Social Networks for the life of the world
Microsoft, when they rolled out Windows 11, made some changes to their File Explorer that slowed me down as a developer. I needed to restore the Windows 10 behavior. The Windows 11 task bar always combines icons from multiple instances of the same app into one. To find the instance you want you have to … Read more
These are my rough notes on the steps needed to set up a VM to do WordPress development with PhpStorm. Create the VM Download the Ubuntu .iso file and create a VM using your virtualization program. Give the VM at least 6GiB of RAM and two processors to work with. For best results give it … Read more
Problem: How do I get the UNIX timestamp for midnight local time in php? Why would I want this? To schedule a daily processing event at 00:05 every day, we might use This is handy for running various overnight work at a particular time of day in local time. What does “local time” mean in … Read more
Have you ever written any WordPress code that needed to register a lot of hooks — a lot of actions and filters? Have you ever forgotten to put the right number of $expectedArgs into the call to add_action() or add_filter()? Worse, have you ever forgotten your call to one of those? No more! This article … Read more
This, a work-in-progress, is a list of good tools for WordPress developers. Plugins Query Monitor by John Blackbourn. Monitors pretty much everything that happens on WordPress page views, not just queries. WP Rollback by GiveWP.com. Reinstalls previous versions of themes or plugins. Demo Press by Milan Petrovic. Generates fake content and can create many posts, … Read more
When developing WordPress plugin for distribution on the wordpress.org directory, we need some tools to automate the release process. It’s convenient to use github (or another source-code control vendor) to hold the day-to-day development source code. And, when we’re ready to release the plugin to the WordPress repository, we need to use WordPress’s Subversion (svn) … Read more
postgreSQL is, according to this article by Andy Pavlo, doing very well in design wins for new projects. Could WordPress adopt it? It would be hard to do. Even if the core could be adapted, the vast ecosystem of plugins and themes is very MariaDB / MySQL centric. Here are some musings from the core … Read more
Sometimes, upon adding indexes to MariaDb or MySQL tables with columns with zero-default dates you’ll get an error message like this: This happens because your server’s default sql_mode includes the NO_ZERO_DATE value. It is prevalent when working on WordPress indexes using phpmyadmin or some other MySQL client program. To prevent it, change the sql_mode before … Read more
Anybody who’s worked with databases knows this: as they grow they can slow down. It’s the curse of the customer base. Successful applications gather users and other transactional data. In this article I’m using MySQL database queries based on WordPress’s database design. Still, the ideas in this article apply to every application built on any … Read more
It’s straightforward to get WordPress to capture the MySQL queries it uses to generate each page view. We can then analyze the captured queries. Capturing WordPress offers a way to capture a list of the database queries it uses in each page view. It’s simple: define the global SAVEQUERIES symbol. You can define it permanently … Read more