Getting Started with Coda 2 and MaxCDN

This guest post is by Joe Dakroub, a UX Designer/Developer. He currently lives in Michigan with his fiancé and is very passionate about Open Source.

A week ago I received an email from Justin Dorfman asking if I could develop a simple Coda 2 plug-in for the MaxCDN community. I was both shocked and honored that he asked me, a complete stranger, to do something that I really enjoy doing in my spare time. Admittedly, the timing couldn’t have been worse as I am in the middle of some major home improvement projects and 3 weeks away from marrying my long-time girl, Christina Hanna.

However, I was immediately intrigued by a community that seemed to be clamoring for a Coda 2 plug-in to ease their workflow. After very little thought, a few clarifications with Justin and favorable terms (must be open-source and a generous contribution of money on his part), I was off and running!

Conceptually, the plug-in is very simple and straightforward: set your CDN URL and use it.

While there exists only one significant UI element in the plug-in (the Set URL sheet), I wanted to ensure that customers could immediately idenfity the plug-in from any others they may be using. The MaxCDN logo is both distinctive and fun, so I knew it was the perfect element to accompany the simple UI that I had in mind. The actual guts of the plug-in revolve around a regular expression that identifies relative paths (with a starting slash and without) and a list of supported file extensions for use any ANY document type you need.

Getting Started

1. Download install.zip here: https://github.com/netdna/maxcdn-codaplugin/raw/master/install.zip (md5: 7256b3cd39200a4eb8e8837f915c243b)
2. Unzip install.zip and double click: MaxCDN Coda 2 Plug-in.codaplugin
3. Once Installed you have two options:
   1. You may either choose Insert URL from the MaxCDN URL menu item located under Plug-ins in Coda.
   2. Press Control+Option+Command+U for quicker access.

Once it finds all the matches it simply prepends your the CDN URL you set. Should you need to undo this change, simply press Command+Z or Undo from the Edit menu; couldn’t be easier!

Over the past year, I have had the pleasure to develop numerous Coda 2 plug-ins which are also available on my GithHub page to download and do as you wish. Through these small projects I have learned to fully embrace open-source software and give back to the community that helped raise me. Thank you to Justin for reaching out to me and giving me this fast and fun opportunity to share with the community!

Now back to wedding planning and home renovation…

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