Tutorials Archives | zach wills

Setting up ngrok and VVV to share your local WordPress environment with the world

Published June 16, 2015 by zach

If you build WordPress sites, chances are you either know about VVV or are using it. If not, go ahead and get it set up! It is (in my opinion) the best way to handle local site development. Forget MAMP- the future is now.

Alright, enough about that. If you’re here it’s most likely because you want to share your local development environment quickly and easily. Well, you have come to the right place. I wrote another article on how to use ngrok and Vagrant together– this is the same thing.. but more updated and includes a necessary step for using it with Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV).

Whitelisting domains for WordPress CORS

Published April 13, 2015 by zach

This quick tip will share some code for how you can whitelist domains in WordPress to allow for Cross Origin Request Sharing (CORS).

Templating out chunks of reusable front end code in WordPress

Published November 2, 2014 by zach

No matter what you are engineering, there are a number of principles that stay the same. D.R.Y (don’t repeat yourself) is one of those principles. While building out your WordPress theme, you’ll likely notice that there are a few different chunks that are the same across the site. Let’s make them D.R.Y!

How to get email working with Vagrant and MailCatcher

Published October 21, 2014 by zach

Recently I needed to send emails locally. My local dev environment uses Vagrant, so I researched some options and tried installing MailCatcher. I was able to successfully install MailCatcher and run it locally, however I couldn’t access it from my host machine. If I used curl on my virtual machine I could see the HTML for MailCatcher, but trying to visit the same URL from my host machine would result in a never ending page load.

How to remove breadcrumbs, result count, etc from pages in WooCommerce

Published August 5, 2014 by zach

If you’ve worked with WooCommerce, then you know that it is PACKED with features. These are awesome! Sometimes, however, you need to get rid of some of the stuff that WooCommerce spits out by default. Luckily, we can do that relatively easily.

Fix for Vagrant not detecting existing VM

Published July 8, 2014 by zach

Recently, I had to restart my Vagrant to apply some changes. When I went to vagrant up, a scary thing happened: vagrant started to download the entire box over again. Vagrant wasn’t detecting my existing box! Not only is this inconvenient if you have specific configurations you made to your Vagrant after the initial install, but it could be detrimental if you use Vagrant to hold your database and didn’t have a backup handy. Luckily, I was able to point Vagrant back in the right direction.

How to share your local dev environment using ngrok

Published April 21, 2014 by zach

Update 5-16-2015: I wrote a new article explaining How to get VVV and ngrok working

This one goes out to all you web developers out there. If you are developing sites, you are probably using version control & working locally (if you’re not- you should be). Your current workflow probably looks something like: make changes locally, push them to staging evnironment, test, push to live. Thats a perfectly good workflow.. for a solo developer.

Current Page Highlighting in an AngularJS Application

Published December 24, 2013 by zach

If you are building a web application using AngularJS, chances are one of the first things you will want to set up is the routing and navigation. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up current page highlighting in an angular application. Let’s get started!

How to create an accordion with AngularJS

Published December 19, 2013 by zach

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create an accordion using Angular.js. In this tutorial we will create a fully functional accordion in an Angular controller. In a follow up post, we will take our accordion out of the controller and abstract it into an Angular directive, making it fully dynamic and much more powerful. Let’s get started!

How to create an input placeholder from a label with jQuery

Published August 11, 2013 by zach

Forms should be as intuitive and easy to fill out as possible. One way to help your users out is by placing your label helper text inside the input field, and hiding it when the user goes to use it. After following this tutorial, you’ll end up with is a nice solution to turn your boring old form labels into a more modern and intuitive form hint.

Category: Tutorials