The Best Resources for Learning WordPress Development

Once you decide to learn WordPress development, the first thing you’ll be faced with is selecting a learning resource. There are lots of one-off lessons, courses, books, boot camps, etc. But how do you know which are up-to-date, what is worth your time, and what is user versus developer-focused? The resources below are ones that… Read More

Customizing WordPress Post States

What are WordPress post states? Post states are essentially just labels that show next to the title of a post or page in the WordPress admin post or page list view. As you can see below, WordPress uses these labels to highlight certain pages or types of content. If you have set a static homepage… Read More

How to Hide a Plugin from the Installed Plugins List in WordPress

When is it OK to Hide Plugins? You probably don’t want to make hiding plugins from users a regular occurrence, however, it can make a lot of sense when trying to provide a curated WordPress experience. For example, let’s say you’ve created a platform where your clients get a turnkey website that allows their restaurant… Read More

How to Run a Quick Security Check Using WP-CLI

WP-CLI lets you verify the integrity of WordPress core files as well as plugins. This means that if a file was tampered with, WP-CLI can tell you. It also will detect files that exist within WordPress core or a plugin that shouldn’t be there. While this type of check isn’t going to be as thorough… Read More

Increasing the Max Results Returned from the WordPress REST API

Generally, the defaults associated with WordPress REST API responses are very reasonable. Case in point, there aren’t many situations where you would really need to get more than 100 results in a single API response. Pagination is supported, so in most cases loading more results is simply a matter of making an additional request. Sometimes… Read More

Shortcode Scrubber Plugin Released

The Shortcode Scrubber plugin is a powerful tool for confidently managing plugins and themes that use shortcodes. Most commonly, a site owner or web professional may want to remove a plugin from a site. Unfortunately, shortcodes are a bit of a hidden feature and disabling a plugin could potentially cause shortcodes in a hidden corner… Read More

Do I Need to Learn React to Build Gutenberg Blocks?

The question of the day is: Do I need to learn React in order to build a Gutenberg block? The short answer is no. You don’t need to know anything about React to build a Gutenberg block. The reason why is because WordPress has done a great job of abstracting away React and the foundational… Read More

Surfacing Gutenberg Blocks in the WordPress REST API

Gutenberg

The beauty of Gutenberg is that the HTML content is more structured and semantic while also simplifying the user experience. All of the data is stored in the post content, which is also great because we don’t have to request a bunch of post meta to render the page. On the other hand, if nothing… Read More

WordPress and the Open-Closed Principle

Rusty Open Sign

Oftentimes we think of the SOLID principles of object-oriented programming as just that: object-oriented programming principles. However, we are going to take a closer look at the second principle, the open-closed principle, and see how it applies to WordPress. You are probably thinking, “WordPress isn’t really object-oriented”… and you’d be mostly right. Much of WordPress is… Read More

Advice for New Programmers

Learning to Code

I’ve been a programmer for just over a decade now and have always shared and taught others as I’ve learned. However, much of that information has never really been documented except in the form of videos from talks at conferences. I want to take some time to offer a few tips to those who are… Read More