Category: WordPress
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8 WordCamps and counting…
I accidentally lied to a lot of people last week. While at WordCamp Europe in Athens I was telling people that it was only my second WordCamp Europe. Turns out I’d completely forgotten about 2019! (Sorry John.) So to help myself tell the truth I thought I’d list out my WordCamp history and why not…
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WordPress at 20: (Nearly) half my life…
18 years, 7 months and 20 days ago I published my first blog post on my first (public, at least) WordPress site. WordPress was not even 18 months old. Today WordPress turns 20 and for very nearly half of my life now I’ve been blogging with, building with and developing on WordPress. It’s been my…
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Convert PHP arrays to short array syntax in seconds
Having just had to look this up, I thought I’d share how I did it. It’s really really easy. 1. Require code sniffer in your project (you are using composer, right?) 2. Run CBF using the DisallowLongArraySyntax sniff That will apply to everything in the current directory, so simply change the . to whichever specific…
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Copying theme options between Pantheon environments using WP CLI
One of my tasks today was to activate a new child theme on a project. We’d already migrated the site to Pantheon (using their very straightforward migration plugin) and had activated the parent theme – in this case Newspack – to start playing around. The Problem My colleague Bart had completed initial work on the…
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I’m building Newspack
As a freelancer at the time, contributing to Lichfield Live led to plenty of work in journalism from tiny startups like Hackney Citizen to established publications like Journalism.co.uk. I spoke at conferences and even once advised the regional editors at one of the UK’s biggest media publishers. Thanks to a recommendation, I won one of…
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The Bullshit Web, and some bullshit about AMP
Alright, let’s start off by saying that I’m definitely a little biased – part of my job involves working with the AMP team at Google and the fine folks at XWP on the AMP for WordPress plugin. I wanted to highlight some things about this Bullshit Web piece that’s going around, though. In short: the…
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WordCamp US 2017: 5 Steps to Better WordPress Performance for Non-Developers
Below is my presentation from this year’s WordCamp US in Nashville, TN. In the spirit of democratising publishing I wanted to help non-developers and individuals/small business owners to have better performing websites with minimal effort. Here’s the recorded talk: And the slides:
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Late escape your WordPress plugins!
A little while ago a colleague shared this interesting article from RIPS on the state of WordPress security. It focused on an automated analysis of 44,705 plugins from the WordPress.org plugin directory (almost all of them). They found that 68.4% of those plugins contained cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. That’s a huge number, and a huge number of vulnerable…
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Feeling RESTful
A month ago I took a (relatively) short train ride into the beautiful Derbyshire countryside to spend a week coding in the middle of nowhere. I was attending A Week of REST – a training event put on by the excellent folks at WordPress agency, Human Made. Part of a group of about 20, we descended on Darwin…