A few years ago, WordPress had fully left behind its identity as a “blogging tool,” and revealed itself to be one of the most powerful CMSs available. Not just for bloggers, This year, WordPress is again quietly undergoing another metamorphosis into an App Engine.
As WordPress evolves, it does a great balancing act of continuing to serve its original users, bloggers and content managers, while also becoming a deeply functional framework for developers to build things like Capsule, a new tool to manage the metadeta and artifacts developers create in their normal workflow.
Crowd Favorite, one of the oldest and most prominent WordPress agencies (founded by Alex King), released Capsule a few weeks ago.
Think a Github Gist, but easier to search for and locate in the future when you need to refer back to them. From there, you can even install a central version of Capsule, Capsule Server. Capsule Server receives and displays content from multiple Capsule instances so it’s easy to share across a team of developers.
Alex King told me that the idea is for developers to improve their code craftsmanship by creating a dev journal. As opposed to a Gist that is mostly a code snippet, Capsule is a bit more involved and allows you to include notes and details about why you made certain decisions over others. I’ve included an actual example at the end of the post to show you what this might look like.
Since Capsule is a full text-editor right in the front-end of the app, you don’t actually need to see the WordPress admin. Capsule supports Markdown Extra syntax as well as GitHub-style fenced code blocks. And the guys at Crowd Favorite made sure there were keyboard shortcuts so it feels like a real text editor.
Plus, capsule auto-saves every 10 seconds and supports WordPress revisions so you never lose data. And it’s open source, so you can contribute back to it. Here’s the Capsule repo on Github.
WordPress’s custom taxonomies are how Capsule stores project metadata, tag it, and make it easy for you to refer back to later. Tag your project @project-awesome, and describe it with #descriptive #hashtags. Capsule stores all those as keywords for each entry.
Also built into the app is syntax highlighting for the various languages you may write in. Most of the folks that I’ve shown the app to have been pretty excited about the possibilities of using Capsule.
For devs who are serious about improving their craft, Capsule looks to be a useful tool to journal your progress and improve faster. And for teams, the ability to review architectural decisions, or help new devs ramp up via Capsule notes seems like it could increase team efficiency and productivity.
If you’ve downloaded Capsule already, leave a comment and let us know what you think. Alex will hang around to answer any questions you may have.
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EXAMPLE ENTRY
[php]@persnickety #set #step #design #decision[/php]
Schema:
[php]
qa_sets: plan ID, name
qa_set_steps: set_id, step_id
[/php]
Changes:
remove description from qa_sets
add a normalized slug for name
Need to create a normalized slug to use when assigning sets to steps
Choice – does the tags field store and pass IDs or Names/slugs? I guess it needs to handle Names/slugs for new items.
There are several (heavyweight) libraries (Chosen, Select2) that provide the ability to create chicklets that connect IDs to the strings in the fields itself rather pure text entry and parsing on the back-end. After some consideration, I think the lighter weight approach of sending the raw input and normalizong on the back-end is a better choice.
For now, we’ll take an [a-z0-9_-] approach, break on spaces and run a strtolower() on everything first. That’s a little rigid, but likely suitable for our purposes.
We’ll also be allowing duplicate tags in the table, keeping them siloed by test plan. I think we’ll populate a default set of tags (managed in settings) as well.
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