Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Tag: WordPress (Page 11 of 219)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

There’s More to WordPress Than FSE and Headless

I don’t know if this is just me, but at the time of this writing I think that those who work with WordPress for a living – usually those described as being part of the “WordPress Community” – can be grouped into primarily two camps:

  • those who are focused on React for the Block Editor and Full-Site Editing (or FSE),
  • those who are focused on Headless WordPress specifically with technology like Next.js

That’s good because we know that we’re going to eventually have the Block Editor and FSE working together and we know the Headless ability of WordPress allows for an array of solutions that can be built using alternative front-end technologies.

Based on newsletters, tweets, blog posts, podcasts, and all of the other way media is shared for the application, though, I think we’re also forgetting the fact that WordPress is far more malleable than FSE and Next.js or, more simply put, locked into having React be the primary thing on which we focus.

Continue reading

The Idea of Boxes for Multiple WordPress Projects in One Installation

When working with multiple WordPress installations – that is, having to manage an array of wp-content directories for whatever it is you’re working on, it seems that it’s more often not common to suggest creating a new WordPress installation for each project.

This isn’t something necessary assuming the nature of your work can operate off of a single database and the same version of WordPress. This may or may not work for multi-site projects; I don’t deal with them so don’t count on this as being applicable.

Continue reading

Writing for WordPress Has to Change (For Me)

When I first started writing on this blog, It was on October 3, 2010. That’s wild to think about. I know that those who read usually fall into one of three categories:

  • People who read regularly, for which I thank you,
  • People who are aware of it and check periodically, for which I thank you,
  • And people who are drivebys from searches from various search engines.

All of that is great and fine and I don’t think I ever would’ve thought I’d be writing roughly 12 years later.

But here we are.

Continue reading

Using Ray in WordPress Development: An Example of Classic Debugging

TL;DR: This final article will demonstrate how to use Ray in WordPress as an example of classic debugging.

No, it’s not the same as something such as Xdebug, but it demonstrates what we can do such as changing variables on the fly and changing the course of execution.


⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.

Continue reading

Quick Tip: Find WordPress Users by Metadata

TL;DR: Here’s how you can use SQL to find WordPress users by metadata. This is useful when you have information such as their first name and last name and want to retrieve the full WP_User.


WordPress provides a number of functions that make it easy to retrieve a user based on certain information. One of the most popular functions (or most useful, maybe?) is get_user_by.

However, what if you’re working on a system that maintains the user’s first name and last name or some other type of data point in the usermeta table and you want to use that to retrieve the user’s information?

Continue reading
« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑