Development

Daniel Bachhuber is the new maintainer of WP-CLI

Travis Northcutt

April 17, 2014

Today Cristi Burcă (perhaps better known as scribu) announced on the WP-CLI blog that Daniel Bachhuber will now be the maintainer of the WP-CLI project. As Cristi notes, he's no longer using WordPress, so it makes perfect sense to hand off the project…

Microcaching with Nginx

Travis Northcutt

April 15, 2014

Development

Zach Brown has a nice post up on how to set up microcaching with Nginx combined with Batcache to handle big spikes of traffic (or just to maximize efficiency and enable running a site on low resources). Zach explains that…

WordPress.vim

Travis Northcutt

April 14, 2014

Development

Darshan Sawardekar has released a very impressive looking plugin for Vim, appropriately titled WordPress.vim. If you use Vim as your editor/IDE, you should definitely check this out. The plugin includes support for an impressive array of features and other tools,…

Image optimization and automation in WordPress

Travis Northcutt

April 14, 2014

Development

Matt Cromwell compares a few different image optimization methods for WordPress sites, including EWWW Image Optimizer, manual optimization, and WPInject. Matt also mentions the WP Smush.it plugin, but interestingly, implies that it produces results similar to EWWW, only less effective. I…

Theme composition vs frameworks

Travis Northcutt

April 1, 2014

DesignDevelopment

Tom J Nowell published a great post today on theme composition vs frameworks. He points out a problem with theme frameworks: what you need or want to do doesn't always fit the way the framework is laid out. The problem…

Introducing Dictator

Travis Northcutt

March 31, 2014

Development

Daniel Bachhuber just announced Dictator, a "provisioning system for WordPress." One key idea Dictator adopted from provisioning systems: environments are ephemeral. WordPress no longer doing what you want it to? You should be able to destroy it and provision a…

Redis object cache for WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

March 31, 2014

Development

WordPress has long had a Memcached backend available for object caching. Over the past several weeks, Eric Mann and Erick Hitter have built out a Redis-based alternative for object caching. Updated Source: https://ethitter.com/2014/04/redis-object-cache-plugin-available-for-download/

Synchronize WordPress uploads across environments

Brian Krogsgard

March 21, 2014

Development

Iain Poulson has written a nice tutorial summarizing five different ways to sync uploads / media across WordPress environments. This is a common problem, and he approaches the solutions using different methodologies, including via FTP (least preferred), rsync, Migrate DB Pro,…

PhpStorm IDE gets official WordPress support in version 8

Brian Krogsgard

March 20, 2014

Development

PhpStorm is a full-featured IDE that has somewhat of a cult following amongst the WordPress developers I follow. Made by JetBrains, it's notable for being lighter weight than most IDEs, web development specific (though not just PHP as the name…

How to properly change and reference various WordPress directories

Brian Krogsgard

February 28, 2014

Development

Using WordPress, it's a poor assumption to assume the wp-content, plugins, and uploads folders are always in the same place, or even always called by those names. The configuration you see above is a sample WordPress root directory. This isn't…

An introduction to transients in WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

February 24, 2014

Development

Transients are an excellent way to speed up complex queries in WordPress. Dave Clements shows you in this post how you can use transients to avoid bringing a site to its knees like he did, by caching those queries instead…

Edit Flow: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice пожитки.

Zé Fontainhas

February 20, 2014

Development

A post reviewing a few common internationalization issues, taking the case of a Edit Flow as an example.

WordPress capabilities magic with map_meta_cap

Brian Krogsgard

February 10, 2014

Development

Mannie Schumpert has done a nice job offering some practical examples using map_meta_cap. Mannie also took all of the examples from Andrew Nacin's excellent WCSF talk from last year. If you are dealing with roles and permissions, the things from…

Debug Bar Slow Actions

Travis Northcutt

February 7, 2014

Development

Konstantin Kovshenin announced a new plugin called Debug Bar Slow Actions, an extension for the Debug Bar plugin. Konstantin's new plugin ...adds a new panel with a list of the top 100 slowest actions (and filters) during the current page request. This…

Why we don’t use a CDN: A story about SPDY and SSL

Travis Northcutt

February 5, 2014

DevelopmentSecurity

A great post from Zack Tollman at The Theme Foundry on why defaulting to what most consider best practices can sometimes be detrimental to performance. Using a CDN (content delivery network) for the new site was a forgone conclusion, as…