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  • Talk from WordCamp Lancaster 2017

    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…

  • Remote commands over SSH from WordPress (Using phpseclib)

    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…

  • Backup Offloaded Amazon S3 Uploads

    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…

  • Resolving SFTP Errors After Server Migrations

    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,…

  • Triggering WordPress AJAX Callback from PHP

    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…

  • Consolidating WP Engine Servers

    I host most of my WordPress websites with WP Engine. I’m currently managing 681 WordPress installations spread across 4 dedicated WP Engine servers, and as of one month ago I…

  • Removing Orphaned Uploads From Multisite

    If you have an active multisite network, chances are you have orphaned content left over from deleted subsites. To clean up the database, there is a fantastic plugin Cleanup Multisite DB…

  • Simultaneous Website Previewing with Two Servers

    So typically when migrating or launching WordPress sites, I’ll modify my HOSTS file in order to preview the site at its final destination before going public. That’s a great way…

  • Regex with WordPress Database Backups

    For too long, regular expressions or regex have been mysterious to me. With the help of the fantastic video series at Laracasts the quirky pattern matching syntax has started to make…

  • Extracting a Site from Multisite

    Something I’ve been working on recently is breaking apart some unnecessary legacy Multisite networks into separate WordPress installations. There are times where Multisite is useful, however I have overused Multisite in…