1. 2018

    Speed up the output by 1000x with a WordPress menu cache

    Generating the menus in WordPress is quite resource intensive. Sites with few visitors and few menu items might not notice this much. But if you have a large amount of menu items, like in a mega menu, in combination with a lot of visitors the menu generation can be a real hog on your server’s CPUs. Let’s see if we can improve the speed with a little WordPress menu cache trickery.

  2. 2017

    Customize the WordPress maintenance mode page

    Whenever you upgrade a plugin, theme or WordPress itself through the WordPress dashboard, WordPress will put itself in maintenance mode and all your visitors will see the maintenance mode notice “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

  3. 2017

    WordPress security for the casual blogger or small business with limited resources

    The resources you have available to spend on WordPress security for your website usually vary vastly whether you’re an international corporation or just a hobbyist blogger. But since most attacks are automated by bots looking for vulnerabilities, a lot of the threats are the same. Here are some WordPress security measures that bloggers and small business with limited resources easily can take.

  4. 2017

    Use mu-plugins for adding custom functionality to your WordPress site

    If you google “functions.php” you get about 7 million results. I bet most of them contain bad advice: “How to add functionality to your WordPress site”. Some of them continue even worse: “\[…\] without using a plugin”. For your own good, don’t edit functions.php to add custom functionality to your WordPress site. You can use mu-plugins to do that.

  5. 2017

    A reference of all outgoing WordPress emails

    As you may know, WordPress sends out email notifications from time to time. Actually, as of WordPress 4.8.1, there are 24 different occasions when WordPress will send an email message. Don’t you think it would be useful to have a reference of all outgoing WordPress emails?

  6. 2017

    The bus factor in the WordPress project

    During WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris, there was a Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg. I wanted to ask him a question, but due to high demand and restricted time, I never got to ask him. I guess Matt is a busy person, so I don’t expect him to actually answer this question himself. But maybe someone in the WordPress community has answers, insights or ideas? A person is the CEO of one of the most important WordPress-related companies.

  7. 2017

    Proper RFC 4122 UUIDs as GUIDs in WordPress

    UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifier), also known as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifier), is a string that identifies a piece of information in computer systems. WordPress use GUIDs to identify each individual post, but use URLs (kind of) for GUIDs, and thus does not follow the standard definition (RFC 4122) of a UUID (or GUID).

  8. 2017

    Six reasons why I love WordCamps

    This weekend I was at WordCamp Berlin, met a lot of great people, and watched a lot of interesting presentations. WordCamps are actually quite informal by themselves, but at the afterparties, people are really letting their shoulders down and it often seems like people are long-time personal friends. If you open up to it, it won’t take long until people will give you feedback on whatever you have released in public.

  9. 2017

    How to perform and mitigate a WordPress session donation attack

    WordPress doesn’t use a nonce for the login form, which opens up for you to perform a WordPress session donation attack.

  10. 2017

    Immutable assets with unique URLs in WordPress for enqueued JS and CSS files

    If you’re utilizing the browser cache correctly, you’ll gain huge performance benefits for your users, as well as save bandwidth and server capacity which equals to saving money. To do this right, you must create unique URLs for all versions of your resources, and tell them to never ask for the content again by telling the browsers that the assets are immutable resources.