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- How To Tutorials

DesktopServer is about convenience as well as meeting the needs of developers and designers that use WordPress. For Professionals, that means leveraging the latest technology to ensure that you reach your target market accurately. At some point, you may wish to test your development website on the same types of devices your client uses or to just preview “responsive design” features. This post won’t go into details as to why this is important as there are already plenty of articles that explain why 2013 is the Year of Responsive Web Design. Rather, I’ll focus on how to do this with DesktopServer and your development WordPress websites. Read more »

- How To Tutorials

PhpStorm is a cross-platform, IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that delivers a feature packed, fast, and efficient user interface for debugging and code editing. As a commercial product, you will find the runtime to be fast and what you would expect from a well written commercial native application. While still requiring a Java runtime, PhpStorm feels much faster than eclipse or even the lighter weight Netbeans IDE. Like Netbeans, it works with either DesktopServer Limited or DesktopServer Premium editions. It also provides all the common editing features you would expect to find in a professional IDE: code folding, code completion, debugging with breakpoints and step functions, variable watch lists and inspectors, and multiple disciplines for syntax highlighting (JavaScript, HTML, PHP, etc.) with an emphasis on PHP. Since WordPress ‘template tags’ are just PHP functions, PhpStorm can make working with WordPress fast. However, first setup is a challenge as placement of user interface elements is less than intuitive. In this post, I will help you simplify the initial setup process of using PhpStorm with DesktopServer to give you a fast and professional IDE for WordPress development. Once acclimated, users will find debugging quick, robust and even more responsive than Netbeans’ typical debugging sessions.

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- How To Tutorials

DesktopServer Premium edition version 3.4.0 now includes extended support for Panic’s latest Coda 2 IDE (integrated development environment). Now you can develop WordPress websites in Coda 2 with enhanced features such as WYSIWYG split view editing on template files (formerly only available in Adobe Dreamweaver). In addition, DesktopServer includes support for AirPreview in Panic’s Diet Coda for Apple’s iPad. AirPreview will allow you to work in Coda 2 while seeing a site preview on your iPad device. DesktopServer unleashes AirPreview functionality to work with your dynamic, PHP driven WordPress website. DesktopServer is the only web server that enables this level of functionality and integration with Coda 2 and WordPress to help you design, develop, and deploy faster then ever.

Watch the video below to follow along and learn how to get started with WordPress, Coda 2, and Diet Coda using DesktopServer.

- How To Tutorials

NetBeans is an excellent, free IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is well suited for WordPress website development. Coupled with the free or premium version of DesktopServer and you will have a modern, professional IDE setup. Even if you are already using another editor or development environment like Adobe Dreamweaver (great for design, not so great for debugging), you may still want to give NetBeans a try or use it as your powerful secondary editor. In this post I’ll show you how easy it is to get started and I’ll cover the basics of using NetBeans for WordPress development.

NetBeans IDE

But first, why NetBeans? NetBeans is a mature editor with years of refinement under its belt. While NetBeans is a serious and optimized editor for C++, Java, and PHP coding, beginners will appreciate the straightforward and simple features. Hardcore developers will appreciate the lighter runtime and active community support for PHP (unfortunately, development has stalled for the heavier Eclipse editor for PHP). Since WordPress ‘template tags’ are just PHP functions, NetBeans makes working with WordPress powerful yet elegant. It provides code hinting to predict your needs and help correct your mistakes. For instance, it underlines and changes the font color to make errors obvious. NetBeans tries to understand your code, not just allow you to edit it. A built-in navigation panel allows you to walk through HTML elements, CSS elements, and blocks of PHP code to simplify the critical task of just finding things. Code folding makes reading long complex template documents a breeze by summarizing lines of code into convenient rollovers. This makes it much easier on the eyes (and the brain) by simplifying complex document parts into smaller ‘folded’ excerpts. Given the right key combinations, NetBeans will even write code for you. Read more »

- How To Tutorials

DesktopServer Premium edition version 3.3 now includes extended support for Adobe Dreamweaver’s Live View. No other web server provides extended Live View support directly for WordPress template files in Dreamweaver. At best, you can only use WordPress with Dreamweaver’s Live View on just the index.php file in your WordPress’ site root folder. But DesktopServer takes Live View further by sensing Dreamweaver’s built in browser. DesktopServer directly renders WordPress template files (and their include file fragments) for more visual feedback and to assist in faster theme design & development. Originally introduced in Dreamweaver CS4, Live View (formerly Live Data in CS3) provides a more modern embedded web browser. Dreamweaver optimizes web development by allowing designers to work on their website files in Code View while seeing a real Live View of their site in Dreamweaver’s Design View window. For an abridged overview, check out the video below. Read more »

- How To Tutorials

Updated: DesktopServer version 3.5.0 now supports .zip files in the blueprints folder with fast database import abilities. Now it’s even easier to template complete WordPress solutions with your favorite settings from dynamic themes like Builder, Headway, Pagelines, Thesis and many others. Or you can pre-configure your favorite plugins and have them ready for your next project in a flash using DesktopServer Premium’s export-as-a-zip feature. Even share them with non-Premium users (freely available, DesktopServer Limited supports blueprints too). Blueprints are faster than any PHP based backup and restore solution since DesktopServer is compiled and optimized to native code for Macintosh and Windows. Import, export and blueprints are at least 2x faster in version 3.5.0.

Did you know that you can place plugins and theme frameworks that you frequently use inside DesktopServer’s xampp\blueprints folder? This can help you accelerate the common website configurations you usually create as well as try out different versions of WordPress. One of our goals is to help get users an opportunity to try out beta versions of WordPress to facilitate bug squashing and contribute to the Open Source software community. Starting with version 3.2.3 for both the free DesktopServer Limited and DesktopServer for premium members is the blueprints folder. You can have more then one version of WordPress to select from when you use DesktopServer’s “Create a new development website” option. Read more »

- How To Tutorials

Greetings everyone! My name is Stephen Carroll and I want to welcome you to my first post on ServerPress.com. Hopefully, you will be hearing a lot more from me as a blogger for all things WordPress related. I’m usually behind the scenes programming, researching and testing code. But I’m looking forward to making this column a valuable resource for you. That being said, please feel free to drop me a note on any topics that you’d like to see me cover in future articles, or to provide comments and feedback on my postings.

For my first post, I’d like to introduce you to DesktopServer. It’s the main tool that I use to develop, test, and play with WordPress. I’ll show you how easy it is to get started. I have even tried my hand with Quicktime on a Mac to put together a “promo” on how to run DesktopServer for the very first time. Windows users are not left out, as I’ve added large, step by step screen shots on Windows 7 (click the thumbnails to enlarge). Hopefully I’ll be able to answer some common questions along the way. So let’s get started! Read more »