Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Resources (Page 1 of 60)

A summary of useful links, applications, and tools that I find around the Internet.

WP Privacy, Attestation, Git Updater Lite, and More

For years, I’ve kept track of various resources that I’ve found useful. Having them here makes it easy to refer to them in the future should the need arise (don’t you refer back to your old posts? /s).

It also makes it easy for others to find them if they’re searching for them either in traditional ways or via some of the new ways we have to search (that latter of which is why I find value in still sharing content).

Anyway, over the last two weeks, there have a been four things I’ve found that I hope to look more into in the future. And if not, at least they’re here for posterity.


  • WP API Privacy. The default WordPress installation from wordpress.org automatically transmits extraneous information via various HTTP calls that occur in the admin. Some of this data may be cause for concern from a privacy perspective. This plugin seeks to limit that information, attempting to further protect your privacy in the process (via Duane Storey).
  • WordPress Plugin Attestation. Add this action to your deployment workflow to generate a build provenance attestation of the plugin ZIP file on WordPress.org (via John Blackbourne). For what it’s worth, “attestation” is just the verification that the software comes from where it claims to originate.
  • RAVE for WordPress. RAVE for WordPress is an automated tool which compares the contents of published packages of WordPress with the canonical source code to verify they have not been tampered with (via John Blackbourne).
  • Git Updater Lite. “Since Git Updater already gathers and parses this data, Git Updater Lite only needs to query an update server run by the developer” (via Andy Fragen).

And if you stumble across this post and are interested in anything I’ve written in the past week, you can find that below:

If you’re using WordPress and you’re looking for an extremely quick way to add this functionality to your local installation, add the following code to an mu-plugin …

    Until the next time there’s a backlog of stuff for me to share, that’s it for now.

    Sodium Compat: PHP Sodium Functionality via Composer

    If you’ve worked with PHP with any length of time and needed to use some type of built-in encryption, you’ve likely seen something about the Sodium library in the manual.

    Sodium is a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. Its goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools.

    Unfortunately, the module that contains this library isn’t always installed with the PHP binary. It then has to be either re-compiled or enabled by a package manager. If you don’t have the ability, time, or access to do any of those, then there’s a solid alternative for the native library that can be installed via Composer: Sodium Compat.

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    Resources, Week of 5 September 2021

    It’s been a little while since the last time I’ve shared some of the stuff that I’ve found. Part of it has to do with the fact that I’ve had stuff outside of work and blogging that have been of higher priority, and part of it has to do with taking a vacation.

    So this is a bit of a longer list than usual but it should have enough for someone to find something interesting.

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    Resources, Week of 8 August 2021

    I don’t have a lot of things to share this week – just some articles and utilities – but if I had to narrow it down to what I’d recommend reading, it’d be the articles on Things 3.14, and the article on incentivizing quality code.

    That’s all my comments; on to the list.

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