This past weekend, I spent time closing a bunch of sites, exporting content from one service to another, preparing to consolidate a couple of sites, and even shutting some sites down.

But the number one thing that has resulted in a weird bit of feedback is the idea that I opted to archive my data from Medium in preparing to move it to a WordPress-based site. This resulted in some weird WordPress versus Medium points from others.

Truthfully, I know this kind of argument will never die. But I digress for now.

And, I suppose, the reason this is weird is that I – like many who use WordPress – want the control that comes with owning your data. Perhaps it’s also about playing in someone else’s sandbox, too, right?

But there’s an inherent problem with sticking only with one CMS and neglecting what the rest of the industry is doing.

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Updating options within the WordPress admin is simple, right? It’s a matter of filling out a text field, checking a box, or swapping a radio button then clicking save.

But let’s say that you need to set up a hook that fires that also updates a secondary, related option whenever one is toggled.

For example, given an option represented by a checkbox, let’s say that you want to set an option in the database whenever the checkbox is unchecked and then delete it whenever said option is set.

There’s an action specifically for doing this that makes it pretty easy.

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Yesterday, I shared a post on how to use wp_remote_get but I left out an alternative function: wp_safe_remote_get. The original goal was to use the first post to show:

1. What the original function accepts,
2. How to use the original function,
3. What the original function returns,
4. What an implementation make look like.

And then I was going to take a look at wp_safe_remote_get. But there’s a challenge: I have smart friends. Shortly after I published the post, I get a response from Roy:

wp_safe_remote_get***

— Mildly Spicy Salsa (@royboy789) January 10, 2017

Thanks, Roy! (Be sure to say “Hi!” to him. :)

But seriously, the follow-up to yesterday’s post is exactly that: wp_safe_remote_get. And it’s how to determine the difference in the two functions and when you’d use one over the other.

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