Acquia Certified Site Builder – Drupal 8

Earlier this week I took and passed the Acquia Certified Site Builder exam for Drupal 8. Here are some tips and a few resources that helped me prepare for this 50 question, 75 minute exam.

Docker WordPress Dev Environment

This post documents setting up local development environments with Docker using the official WordPress Docker repository as a base image. Page two includes configurations for remote PHP debugging with Xdebug and VS Code.

vue-devtools Chrome Extension in Firefox

When I wrote this post in March, only a Chrome vue-devtools extension was available. Using the Chrome Store Foxified add-on, this post documents installing the vue-devtools Chrome extension into Firefox for debugging Vue.js applications.

Google Maps API with Webpack

Google Map application that uses a draggable location marker to set address, longitude and latitude geocode inputs. This post covers some of the Webpack tools for both a local development environment and production build of the app constructed of a few JavaScript modules and css.

Cygwin Oh My ZSH Recipe

This post documents my Cygwin + Oh My ZSH configuration which gives me a consistent cross platform terminal experience on Windows, OS X and Linux.

WordPress Post from Front End using REST API and Vue.js Part II

The objective of this post is to demonstrate some Vue.js basics for working with the WordPress REST API. This post continues where the last post left off with the following additions.

WordPress Post from Front End using REST API and Vue.js

This post is a simple proof of concept for using the new WordPress REST API to submit a new post draft from the front end. The form and user inputs are built using the Vue.js framework and vue-cli to create a simple Webpack build configuration.

Creating a Custom WordPress Page Template

I wanted a front-end page template to play around with the new REST API that is now in WordPress 4.7 core. A custom page template gives me the latitude I want at this stage of development, so here is how I did it.

WordPress Twenty Seventeen Theme Sass

These Sass modules make customizing the style.css a lot easier for the new business focused Twenty Seventeen default theme for WordPress 4.7. Each Sass module represents WordPress Twenty Seventeen stylesheet sections.

Laravel JWT Auth with Vue.js 2

This post is a refresh of Laravel JWT Auth with Vue.js I posted in September that applies to the 1.x version of Vue.js. Evan You released vue.js version 2 shortly thereafter and this post will cover building the Laravel JSON Web Token based authentication with it.

Vue.js CLI Webpack Laravel Proof of Concept

This post is a simple proof of concept for using vue-cli to scaffold a Webpack Laravel project. The production build modifies the default Laravel blade view and outputs the built assets into the public/static directory.

Laravel JWT Auth with Vue.js

This post documents using Laravel to build JSON Web Token based authentication with a Vue.js 1.0 user interface. UPDATE: vue.js 2.0 version published.

Laravel Install on Windows IIS

This post documents installing PHP 7, PHP Manager and Laravel 5.3 on Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager version 10 which ships with Windows 10 Pro. This Laravel Installation will also be configured to connect to a SQLite database.

Installing Laravel on XAMPP

This post documents how to install Laravel locally using XAMPP. When you are developing with Laravel on an older computer or one with limited resources, using XAMPP for your local PHP and MySQL development server works well on Windows.

Handlebars Templates with Browserify

This post documents how to use the hbsfy precompiler plugin for Browserify to compile Handlebars templates into javascript. With this design, templates can be required as javascript modules in the views that use them.

Laravel User Registration with Email Activation

This post documents how to add an e-mail confirmation to the Laravel User registration that is generated by the Artisan console. In this example, the registered user will not be able to login until they to the activation link sent to their registered e-mail account.

Laravel User Authentication with Ajax Validation

This post documents how to add Ajax form validation to Laravel User Authentication that is generated by the Artisan console.

Slim 3 MVC

This post documents a Slim 3 PHP micro framework application with models, views and controllers (MVC) using Twig templates to display data from a database.

WordPress Twenty Sixteen Theme Sass

I recently created individual Sass modules for each of the WordPress Twenty Sixteen style.css stylesheet numbered and annotated sections. Additionally, the fonts and colors have been converted into Sass variables. All of this makes customizing this theme easier.

Google Maps API with Browserify

This post documents how to use local JavaScript modules with Browserify and the Google Maps JavaScript API. In this example, the Google Map contains a marker that can be dragged to reset the browser form with the marker position location data.

Xdebug for XAMPP on OS X

After discovering how nice the vscode-php-debug extension works in Visual Studio Code on my Windows 10 laptop, I wanted this same setup for a PHP project on my work Mac Book Pro running OS X Yosemite (10.10). The version of XAMPP I currently have installed on the Mac is 5.6.11-0

Sass Workflow Using cssnano and Autoprefixer

This Sass preprocessor workflow uses cssnano for postprocessing minification and optimization that includes Autoprefixer to add vendor prefixes for only the browsers that need to be supported.

Javascript Frameworks

After discovering yet another interesting Javascript framework for the web application development recently (Vue.js), I decided to put together this short list of some the emerging and more popular frameworks out there today for building user interfaces.

Google Maps API RequireJS Module

This post documents how to create a RequireJS module that loads the Google Maps JavaScript API and is used by a web page to populate form inputs with location data. The Google Map contains a marker that can be dragged to reset the form with the marker position location data.

Joomla Hacks

My notes while learning about Joomla extension development.

Joomla Hello World Module

This post documents my experience while following the Creating a simple module Joomla 3.x tutorial. I am brand new to Joomla and wanted to share my experience for anyone else trying to develop, install and demo this module in their Joomla 3 environment.

BrowserSync SSI Recipe

BrowserSync is my Node.js web browser app development server of choice. This gulpfile is a work in progress to address support for server side includes when using a BrowserSync static server.

Clink Gives CMD.exe Unix Shell Bash Features

Finally, I can use the Windows Command Prompt like Unix thanks to Clink. This CMD.exe extension adds the powerful Unix Bash-style functionality of the GNU Readline library to the Windows command line.

WordPress Page Specific Styles or Scripts

I wanted an efficient way to load page or post specific stylesheets and or scripts which lead me to see if I could utilize custom fields for this. Using custom fields combined with wp_enqueue_style and wp_enqueue_script worked perfectly.

Bourboneat WordPress Theme

I have created a new Wordpress starter theme for building custom themes designed for Wordpress version 4.1 and later. The theme uses the Bourbon Sass library and it's Neat semantic grid components for a lightweight and modular responsive design.

Browserify with Sourcemaps

Browserify lets you write modular JavaScript in node.js style. At the beginning of each module you write, the respective dependencies are added using require statements. Then Browserify compiles the modules along with all of the dependencies into an optimized JavaScript file for use in the browser.

Microsoft Releases Free Code Editor – Visual Studio Code

Yesterday, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code, a free code editor for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications.

AngularJS v2: Angular.io

At ng-conf 2015 last month it was announced that AngularJS 1.X will continue to reside at angularjs.org and Angular 2.0 will be hosted at angular.io. The new version of Angular is not a major update, it is a complete rewrite. In February, Brad Green announced that Angular 2 was officially Alpha in this First look at App Development in Angular2 video.

Visual Studio MVC Bourbon Web App

It is now 2015 and with it a new version of Visual Studio that includes tools for Bower front end package management, Node Package Manager (NPM) and the Grunt JavaScript Task Runner. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has its own way of implementing Grunt, Bower and Node Modules in their upcoming Visual Studio debut.

JavaScript Templating Options

Javascript templating is a technique to render JSON data in HTML markup with JavaScript.

Compass on Windows

This post documents my latest compass install on Windows which should be simple enough. I ran into a minor issue and was getting an error...

WordPress Theme Javascript Optimization

This post shows how to combine and minify multiple javascript files in a Wordpress theme into one javascript file. The benefit is a single request to a javascript file that has been compressed by minification instead of multiple request to larger javascript files.

WordPress Theme Javascript Optimization

This post shows how to combine and minify multiple javascript files in a Wordpress theme into one javascript file. The benefit is a single request to a javascript file that has been compressed by minification instead of multiple request to larger javascript files.

Bourbon

This post is not about a barrel-aged distilled spirit made primarily from corn. Instead, it is about a Sass mixin library. To add Bourbon to your web project, visit the Bourbon GitHub repo and take a look at the requirements.

Git Command Reference

This page is a non-exhaustive and growing reference to help me remember git commands. Note: Do not include the < > brackets around the actual branch names, etc., they are used in the examples below to indicate a place holder.

XAMPP Windows Setup SSL

In an earlier post, I documented my XAMPP Windows Setup for myself and anyone else would find it useful. Now I am adding SSL to the virtual host configuration and this post will document that process.

XAMPP Windows Setup

Documenting my XAMPP for Windows setup for myself and anyone else who finds it useful. For those of you that do not know, XAMPP is a completely free, easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

Bootstrap Customization

This tutorial covers using Git to clone, branch and merge the latest Bootstrap source code, modifying and compiling your modifications to the source LESS variables using Grunt and viewing your compiled changes with a local Node.js web server.

Grunt JavaScript Task Runner

This tutorial describes how to setup and use the Grunt JavaScript task runner to automate repetitive tasks such as minification and compilation. Grunt is installed using npm, the Node.js package manager. You will also need Git to work with the tagged source code.