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 point I feel like my options are:
1. Stop hanging out in WordPress Slack. 😞
2. Requisition a new work machine with more RAM. For Slack. 😕
3. Shut up and continue to deal with it. 💩
I’ve gone with a modified version of option #3 thanks to Nativefier. It quickly wraps any site in an Electron shell and creates an executable for your operating system. So now I’ve got an app just for WordPress Slack. My (7) other teams can stay snappy and I can restart the Electron app as needed when RAM gets tight.

And if you’re using a Mac, you can have it too… Just click the image below to grab a (totally unsupported) copy.

Pardon the hastily thrown together icon. It’s this Dribbble shot plus a plain ol’ WordPress logo. To be honest, I wasn’t looking to blow a whole lot of time on this. And I didn’t. So that’s cool.

Hopefully at least one other person finds this useful!
July 8, 2016
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, Aaron Rutley has written a script that helps you create and delete sites under Valet in seconds.

I’m going to spend a little more time with this over the coming weeks. Maybe I’ll put something interesting together if I can find the time… No promises though.

June 28, 2016
Simple Cache

GitHub – tlovett1/simple-cache: A simple caching plugin for WordPress.
A simple caching plugin for WordPress. Contribute to tlovett1/simple-cache development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com

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 you need your site to run fast, don’t have time to mess with complicated settings, and have been frustrated by other caching plugins, give Simple Cache a try.

Sounds nice. Wish I had an unmanaged site to use this on.

April 18, 2016
Reasons for Custom Tables and an API

Custom Database API – Reasons for Custom Tables and an API – Pippins Plugins
pippinsplugins.com

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 table, that does not mean you should or that it is even a remotely good idea.

You have no idea how happy I am that someone is finally saying this. I’m even happier that the someone saying it is Pippin.

Really looking forward to the rest of the articles in this series!

August 14, 2015
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…

Episode 11 – A Day In The Life of a Developer Advocate at WP Engine with Jason Cosper

EP 148 – Coding and the design process – Aug 10 2015

As you can see, I’m a pretty insightful guy. Humble too.

Want to have me on your podcast? Hit me up on Twitter!

August 11, 2015
Shortcake Bakery

GitHub – wp-shortcake/shortcake-bakery: A fine selection of shortcodes for WordPress
A fine selection of shortcodes for WordPress. Contribute to wp-shortcake/shortcake-bakery development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com

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.

August 10, 2015
Scaling WordPress queries with Elasticsearch

Scaling WP Queries with Elasticsearch – The Agile Content Platform | WordPress VIP
To try and surface better content to users, there are taxonomies and meta queries that normally don’t get used anywhere else.
vip.wordpress.com

File under: Cool shit you can do with Elasticsearch.

July 22, 2015
WPScan Licensing

WPScan Licensing
When you first release software online you don’t put too much thought into the software license (I didn’t at least). You have no idea if the project will tak…
web.archive.org

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 back and forth arguing the intricacies of the GNU GPL while they try and weasel their way out of complying to our license. This takes a lot of my time away from the important stuff, working on WPScan and the WPScan Vulnerability Database. Because of this I decided to add a clause to the license. If you want to sell WPScan you can pay for a commercial license, otherwise you can use it under the GNU GPL.
After a few months with this license it was pointed out to me that the GNU GPL does not allow these kind of clauses. What some individuals and companies decided was a ‘loophole’.

Their new (proposed) license has been posted as a Gist — which I’ve embedded below — and the developers are welcoming feedback.

If you’re schooled in Public/Open Source software licenses and are interested in the future of WordPress security tools, go leave a comment!

January 21, 2015
Making Your Own High Performance WordPress Server

Making your own High Performance WordPress Server | Zach Adams | Boise Web Design and Development – Making your own WPEngine-Like High Performance WordPress Server
Web Developer and Programmer
zach-adams.com

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 vested interest in folks signing up for service at WP Engine — seeing as how I work there and all that — but this is still pretty fantastic.

January 19, 2015
WordPress SEO Tamer

GitHub – hlashbrooke/WordPress-SEO-Tamer: Love WordPress SEO by Yoast, but hate its dashboard clutter? Well, look no further!
Love WordPress SEO by Yoast, but hate its dashboard clutter? Well, look no further! – GitHub – hlashbrooke/WordPress-SEO-Tamer: Love WordPress SEO by Yoast, but hate its dashboard clutter? Well, look no further!
github.com

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 Tamer’s options, but that’s still a pretty shitty thing to do. ᔥ

January 14, 2015