Peter Wilson

Category: Blog

  • I’m speaking at Web Directions Enqueue

    I’m thrilled to be part of the line up for Web Directions Enqueue, co presented by The Code Company, on November 28, 2025. Enqueue is to be one of the first engineering focused WordPress conferences in Australia, and the line up includes some of the best engineering minds in WordPress today, including Jono Alderson, Tammie Lister, Isabel Brison, Cameron Jones and too many more to mention.

    I’ll be doing a deep dive into the performance improvements WordPress Contributors have added to the Query classes in recent years. 

    The WordPress Performance team was established in 2021 with the goal of improving the performance of WordPress Core. As a fundamental part of rendering each and every page of a WordPress site, the WP_Query class has received a lot of attention.

    In this talk, Peter will discuss how the performance of WP_Query and the WordPress Query component have been improved with increased caching, and how that can be taken full advantage of when building WordPress sites at scale.

    There will also be talks about integrating WordPress with LLMs, accessibility and developer workflows.

    Enqueue is taking place in Sydney on November 28, 2025 in the beautiful Dr Chau Chak Wing Building at UTS (the paper bag building). It will also be streamed via Conffab if you’re unable to make it in person.

  • Unit testing WordPress plugin headers

    WordPress plugins require a number of headers to be included in the plugin file for them to render correctly in the dashboard. If releasing a plugin on WordPress.org then a number of additional headers are required in the readme file.

    The problem I have is that I can never remember which header goes where. Each time I write a plugin, I have to spend time reading the docs and making sure everything is in the correct location.

    (more…)

  • 13 years of contributing to WordPress

    Billiards balls on a billiards table. In the foreground is a while ball showing the number 13.
    “13” by Alexander Makarov is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    Inspired by Jonathan’s contribution anniversary post of a few days ago, I decided to look up when I received my first props in WordPress.

    Coincidentally, I’m also a July props baby and received my first WordPress props thirteen years ago today, on July 11, 2011 (Australian time). It was for the second ticket I’d filed, #18018, and Andrew Nacin committed the patch I’d provided a few days later.

    (more…)

  • Type declarations with WordPress filters

    In a December blog post Juliette Reinders Folmer described the upgrade path to allow projects for supporting PHP 8 alongside older versions of PHP as a nightmare.

    Seeing it come up in my timeline again recently, I started thinking about the affects of type declarations on projects, especially those with a plugin architecture.

    (more…)

  • WordPress 5.6 released

    WordPress 5.6 “Simone” has now been released and is available for download.

    Nina Simone album cover: Silk and Soul

    For the first time, the release squad was made up entirely of people identifying as women or non-binary. In some corners of the internet this proved to be controversial.

    (more…)

  • This week I’m sick of it

    Swings and roundabouts but this week I am sick of it.

    • I’m sick of sanitising when I open the gate to our block of flats
    • I’m sick of sanitising as I grab a take-away coffee
    • I’m sick of sanitising as I enter the supermarket
    • I’m sick of going shopping at 7am to avoid people
    • I’m sick of doing the covid-shuffle as I pass strangers on the street
    • I’m sick of walking on grass or rocks to maintain my distance when walking along the shared path
    • I’m sick of Zoom
    • I’m sick of being excited to get on a Zoom
    • I’m sick of catching up with friends over Zoom instead of spending three hours talking shit in a restaurant
    • I’m sick of movies going straight to streaming because people need it right now
    • I’m sick of this fucking home office
    (more…)

  • Nick Cave’s stream is not the problem

    I don’t think the stream, per se, was the problem with the Nick Cave concert last night. It’s was a Vimeo embed, they know how to stream and devices optimise for video. It’s the page around it that @dicefm needs to fix.

    (more…)

  • Accessible photo tinting

    A very common pattern on the web is to overlay text on a photo. It’s a lovely effect but one that requires care to get right.

    The difficulty arrises for the web developer wishing to produce an accessible site because they can never be sure what the colour of the photo will be.

    (more…)

  • Using real cron for WordPress with WP CLI

    For WordPress site owners wishing to use real cron via a crontab job, it’s fairly common to see advice to use curl to request the site’s wp-cron.php file on a regular basis.

    In the days before the WordPress CLI (WP-CLI), using the wp-cron.php file was the only technique available to site owners wishing to use real cron events.

    (more…)

  • Accessibility is more than access for all

    I’m in London visiting friends for a couple of weeks and, predictably enough, took them to see West End production of Hamilton the Musical. Unfortunately one of my friend’s health has deteriorated over the last few years so queuing for entry to the theatre is a problem. We needed an access ticket.

    This doesn’t feel like an access ticket, it feels like a VIP ticket.

    (more…)