Austin Ginder

Austin Ginder

Downloading Backups From Previous Host Provider

Given the following scenario, you’ve just launched a new WordPress site by pointing DNS to the new server and you need to grab a backup file from the old web server. What do you do? There are many potential solutions,…

Dynamically Load WordPress Database

The file wp-config.php defines configuration before WordPress is fully loaded, and includes things like database credentials and unique authentication keys. Did you know these configurations can dynamically be loaded? The following custom code will dynamically determine a database name based…

Manually Merging Posts Between WordPress Sites

My recommendation has always been to avoid workflows that involve deploying staging to/from production. That’s because merging WordPress websites is really hard if not nearly impossible to pull off. There are just too moving pieces to track. 👀 Mergebot was…

Digging into Mailgun’s API with PHP

Mailgun is a popular transactional email service which I use on many WordPress websites. They have an official WordPress plugin and documentation for developers. I spent the weekend digging into their API in order to revamp an integration between Mailgun…

Quickly Locate Unknown Disk Usage over SSH

Ever have a website’s disk usage grow over 100GBs unexpectedly? This week I did. This is how I quickly figured out where the extra data was located with the help of rclone and Kinsta’s ssh access. Good host providers let…

Disable Web Requests for WP-CLI Only WordPress

Did you know you can use WordPress exclusively from WP-CLI? The use case for doing this is pretty unique. Not likely something you’ll see in the wild. Generally you want WordPress to handle web requests however for a WP-CLI only…

Handing Legacy Static Sites with Kinsta

On occasion I need to host a PHP static website. This is typically while the customer is working on a new WordPress site and simply needs to keep their legacy site live until the new one replaces it. A good…

Reusing Cookies for Automation

Previously I’ve wrote about using a Ruby script to automate fetching data from WP Engine’s portal. Recently that script broke due to the way WP Engine’s login process works. While it might be possible to fix, let’s look at bypassing…

Local Lightning for WordPress Development

When it comes to local WordPress development, I’ve been split between two different tools: Laravel Valet and Local by Flywheel. Valet is really fast, however Local just works. Well, meet Local Lightning. It’s a completely remade version of Local by…