Month: October 2023

Super Fast PHP WordPress Plugin development with VVV

This is just a quick shoutout to the virtualization app which is helping me a lot with my LED-WEBSITE-INDICATOR plugin development.

Check out https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV

The VVV project uses VirtualBox in the background to automatically set up a WordPress development environment, including two working WordPress sites to play with. The whole thing is done for you, all I had to do was copy my plugin to the shared folder and every change was visible on the working local site.

If you are getting into PHP and WordPress, check out the project, I won’t say any more about it, just try it already!

MQTT port 1883 – access denied!

Well things are going really well with the LED Website Indicator project. I re-wrote the firmware, this time using the amazing Autoconnect library (UI for managing MQTT broker and WiFi) and PubSubClient.

The new D1 mini and shield have arrived at the factory – along with a fancy new 3d print cover, so we uploaded the firmware and reached out to friends to test the WordPress plugin – in order to see some flashing lights. No lights. One friend even had his managed WordPress install locked (he wasn’t allowed to install new plugins, some sort of restricted mode – luckily a call to customer support resolved the issue quickly).

After a lot of troubleshooting I finally worked out the issue (on two different servers so far): the admins have locked down outgoing messages and closed most ports – including the one I’m using in the LED-SITE-INDICATOR WordPress plugin, port 1883. Long story short, we can’t have outgoing MQTT messages on all servers (it works on mine though).

So I had to re-write the PHP code as well, removing the MQTT and replacing with http call to an api – which then does the MQTT stuff, on my own server which is allowed.

Conclusion

Check out the LED Website Indicator project – launching any day now!