Social Networks for the life of the world
I have been working on a WordPress search plugin to use Valerian Saliou‘s Sonic search backend. It is a lightweight alternative to backends like Elastic Search. Its straightforward approach to normalizing natural language queries makes it useful for searching WordPress content. And its speed and feature set lend themselves gracefully to autocompletion. Using Sonic in … Read more
Someone asked how to get started developing with WordPress. Here’s my take on it. You gotta learn to use it first. These are steps to getting power-user skills. Hosting Buy an account on a budget hosting service. ~US$10 per month is a reasonable cost. It MUST support multiple WordPress sites. Sometimes these are called “subdomains” … Read more
To plugin developers WordPress offers the Settings API. It lets us define settings pages, sections within those pages and fields within the sections. WordPress Settings API We use WordPress options to store configuration variables for our plugins. The settings API lets us create pages in the WordPress back-end dashboard to allow users to enter and … Read more
Jetbrains, the Czech company that makes PhpStorm, WebStorm and Intellij-Idea, has their Gateway product in beta. It works like this: you run the Gateway software on your desktop machine — you know, the one with the nice display — and it connects to some other development machine to run your IDE. I’ve been using it … Read more
During its occasional and automatic core version updates (for example from version 5.9.2 to 5.9.3) WordPress inspects its tables in its database server (MariaDB or MySQL) and tries to restore them to WordPress’s standard schema. Sometimes a site owner or plugin customizes those tables. For example my Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin reorganizes some … Read more
Here’s a WordPress instance with 100,000 fake users made with the DemoPress plugin. It also contains fake posts, pages, and comments. If you need to test a plugin or theme with a large site, this may help you. The image of the instance was made with the Duplicator plugin. Download the zip file, unzip it, … 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
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