Practical

No WordPress blog would be complete without an area for tutorials and practical tips to hang out. Check out our tutorials and get your hands dirty with WordPress.

WordPress wp-cli Kung-Fu Made Simple

26 September 2013 by Nuno Morgadinho

With every new site or project, there comes a new WordPress install, and a few steps are needed before you can start to work. They usually involve one or more of the following:

download / update WordPress
create a new database and database user
set up Apache vhost
set up vhost url on system hosts file
install your favorite plugins
install a theme

This is a fairly simple process, which takes up a few minutes every time you start on a new project. However, since I like to automate things to decrease the chance of screwing up, and saving time, I’ve started to play around to see if I could somehow streamline this process. [Read more…] about WordPress wp-cli Kung-Fu Made Simple

WordPress Rewrite Rules, Human Made Core Style!

21 January 2013 by Joe Hoyle

The WordPress rewrite system is an area many people struggle with when starting out. People not familiar with rewrite systems don’t necessarily understand what role they play and often developers who are used to using rewrite systems find WordPress’s implementation somewhat clunky.

When working on relatively complex WordPress projects, which have multiple custom taxonomies and combinations of post types, custom rewrite rules are likely to be needed. [Read more…] about WordPress Rewrite Rules, Human Made Core Style!

Debugging Tips for WordPress

16 November 2012 by Mario Peshev

Recently I’ve had several discussions with colleagues asking me for the debugging practices that I use. I try to constantly enhance my workflow, resources and improve the quality of my work by speeding up the process of narrowing down the possible reasons for a bug or a feature limitation. Speaking WordPress-wise, I’ll list a couple of things that I consider important. Some of them are more than obvious, but somehow people misuse them or forget about them at a moment of crisis (so to speak).

Before you start: always do backups. Debug your web application locally, test properly and ensure that everything is on set before deploying to the real server. Best practices teach that a local server -> staging/dev server -> production server is a good setup to prevent the obvious error of hitting the live website.

WordPress in Your Audience’s Language: Why?

6 July 2012 by Milan Dinič

In today’s software, the default language is usually English, which in turn encourages people outside English speaking countries to start using that software as-is, even when localized versions exist. They simply stick with the English version, since they themselves have grown used to it and the localized version ends up feeling “strange” to them. It comes as no surprise that this applies to WordPress as well. Many site administrators, even though English is not their native language nor do they publish in English, still use the default, English version.

However, a localized version of WordPress has a lot more than meets the eye, i.e. the translation of strings, such as local settings and formatting, a few of which I will present here:

Writing Plugins: Is It Always Worth It?

29 June 2012 by Rafael Poveda

Writing code can be boring sometimes, whether you need some new features, but don’t like them or the process itself has somehow become tedious. You cannot focus and you are at a dead-end. The only thing you want is to get this thing working and finish it already. Sometimes what you need to get done is so simple that two lines in your theme’s functions.php file would probably do the trick, and the code for the header of a plugin alone is 10 lines. Why bother coding a plugin at all?