Social Networks for the life of the world
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
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
People are using the Index WP MySQL For Speed WordPress plugin! That’s great. But it shoots into the dark: nobody can tell how much improvement they’ve seen except subjectively. That’s not good. It’s hard to improve something unless we can actually measure it. Two things can make a troublesome query. If it runs just once … Read more
This pulls together some notes on handling plugin programming for WordPress multisite (network) installations. Basic information Lots of this information comes from the globally instantiated $wpdb object. Tables To get a list of WordPress tables you can use the wpdb::tables() method. Here’s a quick way to get a useful list of tables. This list include … Read more
WooCommerce and its Storefront theme display so-called category archive pages to list products in the category. If the category includes a description, it shows at the top of the page along with the category’s name. This php snippet adds an Edit link to those pages allowing a privileged user logged in to the Dashboard to … Read more
Writing a WordPress plugin I had to dig around to figure out maintenance mode. That’s when visitors get this message. Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute. It’s easy to do from plugin or theme code. To enter maintenance mode Write a file named .maintenance into your document root with something like … Read more