WordPress translations are compiled from human-readable PO-files into machine optimized MO-files, but still takes a lot of overhead to load. If you only could cache the translation load time, you would save a lot of page load time. We can easily cut 90% of our WordPress translations loading time.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you, in your PHP project could define a package that makes sure that everybody who even tries to commit code is forced to follow the project’s defined coding standards? Yeah, me too. So I created this Composer plugin you can use in your projects.
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.
Recently DigitalOcean released new pricing plans where they basically doubled the RAM for the same price of the old plans. But to get the benefits for your existing droplets, you have to upgrade all of your existing droplets in a process that involves shutting them down, selecting the new plan, waiting for the upgrade to happen and power on the droplets again. I have tens of droplets and had no intention of doing this manually, so I wrote a script to use the DigitalOcean API to automate a mass-upgrade of all droplets.
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.”
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.
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.
Since I translate a lot of WordPress themes and plugins, I sometimes come across plugins who try to be clever with their translations. This tends to not work so well in reality.
I’ve been using, and advocating for others to use, Yoda conditions for a long time. Sometimes, I read or hear about someone who doesn’t like them, without actually describing why. From time to time I read a blog post that advocates against it: And it’s always the same reason.
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?