WPwatercooler

EP19 – IDEs and Text editors for WordPress Development – WPwatercooler – January 28 2013

On this episode of WPwatercooler, the panel dives into a lively discussion about text editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). The conversation spans from the merits of various text editors like Sublime Text and BBEdit to the nostalgia of older software like FrontPage and HotDog. The team also explores the challenges that public sectors and corporate environments face in keeping up with technological advancements. The episode wraps up with some insights into Windows 8 and its impact on development. Overall, it’s an engaging dialogue that covers both the technical and the cultural aspects of coding and development.

Panel

Episode Transcription

(70) EP19 – IDEs and Text editors for WordPress Development – WPwatercooler – January 28 2013 – YouTube

Transcript:
(00:00) thank you [Applause] hey this is Jason Tucker and you are at the wp water cooler today we’re going to be talking about Ides and text editors I know this is going to be an awesome amazing show because we’re all probably going to say the exact same text editor and three minutes later we’re going to be done with this show so let’s go through the list here and say get some introductions going let’s start with you Mr Chris Lima hi I’m Chris summer and you can find me on Twitter Chris and I’m blogging with
(00:34) Chris Lama how about you Dave hi I’m Dave I’m a software engineer and I build web applications with WordPress and other Technologies Patrick and Patrick and I’ve been I build stuff with red cross me too tell us about it say oh oh uh I’m say read and I build cool stuff with uh WordPress and you should all be the Unicorn courtesy Sarah kidding how about you Steve Steve zenget founder of Zeke interactive and I lead the OC WordPress Meetup and he’s not a unicorn uh last time I checked that’s well
(01:21) where’s our so as much stuff she’s that hi I’m Suzette I work for media Temple I’m their WordPress evangelist lead and you can find me at Mt underscore Suzette on Twitter awesome how about you Taylor my name is Taylor I work for 10 up and you can find me on Twitter at TD Dewey and my company at 10up.
(01:46) com sweet I’m Jason Tucker host of the show I run a company called Tucker Pro and I built cold websites using WordPress OMG we have so much in common I know it’s amazing it’s so cool so the this this entire episode is all Taylor’s fault I just wanna I just wanna just put it out there like that way to go Taylor it would have been awesome had I not shown up right yeah I just had an affiliate link for PHP storm he’d be driving a Hummer right now or a like yeah something awesome he was he was getting people to switch the PHP storm very very
(02:31) quickly after showing some pretty awesome amazing stuff during his talk over at um at Work Camp Phoenix and I just wanted to get him on the show here to really drive it home and kind of let her know about some cool stuff he could do with his one of his editors of choice what’s everyone using I’m curious whatever for a text editor for an IDE or both for both I guess yeah well a Sublime Text too for my text editor uh PHP storm is my idea of choice and my Hummer is not my car of choice but you know whatever but you’ll take it
(03:06) because you know what else why not right actually that would be a bad idea because it would cost a lot of money to own a Hummer I think I think it would yeah I’m quite happy with my uh my little only if you want to drive it right that’s true we just want to like look at it and have parties in it you’re good just stick it in your front yard Hummers around where I live for me for me I started out with text me that was uh that was the the editor that I was using when um I first started doing some web development on on the Mac
(03:37) before that I was using a couple different things uh notepad plus plus on um on Windows which was a pretty cool you know I try to find something that’s that allows me to really mess with text quickly and easily if I want to capitalize stuff lowercase stuff make any changes like that the shift key could help you with that super awesome text editors it’s an Innovative approach I think it is the shift key yeah exactly so so Taylor what what do you like most about your your the product that you’re repping there the product that I’m I’m
(04:14) actually not repping phds from for anybody that wants to know I actually have no affiliation there um but I think IDs in general and the big the big part about it is that they know your code base like it knows what WordPress is sorry because you know I like to do that obviously can you tell me exactly what IDE stands for me the audience Etc integrated development environment so the idea is that it has your text editor uh there it has Version Control built in it has ways to manipulate and move files around and you’re thinking wow that
(04:47) sounds a lot like text mate or Coda or phpstorm and then it goes a Step Beyond that right it also has a debugging environment it can integrate with your Version Control uh all sorts of things um so it’s it’s like your One Stop Shop for editing your your stuff do you find that a lot of them in general have steep learning curves yeah no no well that’s because Dave’s like a rocket scientist come on now I don’t see them as having really a learning curve I mean it’s it’s kind of like Excel most people learn and use
(05:20) about oh maybe three or four percent of what Excel can do but they can do a lot maybe learning more and more about what your tool is capable of doing as you’re using it I can’t believe you just referenced Excel yeah I just it’s an example I just ran your numbers to Excel and I think your percentages are off oh well the best thing they probably just took a dip visual edit yeah using any type of the visual editors or other Visual Basic editors um you know being able to do text completion um is is amazing you know that was like
(05:50) the big thing that they touted was you know start typing in a couple a couple letters and it goes oh that’s a function called this or oh there’s a variable called that and then quickly give you a drop down of what things you want to select is that what you what you’ve already used for or is that who’s your code so that’s that’s I think where the learning curve is is you have to tell it some information about your project before you can really start using it to anything more than a little
(06:17) text editor and I don’t even think netbeans allows you to just pull up like a single file it does it does it okay so yeah so I mean if you use it like a text editor right just pulling up one file at a time it’s kind of useless um so so the power I mean to to anyone watching this right uh and say um the power it’s fine no big deal the power of one of these is I’m just playing the power of one of these is really when it comes to uh speeding you up in terms of autocomplete right so one of the things I like most about about
(06:57) Ides when they do understand your code when they understand your environment is that you know you’re typing a lot faster because you’re moving through uh no name spaces and objects that are well understood by the IDE so it fills them out and lets you just keep moving is uh is is the one that you’re talking about Taylor uh is is the one that you’re talking about only for PHP a PHP storm is yeah it’s based off of uh jet brains which so they have like this has a whole bunch of different they have
(07:34) a whole library of stuff for all yeah yeah but yeah so is whereas netbeans lets you use just about anything right right is somebody using that beans here because I’m not I I just pulled it up once you are okay yeah I use netbeans right I started using it about 10 years ago for Java development but it’s got a PHP extension so it knows PHP JavaScript all that stuff uh that makes it is that why it’s related net beans and Java because like coffee beans Java um I don’t know where the name came from so
(08:08) it would be just a guess just trying to figure out okay I have another really important question so when they do those uh is it like autocorrect is like a website for all the the bad autocorrects in your idea Steve’s been typing leads autocomplete is different than autocorrect oh sometimes for you right and stuff right so so you’re in there and you want you want to start typing is it WP and Q script or is it WP and Q scripts or is it WP script and queue I mean what is it and you just start typing in queue and
(08:47) it goes oh you want to put WP in front of that and script after it and and you just press you know you type in queue it goes here’s your function you know do you want scripts or Styles you hit the one you want press Tab and and you’ve got it and then it also tells you what the parameters are and you can keep going so that’s where it’s quick that’s the main difference between that and code I use Coda and um one difference okay I I don’t remember what I was you for Coda um text I think that’s great
(09:21) yeah or uh but so what can you can you um uh illustrate some of the differences between you know sell me is I was there um there was a lot going on there will be a quiz after this I’m heading to now Taylor yeah so okay so the autocomplete is one thing um what I found really helpful when I when I first started using phpstorm um is is getting familiar with the WordPress code base so you can start typing a little bit of a function it tells you what it is which is fine but even for functions that you know what is
(10:05) it that they actually do um and most people I talk with it they’re like oh I go check on the Codex to see what this function does but the Codex isn’t really I mean it’s a great reference but it’s not it’s not going to be 100 accurate what is 100 accurate is the code itself and you can hit on on mine I have it mapped to command B for control b or something I don’t know and you hit it and it takes you right to the actual function and you know that is written out and what the actual code is for that function it also
(10:34) tells you during the autocomplete uh at least at least in within phpstorm it tells you what type of variable it is so it’s a story uh you know it’s an array is it a string is it you know whatever that’s that’s gonna work if you set your doc blocks correctly so comments at the top which is why those are so important for us because it just ties everything in together yeah so but here’s the thing with like Ides and I I started with Ides back in in college for Java or whatever so long ago they’re great for when you get
(11:11) everything set up right but when you don’t have everything set up right they’re just this huge cumbersome block of blah when whereas something like Sublime Text to or uh Coda or text mate they’re so simple you can’t get anything wrong and you can use any FTP agent any FTP client you want and you can use that’s right yeah absolutely see so that’s the thing like all of this auto complete and reading your doc blocks that’s all from stuff you’ve done so it’ll help you only if you’ve already
(11:40) done it right so if you it’s not gonna like it’s not really like an educator type tool in a way and everything in the in the WordPress code base oh so it has that as a library pre-loaded uh no you love a project and at the project includes the WordPress code base it knows all of the WordPress code base oh it’s like the Codex just got loaded into your IDE right I mean that’s pretty yeah feels like it’s loaded into your brain when you’re working that way like The Matrix just plug it in one of the other features I’ve used is
(12:15) uh tools for refactoring yeah so if you are working on some code and you decide you need to change a function name in a in a class uh it’ll let you change that name and any references to it nice if you have the same function or method that you’re using in multiple places and you want to rename one of those it knows what class you’re referring to so it only changes the references that you want to change when you’re refactoring so that’s really useful that’s handing it’s like find and replace but
(12:43) smart find and replace exactly yeah what if it just starts building things on its own oh no they don’t do that yes it’s not a code generator you don’t know how just let it running wait what I don’t know I have this code so I have like a Singleton pattern loaded up into this thing and you you hit uh control n generate Singleton and it it lays out the structure for you and then asks you to go through and replace the like the name of the class yeah as you replace it once and it’s so you could have like reusable code but
(13:18) with with variables set in it what Singleton yeah that’s another water cooler one second Taylor could you do the sound effect though one more time before we move back there dude it’s the it’s the Poo that I’m talking about I remember what it is uploading because I’m just thinking like singlet like from wrestling no no it’s a design pattern where you create only one instance of a class oh it’s object oriented programming yeah oh right oh yeah yeah it’s actually one of my goals for 2013
(14:17) is to get wrapped my mind around oops oops so I did something cool yesterday I don’t think this is this is related to like specifically for an ID although I did it in PHP storms save us but uh it was it was I did a regex find and replace on a huge select so it’s like select option value and then whatever and transform that entire select into an array with like one line of regex I was like this is amazing it was just going around telling everybody what are you on about is that a gangplank no that was that was at my house so you
(15:00) were like telling your dog oh my God yelling at the door bent on that regex to do what would have taken five minutes to rewrite that stuff yourself that’s what I want to know that’s exactly where I was gonna go right beat you to it I did this huge huge regex and you know it only took about 45 minutes of analysis so that I could I could figure out this line and then it automatically replaced the three instances right I had to go change three words so that’s awesome that’s cool man never underestimate the value which does bring
(15:42) up the question Taylor in since you’re a big reuse fan do you have do you have every letter of the alphabet at the top of your screen so you can drag and drop it into the place where you need it you don’t have to retype it no no I’ve bound those letters to our cane key commands so like consult shift option eight uh inserts the letter s that’s right so you are using the ship that makes things easier and if I don’t use the shift key it’s a capital S that’s right it’s like genesis it’s perfect it’s not
(16:16) anything like this oh burn oh wait I can’t do it you’re calling her own Burns again people oh wait yes I am oh wait that’s Steve wait so you’re too far away I think we need a counter for theme Burns and plug-in Burns and and GPL Burns just everywhere to go back to Patrick’s uh uh comment regarding you know using it an editor versus a full-on IDE uh you know why aren’t you using an IDE I mean for me I would love to be able to use one just so that I can have a decent debugger so I can figure out what are
(17:03) what’s breaking should I set a you know a break point here and figure out what’s happening here and then be able to analyze here’s all the you know the the uh there’s all the different values that the variables have currently and did I said something wrong what did I do yes you did I never have I never had bugs in my code whatever not all as good as you Steve uh obviously I mean it depends what you’re doing Jason if you’re doing tons of crazy plug-in stuff you’re gonna you’re gonna need a debugger but if
(17:34) you’re not doing a really intense programming it’s so nice to just load up that text editor in a second you double click on a file it pops open the file and you can edit whatever you want you just you just want to start typing that Open Bracket HTML close bracket Open Bracket h e a d closed bracket you just want to do that on your own don’t that’s hot man no no no so so when I use it I use um have you guys heard of sorry have you guys heard of um fetch by nettuts it’s just a plug-in for Sublime Text and
(18:04) so I say you know it’s like command shift p or something and it goes and pulls down this plugin and it pulls down this file and then you can replace words with it but it’s software though you know you can I don’t know I’m just looking out for them looking out for facts that’s it yeah that’s interesting so what what’s that actually doing then it’s pulling in so you can save packages or individual files that you use for reuse so I have WordPress as a saved package I open a new folder and
(18:53) then I say download WordPress and it goes and fetches it in 20 seconds later the newest version of WordPress is saved in your directory and you can then I go pull down a theme or I go pull down the plugins I need oh it just gets the latest version of everything you need oh that’s cool does it for your scripts and stuff too you can yeah you can do a prescription you should really be curious I’ve got to uh I gotta log off here in a minute but I just want to let everybody know I’m an old school purist I only use
(19:21) front page to leave early what is this I did um I actually um to be honest I was a BB edit uh uh I swore by BBN for years and only recently switched over to CODA that’s what I’m using you’re old enough to remember thank you did you ever did you ever use home site oh yeah dude I was actually a Dreamweaver user for for many years um I did not use home site I was there was it was it was the text editor before Dreamweaver right and and uh that it was it was pure beauty it was that had a that had a regex search and replace
(20:09) embedded in it for smart replacing that was way Beyond its time was it home site was only Windows yeah yeah so I didn’t use it yeah and they didn’t even have a Mac I mean you had to wait like six months to get one so I used uh I use Coda two I use I use desktop server and I keep my terminal window open for debugging I just I have I’m tailing the error log um you’re tailing the airlock that’s what I said that’s what the kids yeah it’s not perfect but that’s what I do yeah I’m not saying it’s a good
(20:46) replacement for 90 it’s just myself so so Steve we should hook up because you can actually do step through debugging is becoming a date site by tonight he means that the OC WordPress Meetup uh that non-developer day he might have been saying something totally different to Taylor just now I think [Music] it’s Rendezvous don’t forget all your software take it on your drive and you guys can flash drive each other it’ll be great there you go I made a flash drive so Dave Dave are you are you just using netbeans or
(21:46) using anything else um I used another text editor um she’s I can’t remember the name of it right now it’s just it’s always on my desktop because you’re totally shocked by the question in the 30-minute show on text editors and Ides I well every it starts with the word protection every time I I think of it I start thinking in my mind text me because you guys are all talking about text mate and it’s kind of pushed that other name out of my brain hex Wrangler you could there’s this button on your computer you could click
(22:15) oh you’re on Windows oh never mind no I don’t know what you click on last minute oh no that’s the thing I think I’m the only person here that’s not using the Mac I use Windows and Unix and that’s why I like netbeans because it runs on both of those as well as the MacBooks yeah she is she should say that should say that PHP storm netbeans Komodo I think are all Java based so they actually run on every operating system yeah but PHP storms actually it doesn’t feel like it’s really heavy like some of
(22:46) the other ones are okay it’s a function of how slow your computer is that’s not really about oh burn computer now Jason you need to get a computer from this century oh Wes Wes was selling one yesterday on Facebook but it’s now gone he was that was exciting actually I get excited when people sell computers because you never know what you’re gonna find on this is what we’re using on a Windows computer I was using notepad plus plus and before that I would use Homesite before they got bought out by
(23:28) Dreamweaver but just play and before that just plain notepad because I just like doing code that’s how I started yes did tables baby nested tables oh let’s think about tables for a second that’s what I’ve learned about tables so far now is that they work good on mobile because like percentages tables are back that’s pretty awful actually everything old is new again it’s and uh tables work well on um emails as well yeah this is true that’s nothing nothing else it’s good for anyone still using hot dog
(24:19) what do any of you even remember hot dog I remember hearing about hot dog 2006 2007 no I use Homesite that was my thing back then yeah I used I used to use Dreamweaver back in the day one time I used front page and then I yeah remember front page I think it was I think hot dog I think a hot dog came out in like 95 maybe 96.
(24:49) it was uh I was in high school yeah yeah oh sorry that have like when you install front page it makes all these folders with underscores in it like about 10 folders like at the beginning and I still find sites that have that that structure that’s for front page extensions don’t don’t hate I I still have clients um who come in and have been making their pages in uh front page and Dreamweaver I mean they’re they’re obviously um lay people they’re not developers but they’re they’re trying no I don’t mean it like that but I mean
(25:37) they’re still really marketed you know actually I don’t think front pages around anyone no right I think they Sunset that yeah I know they killed it they killed it now you can get totally use the software we’re gonna just stop now you can get a uh free version of one of the visual Studios just the web Edition oh I bet that’s useful yeah yeah because then you gotta install all those net extensions and IIs and everything else don’t hate uh I don’t hate if I want to if you remember who’s the only
(26:08) guy here who’s running Windows I have a box that is a Windows box and we do use visual studio all the time and it does and you’re like yeah he uses it as a doorstop it integrates very well with vision with TFS team Foundation server for Source control and it integrates with all of our build Solutions and everything else so you know there’s there’s a place for it in the corporate world oh yeah yeah I’m not saying there isn’t yeah that’s true that’s true still has its little claws
(26:41) all up in there City Hall here uh I think they just updated their IES to like I.E eight or something so now all the city employees are now using some really Advanced ieas to look at stuff it’s exciting up until like two years ago they were using ie6 for real all of the computers at City Hall were using them we have public we have public sector employees who are currently eager to install Windows 8 so not everybody not everybody is way way old school that’s true not everybody but far too many institutional environments are stuck on
(27:23) ie6 because that’s all their it department wants to support yeah and yeah it really does they navigate into this Century that’s the one percent that we all see on our on our things this like they’re they’re damn it there they are those damn city employees although they’re probably using their eye bringing their iPads now I’m like using those instead they’re like screw this computer there are a lot of our we have we have a lot of uh emphasis works you know three of our divisions work in public sector so
(27:55) cities states counties um and we have a lot of situations where employees are bringing in their own gear right and uh and that is driving the I.T departments forward and that drives that drives their adoption forward and so we are seeing a lot of cities I mean we honestly normally on something like a Windows 8 release we would you know in the past we would see uh big cities that would be a little more forward-thinking would still wait a year before before making a move and we’re seeing some of them you know look at making the move
(28:30) within six months so they’re uh that’s progress they’re they’re actually that’s really fast for like Community or city yeah yeah we’re seeing the shift it did take us by surprise when the first person called and said hi uh does your product work with Windows 8 we’re like Windows 8 it just came out last week why are you even calling me like back in a year right so well they’re doing a year-long of study to see if when they want yeah via Atlanta they still windows I don’t actually I I think
(29:06) they’re on XP I don’t I don’t actually I don’t know what what windows they’re on better than Vista when I live yes we have Public Safety we have employees we have employees who still are on XP um never went to seven now they’re looking at eight but uh yeah this is just a dim memory right they skipped Vista they didn’t want to touch it doesn’t go right past that has anyone actually used Windows 8 I mean not to like get off how is it is it is it as bad as they say it is no I love it really cool that’s
(29:46) cool you just said that out loud yeah in public forum okay you want to know you want something else that’s crazy so the XML that is used uh formally you know xaml that was used in Silverlight the XML that you can write can ultimately be delivered as a Windows based product or in the cloud as a web-based product right and in both cases it will still take some default design uh patterns that previous to now Microsoft had never deployed and apple had been known for right applications that actually looked pretty good
(30:30) um the uh the Microsoft folks brought in designers into almost every one of their product groups and spent a lot of time teaching their own engineers and making the default uh the default if you go into visual studio and say you know give me a default project a lot of those default templates now support a deeper understanding of white space an understanding of alignment of uh you know consistent use of particular font sizes all the things that we would normally say uh are are strongly in other camps they’ve embedded into their
(31:08) into their products so that developers you know would really really have to struggle to make ugly looking crap and that’s uh that’s a that’s a big step forward for them it’s a big deal and then they made all their Surface ads look exactly like the Mac ahead wow but that’s a Marketing Group sorry folks we got it in the show here I’ll come back and speak all about Microsoft and it’s awesomeness in the WordPress World here but for now you can run WordPress on Azure you can you can so we can
(31:44) all right guys well this is Jason Tucker WP water cooler episode number 19. I want to say thank you very much for everyone that’s been on the show today and I want to let you know that you can leave us comments on Facebook you can leave comments on YouTube and on Twitter I’ve been seeing a lot of folks on Twitter talking about the show they’re like what you’re talking about Ides and text editors this is crazy thank you very much for coming by I appreciate it bye-bye

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2 responses to “EP19 – IDEs and Text editors for WordPress Development – WPwatercooler – January 28 2013

  1. Pam Ann Aungst Avatar
    Pam Ann Aungst

    Looking forward to it!

  2. davejesch Avatar

    The name of the Windoze-based text editor I was trying to remember is TextPad.

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