A common customer request I get is to reset a WordPress staging site back to its default state. I’ve done this manually quite a few times and decided I should just script it. The following bash script will drop all database tables, install a fresh copy of WordPress and remove all themes, plugins and…
There are many reasons why you might want to automate website screenshots. I’ve previously attempted to do this with development tools like PhantomJS and Selenium however was left unimpressed. Selenium is hard to setup and PhantomJS had difficulty getting accurate website screenshots. While searching for a better tool I discovered gowitness a command line…
I first encountered the programming language Go back in 2015 while making a Github issue for Rclone. Since then I’ve used tools like Fathom, gowitness, Restic and Wpress-Extractor all written in Go. Learning Go has been on my todo list for a while now. During Christmas break 🎄- the span of 2 weeks –…
I recently discovered a hidden gem with Kinsta’s SSH environment. They have a built in option for performing a background process using the screen command. Huge thanks for this tip goes to Jeff, one of Kinsta’s support engineers 🙏. Two types of SSH disconnects with Kinsta The most common type of disconnect happens due to inactivity.…
Bash is amazingly powerful and yet not the easiest thing to learn. When learning any new computer language it’s natural to write everything in a very long single file. As you get better with the language you start to break things out into separate files as reusable modules. Bash is no different. One exception is…
This post is part of a series called “Learning Vue.js as a WordPress Developer” Part 1 – Getting Started Part 2 – Structured PHP, Rest API and Axios Part 3 – Markdown and WordPress Embeds Part 4 – Authenticated Rest API Part 5 – Decoupled Page Template The previous post included lots of hacky…
When it comes to unique use cases for WordPress, headless WordPress is all the talk. However earlier this year I stumbled upon another unique use case for WordPress. One I haven’t seen talked about before. That is a WP-CLI only WordPress. WordPress runs just fine without being web accessible. Under this configuration all interactions…
Since the beginning of this blog I’ve relied on Jetpack Subscriptions to send out email notifications when publishing a blog post. It’s a free, quick and easy solution for handling blog email subscriptions. That said it’s not very flexible and emails are handled by the WordPress.com infrastructure which is not something you can control.…
Daily backups are a necessity for any website. However performing a full site restore from backup should only be considered as a last resort. For high traffic WooCommerce sites restoring a backup means all customers orders are lost from the backup time till the restore time. Avoid performing a full site restore if possible…
Coming from WP Engine, Kinsta PHP options are amazing. Each site with Kinsta can run a wide range of PHP versions from 5.6 to 7.3 beta. That said, with greater control comes additional responsibility. Here are some tips for keeping PHP up to date while managing over 250 sites on Kinsta. Gathering current PHP…