Tag: WordPress | Tom McFarlin

September 13, 2019September 13, 2019

Why I’m Archiving My GitHub Repositories

One of the things I’ve been considering for a while now (read: most of this year) is archiving my GitHub repositories and retiring what WordPress plugins I currently have available.

Last month, I spent time thinking about why I’d want to do so versus just letting them sit. Though there are multiple reasons for doing so, there’s one reason to which I kept returning (and plenty of others I’ll outline in moment).

But first, the TL;DR is this: There’s a single side project I want to work on without any distractions.

That’s it. Nothing elaborate, fancy, or groundbreaking. The thing about having a variety of other repositories available, though, is that there are occasional emails about bugs, feature requests, etc., all of which are appreciated but most of which I don’t have time on which to focus at the moment.

Instead, I think my time can be better spent on other work. And I think I want to spend my time on other things.

September 4, 2019September 4, 2019

Working with cURL, WordPress, and Valet

I’m one of those types who uses the 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as my primary DNS servers.

But one problem that comes with using these as my main DNS servers (and maybe others, I don’t know as I’ve not tried them) is that when I’m using cURL to make requests to a third-party server, it will often result in an a 404.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

August 28, 2019September 3, 2019

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 3

In the previous two posts, I’ve talked about the basics of caching and how caching works in WordPress, at least to a degree.

But remember that this series was motivated by an email from someone who thought that I could do a better job of explaining how transients and caching work in WordPress and why it’s important to understand how everything works in tandem with each other.

So in this post, I’m aiming to bring it all together and talk about how the Transients API works in conjunction with MySQL, why it’s important to understand the relationship, and how to handle this moving forward.

August 22, 2019September 3, 2019

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 2

In the previous post, I shared a basic primer for how database-backed applications – specifically WordPress – work without caching.

And before we talk about how basic caching works in WordPress, namely with the Transients API, it’s important to discuss the basic principles of caching. This includes why we do it, its benefits, and how it works.

Then we’ll get into how we can take advantage of basic facilities in WordPress to actually do this.

August 21, 2019September 3, 2019

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 1

Back in may, I wrote an article about using the WordPress Transients API. I summarize the article like this:

To simulate cookies and their feature of expiration, using WordPress transients may be a viable solution.
https://tommcfarlin.com/using-wordpress-transients/

Though the purpose of the article was to lay out a foundation for how we can design a class to work with the Transients API to simulate the behavior of cookies, one of the side effects of the article is that it didn’t do a good job of explaining how the Transients API (and, by proxy, how MySQL) works.

This was brought to my attention via email by David at UpDraft Plus.

So I thought it useful to talk about the concept of caching from a practical level, how it’s implemented in WordPress, then maybe look at we how to utilize plugins or newer technology to better power our sites and applications as well as have a better understanding.