Tag: WordPress

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 […]

Talks

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 […]

Code

13 years of contributing to WordPress

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

General

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 […]

Code

Five common WordPress patterns I avoid

I write quite opinionated front-end code. It’s one of the advantages of working in the industry for around twenty years, I know what does and doesn’t work. Working in a rapidly developing industry long term has taught me to be open-minded too, to listen to new ideas and to be prepared to adapt them. I’ve […]

Code

Preparing for WordPress 4.4 comment form changes

As detailed on the Make WordPress blog, the order of comment fields will change in WordPress 4.4, scheduled for a December 2015 release. This may affect your theme if the comment form doesn’t use the typical layout of one field above the other. Preparing your theme for the release of WordPress 4.4 will require your CSS […]

Code

WordPress 4.2.3 and the benefit of time

WordPress 4.2.3 has reminded me why being conservative with enhancements is a good thing. If a bug is committed, you lose the benefit of time to fix it. WordPress 4.2.3 has broken some sites using shortcodes in HTML tag attributes. As part of a security fix, certain ways of doing this are no longer possible.

Code

WordCamp Brisbane

I had the pleasure of speaking at WordCamp Brisbane recently. The video and my slides are below, following the slides are links to the resources mentioned in my talk.

Talks

Plugin dependencies in WordPress, a user’s perspective

Ryan McCue has started a discussion around plugin dependencies in WordPress, Gary Pendergast has responded. Ryan thinks it needs to be solved, Gary doesn’t – but if he did, would solve it a different way. As a user, I don’t want to be exposed to security issues in orphaned code. Each of them go into some technical details, […]

Code

Intuition is ?

Complaining about WordPress 4.2’s inline Emoji script is to complain about the biggest front end performance gain of the feature. You see, that tiny script does two things: check if your visitors browser supports Emoji, and, asynchronously load the JavaScript to polyfill Emoji if the visitor’s browser requires it.

Code