I had a chance to test this out recently. I wanted to take a copy of a live WordPress install, so that I could test a new plugin. It only took a few minutes to clone the site onto my development server. WP Twin moves all the files and database from the cloned site, and sets it up in a new location, re-pointing all the links to the new site.

As anyone who has ever moved a WordPress site before will know, this is much simpler than the manual steps FTPing all the files, backing up the database, editing the database and then iterating through checking that everything works.

Neat tool. I’ll use this more in the future.

That means I can test how my WordPress themes look on IE8 running on Windows 7. I can also run Windows only applications and share files between the VM and the MacBook using a shared folder. Neat.

I struggled a bit to get the VM instance of Windows 7 to recognise my Dell Photo AIO 922 printer. For a while the printer name was greyed out in the USB devices list. I’m not quite sure how I resolved it, but I think the following steps helped:

• In the Settings for the VM, click on USB and add a new USB Device Filter for the printer.
• Unplug the USB device and plug it in again while the VM is on (the old solutions are the best).

Getting the printer connected is a fantastic result, as there are no Mac drivers for Dell printers and it therefore won’t work with the Mac. But now I have a way of scanning and printing. Yay!

Development Environment

• XAMPP provides me with the right Apache and MySQL environment for my test sites. It makes it easy to use the WordPress one-click install into this environment.

Coding

• NetBeans is a useful IDE for manual coding of WP themes, CSS and plugins. No Intellisense or anything terribly clever (idea: wouldn’t it be good to have a sort of Intellisense for WP template tags built into an IDE?).
• Firebug is an excellent utility for debugging CSS and markup issues in Firefox.

Image and photo editing

• Gimp for Mac is good for image editing. It appears to be a clone of Photoshop and it takes a while to get used to the way it works – I’m still at the early stages of learning how to use it.
• iPhoto comes with the Mac and is good for quickly editing and cropping photos…
• …but I think I prefer Picnik.

Copying to Live

• Cyberduck is a good FTP tool specifically written for the Mac.

We’ve been discussing recently how an SOA will help us to provide better and more flexible systems for our users. Particularly in an environment where major line-of-business applications (such as HR, EDRM, Finance) support the main business processes, and there aren’t many cross-silo processes.

One area where SOA might help is in aggregating data from different sources. For example it might help for users to correlate information from the finance system and the HR system, or even from external feeds.

So it was interesting to read Tim O’Reilly’s article on Yahoo Pipes, and then to have a play with the application itself.

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. It provides an graphical online toolset to fetch XML feeds (RSS, Atom, web services), manipulate the contents, merge result sets together and provide an XML output.

Some of the best examples of published pipes are Picture Near Place, that allows you to search for Flickr pictures near a place (defined as US zip code), and eBay Price Watch that allows you to create a feed watching for an item on eBay within a certain price range.

I’ll publish my own when I think of something useful to pipe!

This Java-based program provides a graphical interface to create mind maps, along with a library of icons, and it is possible to save the map as PDF, which is good for sharing the maps with other people.