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When building WordPress websites for customers, I feel the best approach is to do a custom designed and developed theme using something like Underscores as a starter theme combined with Advanced Custom Fields. There is just nothing like building up a website from scratch with just the features that the customer needs. No bloat…

I’ve been using a premium DNS provider since 2014 and only recently switched to use vanity nameservers. This will be a walk through showing the steps I took to setup vanity nameservers using Constellix (DNS Provider) and Hover (Domain Provider) for anchor.host. Step 1: Add new A records to primary domain. First find the…

On March 1st 2020, Mailgun will be phasing out their free tier. I’m a happy paying Mailgun customer. How is this going to affect me? Well, over the last several years I created a number of separate free Mailgun accounts for various hosting customers. All these free accounts have my credit card details on…

Let’s say you want to use a simple WordPress theme like Blocksy, yet you want to add a bit of custom functionality. What are your options? Well the most logical thing to do would be to create a child theme with custom layouts. Another option would be to build a custom WordPress plugin. Both…

Ever launch a new website and run into DNS delays? Ever curious what’s happening under the hood? Let’s take a closer look and DNS updates and some tips for troubleshooting the DNS rollout process. There are great – and not so great – DNS providers. The difference between a good DNS rollout and bad…

Given the following scenario, you’ve just launched a new WordPress site by pointing DNS to the new server and you need to grab a backup file from the old web server. What do you do? There are many potential solutions, such as: Revert DNS Modify the local HOSTS file so that you can reach…

The file wp-config.php defines configuration before WordPress is fully loaded, and includes things like database credentials and unique authentication keys. Did you know these configurations can dynamically be loaded? The following custom code will dynamically determine a database name based on an environment variable. Multisite like mode using WP-CLI and shell variables Giving the…

My recommendation has always been to avoid workflows that involve deploying staging to/from production. That’s because merging WordPress websites is really hard if not nearly impossible to pull off. There are just too moving pieces to track. 👀 Mergebot was a brilliant attempt at solving the merging problem. Unfortunately, that project has been abandoned…