Loading WordPress assets usually consist of making multiple calls wp_enqueue_script or wp_enqueue_style, but this makes for redundant calls and unnecessarily long methods.

So I’ve been experimenting with a variety of different ways to load assets. And though I’m not planning to layout the final version of the code for doing this in this post, I thought it’d be worth starting from the first pass at how we can improve our process.

After all, even if there’s one degree of improvement to make in your work, isn’t it something worth considering?

Continue reading

Supporting free WordPress plugins has been interesting to me for some time now because there are some inherent challenges with managing a freemium-based product.

Last week, WP Tavern covered a new project by ServerPress called WPSiteSync. It’s a neat plugin in and of itself, but what caught my attention was how ServerPress is structuring support for the free variation of the plugin.

In short, the article mentions:

Support for the free version is only provided on Fridays from 10am-12PM Pacific standard time. A cursory glance at the support forum shows the ServerPress team responding to a number of threads.

And though there seems to be some pushback in the comments about this, I’m intrigued by this particular approach to support.

Continue reading

As developers, one of the most important things we can do is prevent direct access to your plugin. By this, I mean if someone gets clever and tries to access to one of the files located in any given plugin’s directory, they should not be able to execute any of the code in the script.

A simple plugin’s directory from which the below source is pulled.

And I know: This seems like something that’s easy (it is), but even in a recent project, I’m reminded how it’s not something that even some of the most useful plugins do.

I can only chalk this up to lack of awareness or perhaps lack of education. If you’re not setting your work up to prevent direct plugin access to your plugin, you’re leaving a significant security gap in place, and it’s something that can be easily corrected.

Continue reading