Page 166 of 429

The Modern WordPress Server Stack

May 6, 2016 / Tom

During WordCamp San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Carl Alexander speak on the topic of the modern WordPress Server Stack.

Modern WordPress Server Stack

A few notes:

If you’re not following Carl on Twitter, I recommend it. He’s an incredibly smart person who is doing some really neat things with WordPress.
If you’re not subscribed to his blog but are interested in advanced programming topics as it relates to WordPress, I recommend subscribing.
If you weren’t present for his talk, you can catch it on WordPress.tv.

With that said, Carl also included an article that accompanied his presentation on his blog and it’s something that I think makes for good reading.

I find this especially true if you’re someone who is at an intermediate level of WordPress development or if you’re someone who’s looking to learn more about server administration.

Using Console.app for Viewing PHP Logs

May 5, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working with PHP, there are some great libraries and tools that make it easy for logging notices, warnings, errors, and so on within our code.

For what it’s worth, I think PHP does a pretty good job of doing this on its own, but if you need to write your custom logging code, there are plenty of off-the-shelf libraries that are helpful.

But that’s not the gist of this post. Instead, just as I think it’s important to make sure we’re providing reliable logging information, I think it’s important that we’re able to view said logs, as well.

Thinking Through Problem Spaces in WordPress

May 4, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I enjoy talking with fellow developers about the problems they are thinking about as it relates to their field, and the problem spaces in WordPress is no exception.

That is, I enjoy hearing about what they are working on, what they are thinking about, or what they are tinkering with as it relates to their primary line of work.

Tinkering

For many who read this blog (and this includes myself though I’m the one actually writing it), we spend a lot of our time working within the WordPress space but does mean we spend a lot of time thinking about the WordPress space? Furthermore, does this mean that we spend a lot of time thinking about problems and potential solutions to what we see in our area?

First, this is not something that’s unique to our space. I believe that you can find this in any programming community.

Secondly, I think that this notion of thinking about a particular set of problems is something that’s a bit more abstract than what we usually discuss or see written about on other blogs.

A Plugin for Testing Custom Post Types

May 3, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working on the latest version of Easier Excerpts, we added functionality so the plugin would work any post type that had support for excerpts.

Testing Custom Post Types

Because you can’t know that different custom post types that a person may have on their installation of WordPress, I wrote a small plugin that creates a generic custom post type that can be customized, used, and abused in your development environment.

This way, you can install the plugin, activate it, and have a custom post type with which you can test against should your project call for it.

A Problem Installing the Certificate With Let’s Encrypt

May 2, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to making HTTPS available for everyone, the Let’s Encrypt project is great; however, if you’re running a shared host and you have an add-on domain, then there may be a problem with trying to install certificates for each of the sites.

Fortunately, many cPanel installations have an option for installing certificates by Let’s Encrypt.

A Problem Installing the Certificate With Let's Encrypt

But what happens when you try to install a certificate, and you see the following error message?

There was a problem installing the certificate. Please contact support for more information.

Depending on your set up, you may never see this message. But if you’re working within a shared hosting environment or you’re trying to configure a certificate for a set up with an add-on domain, then there’s a specific way to resolve this.

Tom McFarlin

The Modern WordPress Server Stack

Using Console.app for Viewing PHP Logs

Thinking Through Problem Spaces in WordPress

A Plugin for Testing Custom Post Types

A Problem Installing the Certificate With Let’s Encrypt