Category: Articles (Page 139 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

On The Idea of Simplifying Our Tools

December 17, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Perhaps one of the most tiring things of working in development in staying up to date with all of the various tools and processes available to us for helping us get our work done.

As soon as one comes out we even come close to mastering (and I use that term loosely), there’s a new dependency manager, process, server configuration, whatever, to learn and to see if it fits into our workflow.

All the while, many of us want to find the most streamlined process available for us to efficiently do our work and build our projects with as much optimization as possible.

So it’s like we’re faced with this dilemma:

Stay up to date with all of the new tools that are available or stick with what we know and hope that we don’t become irrelevant?

It sounds a bit like hyperbole, but you know the feeling I’m talking about, right?

Retrieve Flickr Photos in WordPress

December 16, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re working on a plugin or theme that’s tightly integrated with a user’s social profile then you may find yourself wanting to pull in photos from their Flickr account.

Flickr API

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, then you know most of the stuff I share like this comes from either working on something for myself or working on something for someone else.

So, in a recent project, here’s how I used the Flickr API to bring Flickr photos into a WordPress plugin to display on the front-end.

Should I Use Caching on a Shared Web Host?

December 15, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Regardless of your experience with WordPress, it’s almost inevitable that – at some point – you’re going to want to experiment with caching your website.

Cache, Not Cash

For those who have a background in computing, you’re likely already familiar with caching:

how it works,
how to control it,
some of the pitfalls,
and many of its advantages.

If, on the other hand, you’re someone who wants a faster site, finds a plugin, and then begins turning options on and off, you may end up negatively affecting your site in some way.

Because WordPress is available a one-click install on so many web hosts, and because the plugin repository has a variety of caching plugins, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and/or try out a number of different plugins potentially altering the appearance of your site when users are viewing it.

And the latter happens to all of us. At least I hope. I had a cache issue late last week :).

Anyway, despite this laborious introduction, the purpose of this post isn’t necessarily to outline the advantages and disadvantages of caching. Instead, it’s meant to answer the question:

Should I use caching on a shared web host?

And though it’s not a difficult question to answer, it’s important to understand that you can only push the limits of your caching so far in that type particular environment.

A WordPress Upgrade Doesn’t Break Your Site

December 14, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

WordPress 4.4 was released last week and there’s no reason for me to cover all the information about it. You can read all about it on:

As with any WordPress upgrade, there’s often the following commentary:

The latest WordPress upgrade broke my site.

And I get it:

You’re a user.
Your site is powered by WordPress.
You upgrade WordPress.
Your site breaks.
Thus, the WordPress upgrade broke your site.

I’m likely preaching to the choir with this post given the audience (at least of which I’m aware), but in case anyone reads this is not a WordPress developer and is someone who is tech-savvy and tries to say on the up-and-up with WordPress, then perhaps it’ll be useful.

If nothing else, I can reference this for others with whom I work as a means to explain something without doing so over and over again (and hopefully in a much clearer way).

The short of it:

Just because you upgrade WordPress and your site breaks does not mean that the WordPress upgrade broke your site.

This sounds a bit like circular reasoning, doesn’t it? Bear with me.

Getting Started with WordPress Development

December 11, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you spend enough time with WordPress, you may very well become interested in development. No, of course not everyone will do this.

They’ll continue to use it exactly as it is:

A blogging platform,
Or a content management system

But just as with operating systems, desktop software, mobile apps, etc., you may find yourself wanting to build things for WordPress.

So the natural question becomes:

“How do I go about getting started with WordPress development?

And there are tons, and tons of articles available for this. There are videos, there are courses, there are seminars, webinars, and so on.

So this is not going to be another post about the 10 things you need to do to get started in WordPress.

Instead, it’s going to take a different approach.