Jason Cosper

Semper fudge.

Category: WordPress

  • Return of the Slack

    While I find the official WordPress Slack team incredibly useful, the sheer scope of it — over 10,000 users & 66 channels — makes the copy of Slack on my desktop ridiculously sluggish. It’s actually pretty crazy how much lower the RAM usage on my machine is when I remove the WordPress team from the app. At this…

  • Playing with Laravel Valet

    I finally had the chance to do a little WordPress work in Laravel’s lightweight development environment Valet last week. My hot take? If you’re interested in setting it up on your Mac, there’s a solid tutorial that outlines how to get started by Tom McFarlin over at Tuts+. And if you’d like to go down the rabbit hole even further,…

  • Simple Cache

    Taylor has been on fucking fire lately with plugin releases. Simple Cache does one thing — caching, natch — and it does it very well: Simple Cache was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day. If…

  • Reasons for Custom Tables and an API

    When it comes to storing large amounts of data that does not very closely mimic existing WordPress database schemas, you should absolutely use custom tables. Choosing not to use a custom table will likely cause more harm than good. While it’s possible to store almost anything you want as a custom post type in the wp_posts…

  • Gotta Podcatch ‘Em All

    A couple great WordPress podcasts — WP Dev Table and WPwatercooler — have been nice enough to have me on as a guest recently. Instead of having you dig around each site to find the episodes, I’ll just go ahead and leave them here… As you can see, I’m a pretty insightful guy. Humble too. Want to have me…

  • Shortcake Bakery

    Shortcake + Shortcake Bakery = Easy PDF, JavaScript, iFrame, Facebook post, Scribd & Genius embeds from the team at Fusion. There’s also a really nice image comparison tool. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I am.

  • Scaling WordPress queries with Elasticsearch

    File under: Cool shit you can do with Elasticsearch.

  • WPScan Licensing

    It looks like the WordPress security tool WPScan is looking to move away from the GNU GPL license for their software. That’s rather unfortunate, but after reading about companies trying to repackage and sell WPScan as their own work, I totally get where they’re coming from. Chasing these companies takes time, sometimes a whole day of emails…

  • Making Your Own High Performance WordPress Server

    Clever forks of WP Engine’s Mercury Vagrant for the “roll your own server” types courtesy of Zach Adams. I say “forks” because he’s actually crafted two different Ansible playbooks. One deploys  WordPress, HHVM, Percona, PHP-FPM & nginx to a server of your choosing while the other adds Varnish, Memcached & APC to the mix. I have a…

  • WordPress SEO Tamer

    Love Yoast’s WordPress SEO but hate some of the clutter that it brings to your dashboard? There’s a plugin for that. This plugin also — as Joost points out — breaks the business model that supports WordPress SEO’s development by blocking the ads for Yoast’s other plugins & services. You can turn the ads back on in…

  • Deploy Elasticsearch on Google Compute Engine

    Thanks to Google, you can now quickly spin up an Elasticsearch instance for a few dollars a month. Couple that with WordPress plugins like ElasticPress & ES_WP_Query and you can get some pretty nice performance boosts in places where folks don’t normally bother to optimize.

  • WP Performance Profiler

    The crew at interconnect/it makes some quality stuff, so I’m pretty excited to try this out.

  • All the Options in the WordPress Theme Customizer

    In reality we’re taking the same problem of providing too many options and migrating them from the Dashboard to the WordPress Theme Customizer. Bummer. Tom McFarlin nails it once again.

  • wordpress-rest-api

    Speaking of JavaScript, here’s a Node.js-based client for the JSON REST API that’ll eventually make its way into WordPress core.

  • Is JavaScript taking over WordPress?

    Unless something totally crazy happens, WordPress is going to be written in PHP for the foreseeable future. However, the more that core turns into an API endpoint for all the JavaScript that’s being added to it, the less beholden the project has to be to PHP. So maybe you should think about buying a JavaScript…

  • Hashcash

    It’s nice that someone is working on an alternative to the Akismet anti-spam plugin monopoly. With that being said, I saw a server load quadruple [from 4 to 16] in under 3 minutes after enabling the plugin on a friend’s site. It was right in the middle of being mercilessly hammered by spammers, but I…

  • WordPress on nginx + HHVM with Heroku Buildpacks

    This is tempting. Extremely tempting. Perhaps I should dedicate some time to playing with this over the long holiday weekend.

  • PHPNG devs boasts major WordPress performance increases

    It’s nice to see that the PHP team isn’t taking HHVM lying down. We have to wait for PHP 5.7 to get PHPNG and it’s 20% performance increase though. If you’re the type who runs his/her own server, there are test build instructions. So maybe you don’t have to wait. But I wouldn’t use this…

  • The qualities of a great WordPress contributor

    Required reading from Nacin for any aspiring WordPress core contributor.

  • Debug Bar Slow Actions

    Debug Bar Slow Actions is an extension for the popular Debug Bar plugin. It adds a new panel with a list of the top 100 slowest actions (and filters) during the current page request. Konstantin has done a great job with this. If you do any amount of site troubleshooting & optimizing, this is worth…