WordPress using Coda and MAMP

Venturing into the world of Coda

A few things brought me to test out Coda. When I first heard about Coda I didn’t look too closely because of the price tag, but after Esben’s comment on my Smultron post, I downloaded the trial.

Soon after I started testing it I realised that it’s not really a text editor: it’s a website and coding management system. Quite a nice one at that.

For a great description, and summary of features, see Charity’s post Clever Development with Coda.

Managing an online site locally

I posed the question on Charity’s blog as to whether you can use the same files for your online site and local site, so that you can keep things in sync. A while later I realised that the question was rather similar to the Multiple WordPress blogs question that I’d already asked and answered.

The only limitation in using the same files is, if you open the site using your localhost (i.e. using MAMP), it will try to use wp-config, which has your server’s database settings.

All I had to do to allow my local server to use the files that correspond to my online site was to use the PHP “if” statements.

If I’m at http://www.kristarella.com, use the server’s database, else use my local database.

Check out my post on modifying wp-config to use different databases to see what I’m on about.

Smarter site management ahoy!

I think this system can be great for developing themes and customising your site. However, be aware that there’s a couple of things Coda doesn’t do: mainly, it doesn’t recognise when you change files through another program. So, it doesn’t realise that you have unpublished files when you move a whole folder in Finder, or when you’ve updated a plugin through WordPress. When Coda can automatically detect file changes, it will be totally sweet.

It’s pretty cool as it is though.