Maybe it’s because I know that if I don’t make this publicly available, I’m just going to continue tweaking it and never launch. Maybe it’s because I haven’t posted anything interesting here in weeks as a result of some work overload, or maybe it’s because it’s my birthday and I felt like doing something [...]

This is a quickie, but is dedicated to any budding WordPress theme and plugin developers who are just getting familiar with PHP.
If you make a call to a plugin function like, oh say, <?php wp_beta_test(); ?>, and that plugin is not currently activated in the WP backend, nothing below that line of code [...]

If you build sites, or applications, or anything related to the web, you have 3 main choices:

You can build static files locally, but your path will look something like file:///Users/xxx/Documents/Projects/xxx/Header:Footer%20(FF)/Mock/index.html (mac)
You can develop online, and you’ll get a path like http://www.xxx.com/project/index.html (if you use your own domain, or go in stealth mode and build on [...]

My introduction to CSS, PHP and pseudo-CMS options via WordPress came entirely by chance. I had experimented with Joomla (then Mambo) in the past, but as a whole, it was simply too feature-ridden for a new-comer such as myself.
It became obvious quite quickly that I needed a publishing platform that:

installed quickly and [...]