Development in (and with) WordPress.
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 while Batcache is a great solution and performs very well, it still requires loading PHP…
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, including syntax highlighting (including highlighting deprecated functions), WP-CLI, autocompletion, the WpSeek API, and more. The…
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 would’ve liked to see it included as well, since it’s such a widely used plugin….
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 here is that what you want to build doesn’t always fit the foundations provided. You…
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 brand new version. This looks like a fantastic addition to the WordPress ecosystem.
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/
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, a clever .htaccess trick, and WordPress filters. I love seeing how people tackle problems differently,…
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 implies), and very customizable. Today, they’ve announced official support for managing WordPress projects. According to the…
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 uncommon. Many people who manage their installs with version control such as Git probably recognize…
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 of repeating them on every page load.
A post reviewing a few common internationalization issues, taking the case of a Edit Flow as an example.
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 this talk are really important to understand. As he notes, “instead of modifying your database…
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 should be very useful in conjunction with (as Konstantin mentions) the Query Monitor plugin to lookup…
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 we assumed it would help us speed things up. But, after testing with a few…
There are lots of ways to deploy WordPress and now Beanstalk has added their own take on deploying WordPress with Git and their deployment tools.
The theme customizer feature was introduced in WordPress 3.4, released June 2012. Since then, it’s been a great tool that’s allowed theme developers to move away from complex options managers to a simpler, more logical interface where many settings can even be live previewed. Over the last couple of years, there have been a few…
End of content
End of content
