I’m not sure if this is a growing trend, but I recently decided to drop the dates from my blog post URLs. Previously I was using the day and name format /2017/12/12/identifying-bottleneck-plugins/ to the post name format This was not an SEO-based decision. I simply like the clean look in the URL, and feel…
In terms of web analytics, Google Analytics dominates. I’ve tried some of the open source alternatives (see below from wiki) however I haven’t been very impressed. Most of them are difficult to use. In fact, only two of them work as easy as Google Analytics with a simple copy/paste JavaScript embed. WordPress and the internet at…
WordPress has a built in maintenance mode. You’ve most likely seen it at some point while updating WordPress, themes or plugins. While meant to protect WordPress from itself while doing something critical, it’s also useable for other situations where you want to change active PHP files. Using SSH you can easily enable and disable…
Today I’m announcing Quicksaves, which is a hosting feature I recently built. They’re essentially a daily WordPress snapshot containing only themes, plugins and version numbers. While this might seem very similar to a daily backup it solves a completely different set of problems. Backup snapshots are overkill for most situations. Let’s say you want…
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 My frontend development skills are getting dated.…
I regularly migrate WordPress sites. As such I’m always looking for the quickest and simplest way to handle the migration. Recently I’ve been handling all of my migrations directly between servers using SSH. This will be a rough overview of what that looks like and why I enjoy it so much. Step 1: Make…
For most people, switching a WordPress site from http to https is possible with just a few clicks. That’s a big thanks Let’s Encrypt, which is being widely adopted by many popular web hosting companies. That said, there can be a few roadblocks when switching to https. Here are few recommendations when switching to HTTPS…
Most WordPress-specific host providers will have some sort of hosting dashboard to manage website redirections. These pages allow you to directly configure the web server rules (Apache and/or NGINX). WP Engine and Kinsta make this fairly straightforward to use as shown here. While there are times adding redirections directly to the web server are…
Advanced Custom Fields relationships are pretty amazing. You can easily manage relationships between virtually anything. The official ACF docs on querying relationship fields is a fantastic walkthrough showing how to handle the front-end display of basic relationships. It works by using the meta_query to make a like comparisons. That unfortunately doesn’t work for complex (many to many) ACF…
I recently discovered wp_schedule_single_event which, as it sounds, allows you to schedule a one time event. This helped solved an issue I was running into while attempting to get Mailgun and Constellix talking to each other. Automating Mailgun setup with delayed DNS verify While working to create an automated integration with Mailgun, I ran into a situation…