Tom McFarlin | Practical WordPress Development

September 13, 2019September 13, 2019

Why I’m Archiving My GitHub Repositories

One of the things I’ve been considering for a while now (read: most of this year) is archiving my GitHub repositories and retiring what WordPress plugins I currently have available.

Last month, I spent time thinking about why I’d want to do so versus just letting them sit. Though there are multiple reasons for doing so, there’s one reason to which I kept returning (and plenty of others I’ll outline in moment).

But first, the TL;DR is this: There’s a single side project I want to work on without any distractions.

That’s it. Nothing elaborate, fancy, or groundbreaking. The thing about having a variety of other repositories available, though, is that there are occasional emails about bugs, feature requests, etc., all of which are appreciated but most of which I don’t have time on which to focus at the moment.

Instead, I think my time can be better spent on other work. And I think I want to spend my time on other things.

September 6, 2019September 6, 2019

From Self-Employment to Employment in WordPress

Earlier this year, I talked about the move from Pressware to WebDevStudios but I didn’t go into much detail. However, last week, I had the ability to do a deep dive into what it’s like to work to work with an agency again.

But it’s more than just work.

September 4, 2019September 4, 2019

Working with cURL, WordPress, and Valet

I’m one of those types who uses the 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as my primary DNS servers.

But one problem that comes with using these as my main DNS servers (and maybe others, I don’t know as I’ve not tried them) is that when I’m using cURL to make requests to a third-party server, it will often result in an a 404.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

September 3, 2019September 4, 2019

Episode 8 – Finale

When I started the podcast at the beginning of the year, I’d planned to do it for at least a year. But some seriously good things have come up since January – namely that our family is growing 🙂 – and I’m all for priorities.

Right now, my big focus is on my family, friends, and work (which includes blogging). So, to that end, I’m putting the podcast on an indefinite hiatus. Normally, that’s a polite way of saying “I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.”

That’s not true in this case, though.

Instead, it’s something that I’ll eventually come back to doing once the new normal has set. With that, though, I decided to try to make this episode longer than the previous episode.

August 28, 2019September 3, 2019

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 3

In the previous two posts, I’ve talked about the basics of caching and how caching works in WordPress, at least to a degree.

But remember that this series was motivated by an email from someone who thought that I could do a better job of explaining how transients and caching work in WordPress and why it’s important to understand how everything works in tandem with each other.

So in this post, I’m aiming to bring it all together and talk about how the Transients API works in conjunction with MySQL, why it’s important to understand the relationship, and how to handle this moving forward.