Tag: WordPress (Page 20 of 219)

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

Participating in Voices of the elePHPant

September 27, 2019 / Tom

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of writing the forward to Cal Evans book Using the WordPress REST API. Shortly thereafter, Cal asked if I’d join him on his podcast, Voices of the elePHPant, to talk a bit about software development in the context of WordPress.

And given that that’s what I’ve spent the majority of my career doing, it made sense to participate.

This not only gave me a chance to catch up with Cal “face-to-face” but also to share a bit about what it’s like working in this particular corner of the PHP community and in the WordPress economy.

Why I’m Archiving My GitHub Repositories

September 13, 2019 / Tom

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.

Working with cURL, WordPress, and Valet

September 4, 2019 / Tom

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.

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 3

August 28, 2019 / Tom

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.

Understanding Caching in WordPress, Part 2

August 22, 2019 / Tom

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.