How you build and deploy a WordPress site will vary greatly depending on the project scope. The following are a few tips for dealing with production, staging and dev sites as a single developer working with a small business client. Start development locally using Git (Theme folders only). You might ask, why Git if…
Jetpack’s markdown module is easy way to add markdown to WordPress. If your not familiar with markdown then this is a good starting point. Out of the box you can use this on any WordPress page or post. Recently I was curious if I could use Jetpack’s markdown other places like custom fields. Turns out, yes…
I’ve been using WP Engine since mid 2014. I’m not a typical customer. Currently have 4 dedicated WP Engine servers containing 518 installs. A rough breakdown of the installs would be 10% high traffic, 10% normal traffic, 70% low traffic and 10% development only. I recently opened up a Kinsta account to run some comparison on…
The WordPress REST API is awesome and fully extendable to do your own custom crazy ideas. The following I’m about to explain goes against all of that. Instead of extending the WordPress REST API I’m creating my own custom API endpoint using nothing other then a custom page template. Learn APIs by building the most basic version…
Ever once in a while I have a customer with a custom PHP file running some daily batch process. Moving these over to a managed WordPress host can get well messy as there isn’t a great way to run a custom cron jobs. In order to keep things clean I like wrapping the custom PHP code…
WordPress is awesome. I use WordPress for my business and all of my clients use it for their business. Recently I’ve been wondering if there a guide that people could use to figured out if WordPress is the best choice to them. One of my customers recently reached out to me for advice on what to do…
The WordPress plugin ecosystem is like the wild west. There are amazing companies producing quality plugins. There are also tons of lone rangers who put out unsupported and poorly written plugins. Plugin conflicts are inevitable and happen during plugin updates. Not doing updates is not an option so here is a framework for dealing with and…
Every site I maintain gets Jetpack installed with the Stats module activate. These stats are pretty basic. While they might not be as comprehensive as Google Analytics they are extremely powerful as they are accessible via the WordPress.com API. WordPress.com Rest API is not WP Rest API The WordPress.com Rest API is a product of…
There is a Ruby gem called Mechanize which is a powerful library for automating web interactions. While playing around with it over the course of a weekend I ended up making the following Ruby script can be run over the command line to login to WP Engine’s web user portal (my.wpengine.com) and do various tasks. The…
Looking up domain records is a common daily task. Most of the time I use a website called MX Toolbox. That works great for single lookup. On occasion I need to do a bulk lookup for group of websites. While there are some websites that do bulk I found the best way is to simply run…