Category: News

Chris Lema announced on his blog yesterday that he’s joining Crowd Favorite as its CTO on September 15th. I think this can only mean good things for the community. Chris as been writing a blog since 2012 through which he inspires us all on a daily basis, for free, and he’s also been giving talks at WordCamps all over the place, through which he inspires attendees as well as those of us who catch his speeches afterwords. And Crowd Favorite? Well, they’ve been at the core of WordPress development ever since its birth back in 2003, and they’ve contributed a ton in their own right. Things such as the Carrington suite of products, (which includes Carrington Core, a completely free WordPress theme that promotes best practices when it comes to its code, and Carrington Build, a package that scratches the drag-n-drop itch while still maintaining code best practices), along with several free plugins. Yeah, Crowd Favorite is definitely part of the concrete.

Chris has been using his experience in the corporate world to help WordPress freelancers become successful. And he’s done a lot of it for free, and it’s been excellent dvice, not just some sort of teaser that says “Oh here’s some stuff I know is absolutely amazing, but you can only have it if you pay me $29,999, and even if you’re a small business you should still do it, because invest in yourself”. (I’m not saying coaches or marketers shouldn’t be paid, or even that they shouldn’t necessarily earn the amounts they are. My point is that Chris has given of his time and talent to our community, and I know several people who have turned that information into successful businesses). So we have inspiring, and a rock-solid foundation for development in the WordPress community, coming together. What could possibly go wrong with this combination?

If you don’t know who Chris Lema is, or haven’t read any of his posts, you can find out more about him over at PostStatus, and you can visit his site and subscribe to his newsletter to get the latest from his keyboard on WordPress. I promise. He’s absolutely worth every minute you spend reading.

PhpStorm is a full-featured IDE that has somewhat of a cult following among WordPress developers. Made by JetBrains, it’s notable for being more light-weight than most IDEs, web development specific (though not just PHP as the name implies), and very customizable.

Today, they’ve announced that PhpStorm will begin officially supporting WordPress project management. WordPress-specific features include:

• WordPress integration in PhpStorm for new plugins (with plugin skeleton) and existing projects
• Development environment configuration for WordPress
• Hooks support (Completion for registration functions parameters; Navigation from hook registration functions to hook invocation; Callbacks from hook registration; and other hooks-related features)
• Search WordPress.org right from the editor
• WPCLI integration

They also link to a complete tutorial on using PhpStorm with WordPress. The tutorial includes screenshots as well as text. All of the above features are available to those in their Early Access program, and will be fully baked into version 8.

Those that are familiar with using a full IDE will probably get along just fine with PhpStorm. Those that primarily use text editors like Notepad++ or Sublime Text or Coda may be overwhelmed at first. There are many advantages of using an IDE, but they’ve historically been plagued for being slow and complicated. PhpStorm works hard to not be. Along with the above-linked tutorial, there is also a paid tutorial called Make PhpStorm Pretty by Jeffrey Way (formerly of Envato).