, they’ve opened up this opportunity for me.

Let’s say you have this situation (as I did). You are using a custom WordPress Post Type and you have set this custom post type to never publish. You’re using it as a way to save data using only the Dashboard, not ever publish the data to the theme. So the only save function you have is saving as a draft to protect it from public eyes.

Because of this situation the post’s date is always set to the modified date as it is never published. This caused a few issues for me as the application needed to pull up archives for posts based on the creation date, not the modified date.

But WordPress only gives the post a created date if it is published, so saving it as a draft updates post_date each time.

So, I had to prevent WordPress from updating post_date each time a draft was saved. I used the below to ensure that on drafts for a specific post type, here ihcrs_events, only got one post_date update when it was created, but needed to retain that date going forward.

https://gist.github.com/aubreypwd/c6109ed817ed89e232c3

As you can see we just update the post_date to the previous value using the wp_insert_post_data filter.

Note, pay extra careful attention to the priority of the filter, 99. This ensures the last update (there are many on save) retains the date. Using 10 or 20 will not retain the date.

I’ve been waiting for a while to publish a new plugin! I have a few, but they are old and outdated. I’ve learned a lot about making better WordPress Plugins (coding wise) and I’ve finally got a plugin with something more modern.

When I set out to develop a new plugin I wanted to build something I wanted. I’ve tried other note taking plugins, but nothing has been simple and exactly what I needed.

WP NoteUp is inspired by Simplenote and aims to be as like it as it can be. Simple and right to the point, just text.

A Pro Version

I have plans, though, to release a Pro version of the plugin that features some vanity items like note backgrounds but should also feature more features like Markup or the Visual Composer.

I know people want more than what WP NoteUp does out of the box with today’s release, sometimes I want more out of Simplenote too. So, the Pro version will have these things and give people that want more…more, and if you just want simple just go with the .Org version.

Note sure how much, not sure when I’ll get it done. But when I do, I’ll post something here.

My daughter seemed super fascinated by Willie Nelson songs I was listening to.

This is what I did anyhow…

Here my external disk is Sling and it has the proper permissions root:admin. Before it had root:wheel which wasn’t allowing me to write to the disk as I did before.

To get the right permissions I used sudo chown root:admin Sling/. I thought that this permission would only apply one time, but I ejected and re-mounted and it kept the permission.

Hopefully this helps.