WP Engine’s SSH is Happening
Over the last few months I’ve had privilege to be part of WP Engine’s SSH alpha SSH access is a big deal for WP Engine and for the entire managed WordPress hosting ecosystem. It’s currently under limited beta, however I…
Austin Ginder
Replacing Dropbox with B2 Cloud Storage for WordPress Backups
Managed WordPress web hosts typically do nightly backups. That’s a great start however if something is important you should have multiple backups. My secondary backup method is a daily script which runs on a Backupsy VPS with lots of storage.…
Cleanup with WP-CLI and Regex
Recently one of my customer’s WordPress sites was filled with random hidden span tags containing a single word: “Save.” The source is a mystery, however I suspect it came from bad code rather then something malicious. It was showing up…
Disabling Emails on WordPress Staging Sites
Using a staging site is great for troubleshooting, however you don’t typically want your staging site sending out email notifications. Luckily there is an easy solution to this problem by using both the Log Emails and Disable Emails plugins. With these two plugins…
Keeping Paid Themes & Plugins Updated
WordPress makes is fairly straightforward to update your themes and plugins. Tools like ManageWP make it easy to update everything for all of your WordPress sites. That said, keeping your paid themes & plugins updated can take extra effort. Here…
WooCommerce Keyless Activation System for Extensions
The main WooCommerce plugin is free but WooCommerce is more than just a single plugin it’s an entire ecosystem unto itself. Recently WooCommerce changed how they handle their paid extensions. They switched from license keys to a license activation system…
WP Engine and Email Notifications
Having your website send emails successfully is more difficult than it should be. Earlier this year WP Engine moved all of my dedicated servers over to Google’s infrastructure. Google’s has some pretty strict rules with emails which help keep their…
Talk from WordCamp Lancaster 2017
In March I gave my first WordCamp talk at WordCamp Lancaster called “Staying Sane While Maintaining Hundreds of WordPress Sites”. It was a great experience and I will plan on a future talk. I was hesitant due to the fact…
Remote commands over SSH from WordPress (Using phpseclib)
I commonly want WordPress to run code, like a bash script, directly on the command line. In PHP there is a set of functions which is commonly disabled for security purposes. That includes exec which is PHP’s command to do just…
Backup Offloaded Amazon S3 Uploads
If you’re using WP Offload S3 to free up local storage then you’ll also need to backup your Amazon S3 uploads. Rather than running two separate backups, one for the website and one for Amazon S3, the following is how I…