Category: Articles (Page 139 of 258)

This past weekend, I had a couple of less-than-stellar exchanges as it relates to customer service, customer support, or whatever you’d like to call it.

Specifically, they were things that transpired with other unrelated businesses both of which got me thinking about the state of customer support in WordPress.

And since many of us are involved in WordPress-related businesses or are running shops in the industry, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the whole thing.

None of this is novel and it’s probably not particularly insightful. Just some things I observed and thought about while driving home (because, you know, who doesn’t think about WordPress when they aren’t WordPressing? :).

The purpose of this, though, isn’t to disparage anyone.

This post is about self-edification. It’s about sharing ideas for how we currently run our businesses and how we might be able to improve – both as customers and as businesses – moving forward.

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For the last few months, I’ve been quietly running a small pop-up on this site used to help build a mailing list for those who are interested in wanting to get better at WordPress development.

I know, I know: This kind of stuff seriously annoys a certain breed of people, doesn’t it? Myself included!

But at the recommendation of a friend, I tried it. And it’s been working.

The mailing list has been successfully growing over the last few months, and I’m getting ready to start something new at the beginning of 2016. To that end, I wanted to share a little more about what’s in store for the first quarter of next year.

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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.

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.

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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.

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