Tag: WordPress (Page 89 of 219)

Supporting free WordPress plugins has been interesting to me for some time now because there are some inherent challenges with managing a freemium-based product.

Last week, WP Tavern covered a new project by ServerPress called WPSiteSync. It’s a neat plugin in and of itself, but what caught my attention was how ServerPress is structuring support for the free variation of the plugin.

In short, the article mentions:

Support for the free version is only provided on Fridays from 10am-12PM Pacific standard time. A cursory glance at the support forum shows the ServerPress team responding to a number of threads.

And though there seems to be some pushback in the comments about this, I’m intrigued by this particular approach to support.

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As developers, one of the most important things we can do is prevent direct access to your plugin. By this, I mean if someone gets clever and tries to access to one of the files located in any given plugin’s directory, they should not be able to execute any of the code in the script.

A simple plugin’s directory from which the below source is pulled.

And I know: This seems like something that’s easy (it is), but even in a recent project, I’m reminded how it’s not something that even some of the most useful plugins do.

I can only chalk this up to lack of awareness or perhaps lack of education. If you’re not setting your work up to prevent direct plugin access to your plugin, you’re leaving a significant security gap in place, and it’s something that can be easily corrected.

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When working on a site, blog, or project on WordPress, it’s not at all uncommon to hear users (developers, designers, bloggers, and so on) talk about caching.

Caching can be a tricky subject to tackle, though. I think that most people have an understanding that caching, in general, can be used to speed up a site. But regarding what it does, how it works, and any other details beyond that are hit-or-miss, pun intended, depending on your level of experience.

And one area in which I see – and have personally experienced – is the understanding of the WordPress Object Cache. Feel free to click the link, though it’s far more advanced than what I plan to cover in this article.

That is, WordPress provides some basic functionality for loading the options in the wp_options database table, but how WordPress caches data, how WordPress retrieves non-cached data, and how it works is often glossed over or assumed to be a sort of magic.

How it feels to work with the magic of WordPress (and not understanding what’s happening).

So I thought it might be worth sharing a few notes about the WordPress Object Cache and how it works with objects if for no other reason that to provide a quick reference for what it is, how it works, and how we, as developers, can leverage it to our advantage.

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