Category: Blog

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 […]

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 […]

I received my first WordPress props thirteen years ago today, on July 11, 2011. It was for the second ticket I’d filed.

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.

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

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 […]

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]