As most people in the community know, over the last few months things have pretty much gone to shit in WordPress-land. Every time you think it can't get any worse, it somehow manages to. WP Engine won their preliminary injunction against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, which meant that about a week ago, the status quo was mostly put back in place - that meant, amongst other things, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was returned to its rightful owner, WP Engine, and the loyalty checkbox on WordPress.org was removed (and then strangely replaced with a pineapple on pizza pledge box instead). Most ...

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my WordPress installation to see how difficult it would be to actually use a different API endpoint entirely instead of the default WordPress.org site. As others have pointed out, there are roughly 1,500 hard-coded WordPress.org links throughout the code, pointing to various API endpoints and reference documentation. What I discovered is, despite what some people are parading online, that there is no real easy way via the code to swap out the API entirely. In fact, the HTTP API within WordPress is probably one of the least useful APIs in terms of being able to ...

I posted the other day about how, after 18 years of WordPress, I finally migrated this blog to another framework. While I started evaluating various popular frameworks like Astro and Hugo, I had some initial problems handling the type of content I had added to my website over time. Eighteen years is a long time to be writing, and WordPress itself changed quite a bit over that period of time. For example, much of my older content has various short codes intermixed within it, which doesn’t really translate well to a new system. Considering I have a bit of time on my hands while I visit some ...

I was recently attending WordCamp Europe near Amsterdam, and met Vladimir from ManageWP. I’ve heard lots about ManageWP over the last year or so, and even helped do an integration with WPtouch Pro to make it work with their system. But I’ve never actually sat down and spent any time with their system, and decided it was time to sign-up for an account, do a bit of exploring and write a basic ManageWP review to let people know what the service is all about. ManageWP is a service that basically helps you manage multiple WordPress websites, all from their own proprietary dashboard. As anyone who ...

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And ...

I’ve been trying to track where exactly people go when they leave my website for a few pages recently, and wrote some code based on a few other examples on the Internet. Basically this bit of Javascript will force Google Analytics to log a special request so that you can see where the user went. It uses jQuery, so you have to make sure you have that included in your theme. Here’s some code that will let you track outbound links on your WordPress website. jQuery( 'a' ).on( 'click',function( e ) { var url = jQuery( this ).attr( 'href' ); var customName = jQuery( this ).attr( 'data-link-name' ...

I’ve recently been optimizing a few different WordPress websites, and wanted to share with everyone some of the easy ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some of these tips are intended for server administrators and assume that you have root access to your server and/or cPanel/WHM (if you’re using cPanel). Other tips are intended for any WordPress website administrator. This article has 5 different tips for how to speed up your WordPress website. If you currently don’t have a WordPress website but are considering setting one up, here is information on how to setup a WordPress blog. Install ...

Two days ago we finally pulled the veil off of WPtouch Pro 3.0, the mobile plugin for WordPress, which is a fairly substantial update to WPtouch Pro. Most of my family and friends know just how hard we’ve been working on it over the last few months, and especially these last few weeks. Last night we had a little party with a few employees and some company friends, and today most of us finally get to relax a little. The amount of effort we put into this launch we basically an order of magnitude larger than the one we did almost three years ago. As if it wasn’t hard enough launching just a ...

Update: Here are the slides from the presentation – enjoy! I’m giving a talk in a few hours down at The Network Hub, and wanted to start a post here for some of the information. For those of you who can’t make it or are stuck on the waitlist, I’ll be talking about the following items: Creative Commons Licensing WordPress and Social Media Stats Plugin: Copyrighted Posts (Licensing Content) Plugin: Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share (Sharing) Plugin: ShareThis (Sharing) Plugin: Sociable (Sharing) Plugin: Flickr RSS (Flickr) Plugin: MudSlideShow (Flickr/Picassa) Post From Flickr to WordPress ...

Since some of the current readers are new to blogging, I thought I’d spend a bit of time explaining the whole concept of trackbacks. Trackbacks are sort of an automated form of commenting so that when a blog entry is referenced by another one, this is reflected in the comments of the original blog entry. For example, let’s say I write a blog entry here, and Clay comes along like the bigshot he is and wants to link to it from his blog. There are two ways he can do it. First, he can link to the actual blog entry itself, which at first seems like a good thing to do if you’re Clay. Unfortunately, ...