WordPress is a truly lovely platform to work with. It has grown over the years to become something that is both well documented and stable and through extensive use within the community it gets more secure all the time.

I could go on forever just talking about all the amazing things that WordPress brings to the table but I’ll cut myself short and just make a short list with the most important things.

The list

In no particular order the list follows below. The things I enjoy most about WordPress.

• A robust and competent CMS
• User management with user roles
• An organized administration interface
• Well documented APIs
• Competent plugin system
• Competent theme system
• Ability to create custom pages
• General extensibility

So these are some of the most interesting things that I have found when using WordPress. I have been working with it on and off as both administrator and developer and my experience is overall a positive one.

If you ever find yourself looking for a platform to base a simple server system on WordPress could be for you. That is if your system uses fairly infrequent larger data transfers.

The example

Just today I learned something new about this wonderful platform and that was how you create a custom page type. Just write the following code in a *.php file in your current theme.

<?php /* Template Name: Example Template */ ?>

Where “Example Template” should be replace with the name which you want your custom page type to show up as. Below this comment you include your own custom PHP code to generate the complete page. Using the well document APIs of WordPress makes the rest a piece of cake. Try it!

I have been playing around with Debian and Node.js during the last week and I think the experience is quite interesting. Getting started and choosing the right packages and build chains is not as simple as it seems in the beginning.

Some of my current choice of tools has fallen on nvm, gulp, compass, babelify and browserify. I also use virtual machines running in Virtual Box in order to secure a stable development environment. Using VMs makes the environment portable and resistant to platform differences.

Working with VMs

Working with VMs is all it’s cracked up to be. Virtual Box 5 is a very nice platform to run on and performs very well even without hardware virtualization enabled.

The networking and virtual disk management are the primary parts and tools which enables a great work environment.

Working with Debian

Debian is my choice of platform due to me being comfortable with the OS already. Using Debian over Ubuntu was a simple choice since stability and reliability is an important factor.

In order enable me as a developer to I choose to have my development toolbox in the native environment of the computer I am working on. This means that I need a way to communicate with the file system of the VM. This is done using the smb protocol sharing a projects folder and connecting it as a network drive. This allows node to run very fast while I can work natively and quickly. There are some occasional slowdowns when using solutions with a lot of file I/O such as git though, but it’s all within workable limits.

Setting up Debian is pretty straight forward but in order to prepare for Node.js and future web development using SASS I need some extra installed packages.

# Basic installs
apt-get install build-essential ruby ruby-dev curl
# Install compass
gem install compass

Working with Node.js

In order to make the most of the node installation we install it using nvm (Node Version Manager). This enables switching between node versions on the fly for any current project.

# Installing nvm (Node Version Manager)
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.31.0/install.sh | bash
# Installing a specific version of node
nvm install v0.10.32

Overall

In closing, working with Debian and Node.js is a very nice experience when you’ve gotten into using the right tools. If you are on a *nix like system you’ll get the most out of it but windows is really catching up.

I’ve been using Debian, Node.js, Compass and React to build web apps on my spare time and for work and they are all truly a joy to work with. ES6-4-life or until I finally return to coding in C.