On today’s episode we are going to talk about the ten software apps or plugins that I use to run my WordPress sites right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode #302. Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today we’ll be talking about the ten different software apps or plugins that I use to run my WordPress sites. All the sites that I manage, the ones that I use, and the one even yourwebsiteengineer.com.

Those all have lots of moving pieces and parts, and these are some of the tools and software pieces that I use to keep them all updated and running and all those good things. I do have a couple announcements that I want to share with you today before we get started with the show. The first one is that the 2017 theme has been announced for WordPress 4.7. I’ve got a link in the show notes where you can actually go and look at it, but it looks really, really slick.

I’m really excited to start to see this develop. It’s going to be led by Mel Choyce, and she is a designer at Automattic. And she’s going to be the lead in organizing this theme and getting it ready for the launch in December. This theme has been kind of branded as a business type theme, and so it’s going to kind of be focused on making a website for a business. The last few default themes from WordPress or that have been coming out with WordPress have been more blog focused and kind of showcased blogs.

Well, this one is going to be a little bit more fundamental for businesses or product showcases. So that is 2017, so we’ll be starting to see some stuff about that in the coming weeks and months ahead. WordPress 4.6.1 fixes two security issues, a cross-site scripting vulnerability via an image filename and a path traversal vulnerability in the upgrade package uploader. Those are two big mouthfuls, but we want to make sure that we are updated to the latest version of WordPress 4.6.1.

And if you’ve got automatic updates turned on, then your site should have updated already for that. So that is another thing in the news. And lastly in the news, I want to share that Flywheel, the company that I use for my hosting, is now offering free SSL Certificates through Let’s Encrypt. And so if you are running a Flywheel site, you can just head on over to our Dashboard, go to add-ons, and then install an SSL Certificate. I started mine this morning before I started recording Podcast.

And maybe by the time that my Podcast is all done being recorded and I’m ready to start working on my WordPress site, that it’ll automatically be converted over to an HGTPS site. So we’ll see what that process looks like, and I’ll report back when I have more information. Basically, I had to fill out a little bit of information, my name, information about the organization behind my email address, and then which domain I wanted to put it on. And then it started doing its magic, and that’s all I know as of right now.

But it’s completely free, and you can get signed up today over at Flywheel. If you want more information, I do have an affiliate link for Flywheel, and it is at yourwebsiteengineer.com/flywheel. All right. Also, there is a plugin that I want to share with you today, and that plugin is called a WP Google Map. And you can find this on the WordPress repository of course. And this is a plugin that will help you embed a Google custom map into post and pages as a short code and as a sidebar as a widget.

So if that’s something that you’re interested in and something that you need to do and you want to do that very quickly, then that is a plugin for you. WP Google Map. All right, today I’m looking back at my show notes from years past, and it seems that it’s been more than a year since I’ve talked about some of the tools that I use to run all of my WordPress sites and just kind of navigate WordPress in general. And so I thought let’s go ahead and update this list and just share some of the things that I use when I am working on my WordPress sites.

So these are ten software apps that I use, and some of them are plugins. But for the most part, they are apps that are running on my computer. Now, I am using a Mac, but let’s say most of them can be used on Mac or PC. There’s just a couple that are just Mac only, so I’ll point those out when that time comes as well. So the first one is DesktopServer, and this is where I run local versions of my sites, which is essentially a copy of my website.

I update all the code here first. I update all plugins here first to make sure that everything works well, and I make sure that it doesn’t break anything. And I have a whole webinar replay. There’s a link to that in the show notes for Episode #302. But there are tons of things that I can do with DesktopServer. I can easily create a brand new version of WordPress. Maybe I have a testing site that I want to set up real quick, or I want to test out a plugin without affecting a live site. I can duplicate sites. I can do all this kind of stuff right from my computer. It makes it really, really nice. It allows me to run WordPress offline. So if I’m at a coffee shop and the Wi-Fi is not super great, I can still work on my websites. I can still make customizations and changes and stuff like that. I really like that feature in the fact that you can work on an airplane. And airplane Wi-Fi is usually pretty slow, but you can still look things up if you need to look up functions or look up different things on the WordPress codex.

So you can do that, but then you can run everything locally with DesktopServer. The GitHub App is another app that I use with my WordPress sites. I have a workflow that, basically, everything is done locally on my computer with DesktopServer. And then when I’ve updated a plugin, I save a version of that to GitHub or in a version of Git in my Version Control, and then I push those changes live to the live server.

So I use the GitHub App. It allows me to easily save those versions. It allows me to easily roll back to a previous version if there’s some sort of issue that I may stumble upon, and it allows me to remove all legacy code, anything that maybe came with the theme that I’ve removed in a child them or anything along those lines. I like to build themes by getting an HTML template and then, like, removing things from there to kind of build my base theme. So you can do all of that good stuff with the GitHub App.

And there is a Git Webinar replay that there’s a link to that in the show notes as well that you can look at kind of how I do that. And the last one is DeployHQ. This one is say is the last one. This is the last one that has a webinar that’s attached to it, and it basically watches my GitHub repository and pushes changes live to my live server. I set it up once, and now every time I save a new version on my website via Git, it automatically pushes to Flywheel and automatically updates my site. And I really, really like that.

So that is called DeployHQ, and it’s found at deployhq.com. And there’s a link to the webinar replay for my workflow from a year or so ago, which is pretty similar to how it is today. A plugin that I use is called Migrate – WP MigrateDB Pro. And this pulls a copy of a live site to my local environment, or I can push certain tables to my live site. And how I use this is it helps me to keep my database in sync with my live site. So I do all of my edits, all my WordPress Dashboard stuff on my live site. But then I need to get my local site updated every once in a while.

So I use this plugin, WP MigrateDB Pro, and it pulls down the information. Sometimes if I’m working on a post or a page or maybe I’m working on a whole category or a custom post type, I can push just the custom post-type features to my live site so I can work locally. So they’re not messing up my live site. So it goes both ways. You can push and pull, and I just find it’s one of the most useful tools. It is something that’s $100.00 for the year, but absolutely worth it.

I use a plugin called Transmit for my FTP editor. This allows me to quickly navigate into my Dashboard or into the wp-content folder of my WordPress site. It helps me quickly remove two or three plugins at a time, or if I wanted to get rid of all of the 20 series themes, I can go ahead and do that quickly from the FTP area. If I’m having some sort of error and want to see what’s going on in the 8.HT access file, which is an internal file that tells your webserver what to do, like, I can look at that inside there as well.

If I need to quickly get to the upload folder or maybe find a backup that’s been backed up onto my server or what not, I can do all of that stuff via FTP. I use Sublime Text as my text editor. And when I do that if I’m working on something, I normally open the entire wp-content folder into Sublime Text. And this gives me the ability to quickly navigate between themes and plugins and different things within my WordPress site. And again, I open up these files from DesktopServer. And then say I open up my theme folder. I can work on things.

I can save things, and then I can do a refresh real quickly in my Chrome browser. And then it automatically, like, refreshes. If you’re making changes on a live site, then you have to actually save them, and then upload them via FTP. And then confirm yes, you want to upload a duplicate version of whatever file you’re uploading. And then you can refresh, and then you have to wait on your webserver and what not. So I just find that it’s much, much quicker to do that. I use Sublime Text to do all of my code editing.

I use Sublime Text really as a text editor, so anytime I need a text editor, I just use Sublime Text, which is really nice. I also use CodeKit, and this is a preprocessor it’s called. And it basically takes any Sass code and turns it into CSS. And Sass is a different syntax for writing general CSS, and so it’s a little bit more quicker. You can nest things. You can have variables. You can do some things that auto expand and stuff like that, and I believe I have a whole webinar on how to use Sass as well. And then these next couple are ones that just kind of fit in, but they don’t really fit in with the day-to-day, like, Word Pressy stuff. But there are a couple apps that I use regularly when it comes to just using WordPress and kind of staying in communication with the community. So the first one is called Deckset, and this is the way that I create presentations for WordCamps and webinars. I use this sometimes to create images for that cover image that appears inside of each podcast episode, and it makes it so simple to create a presentation.

Just this past week I’m preparing for our automatic RAM meetup, and as part of that, we each have to do a four-minute presentation on anything. I mean, it’s just a presentation in front of our coworkers to tell them anything. And so I’m working on one or I was working on one yesterday, and the whole presentation using Deckset is done in markdown.

And Markdown is just a piece of software that or Markdown is a language, I guess it is, that allows you to write HTML quickly is essentially what it was made for. But this is a markdown presentation app. And so I was creating slides, and then I kind of had a template for a slide. And I was able to just copy and paste the markdown several times and then just change the text.

And it just made it so simple to be able to create a presentation. I was able to create a 12, 13, 14 page or slide presentation in under an hour once I figured out – like, I probably could have done the whole presentation in about ten minutes if I had all the content ready. I was adding some images. I was adding text. I had all the text ready, but I was looking for the perfect memes for my slides. And so it was just – Deckset is a perfect app to do this. It’s, I think, $20.00-ish on the WordPress or in the Apple App Store, and it is an app only for Apple computers.

So if you’re using Deckset, I highly recommend it way more than Microsoft PowerPoint and stuff like that. The only downside that I have seen with Deckset is you can’t have any fancy transitions. It’s just for static things. I think you can transition with bullet points, so you can only pull up one bullet point at a time. But essentially, most of my presentation styles lately have just been, like, one slide that’s got a little bit of text, and then I just expand on it kind of like I do on a podcast. Just talk about whatever that bullet point is, so that’s Deckset.

Another one that I use to stay involved with the WordPress community is Slack, and this is one that I have running all the time. I use Slack internally for a lot of things at Automattic. This allows me to connect with any WordPress user that is on Slack, so I don’t have to look up their email address. I don’t have to try to figure out their contact form on their business website. Like, I don’t have to figure all that stuff out. All I have to do is go to Slack, and I can send them a message directly, which is really nice. You can also create private groups or groups inside of Slack. And so, like, we have a channel dedicated to planning for our WordCamp 2017, Dayton WordCamp 2017.

And so I really like Slack for that, and since I have it open all the time, I can easily talk to my coworkers. And I can easily talk to WordPress people in the community both here in Dayton and globally wherever they are in the world. So that’s another tool that I like to use. And then the last one is a Mac only app, and it is called Acorn. And this is essentially a light version of Photoshop, and it costs about $50.00 is the cost to it.

But it just works so much quicker, so much easier, and I just really, really like it. It is something that I’ve been using probably for four-ish years. It came out a long time ago, and I’ve been using it ever since. There’s little quirks about it, but essentially, there’s a lot of keyboard shortcuts that make it very similar to Photoshop. And I have the ability to, when I’m creating album artwork for or the big image that goes with each of these podcasts images or with each of the posts that I put out there on my WordPress site, I can go ahead and I’ve got a filter already set up.

I have a crop already set up for the exact size that I need. So I pull in an image. I figure out what I want it to look like. I crop it the right way. I add the little bit of text to it, and then I’m off to the races. And I’m ready to go. So I really like Acorn for that. Most of any photoshopy type work that I need to be done is always done in Acorn, and I just use that. And I really, really like that application. So those are the ten things that I use, the ten pieces of software or the ten different apps that I use when I’m creating my WordPress sites.

I just spend some time thinking about it and looking through all the applications on my computer, and these are the ones that I really use when I’m focusing on doing something for WordPress. Whether that be building my own website or getting ready to create a presentation for an upcoming WordCamp or talking with somebody in the community, like, these are all the pieces of tools. These are all the things that I need to use to kind of make all of those things happen. In next week’s episode, I’m gonna talk about the applications I use daily at Automattic. Some of them are the same, but there’s a lot of different tools that I use just to navigate things and do all of my daily work to provide support for WooCommerce. And so we’ll talk about that. This is a podcast that I’m releasing on the day that I’m traveling to the Grand Meetup, and so that it will be out there.

And next week will be a prerecorded episode, and you’ll learn about all of the tools that I have. I was planning on doing a topic about WP Pusher as a plugin that’s out there that connects your WordPress site with repository. And I had a heck of a time trying to set it up this morning, so I’m still working through that one and trying to figure out what I can do.

Maybe have that one as an upcoming episode and the wp-content sync as another plugin that will help to manage your content from one place to another very much like WP MigrateDB Pro. So those are two plugins that I’m looking at to form a show around so we can talk about how to move content from one place to another and keep things updated with Git in a version control system. So those are the things that I wanted to share with you today. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we will talk again next week. Take care. Bye-bye.