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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Have you ever connected to a web server over SFTP? If so then it’s likely you’ll see one of these errors at some point: remote host identification has changed , host keys changed, offending key for IP or something similar. This is somewhat…
WordPress makes it easy to run PHP code from Javascript. This is extremely useful for running custom code without reloading the page. The following part I’m using to send backup snapshot emails. This will run the PHP function snapshot_email_action_callback. This works…