WebDevStudios WordPress Website Design & Development Blog

Development

Visual Composer: Taming and Customizing a WordPress Page Builder

Options are great. It’s always a wonderful thing to have options. I think most of us likely grew up being told that having options was important–for instance, fallback options, or when Plan A falls apart. Sometimes, though, too many options can create...

A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Bash & Shell Scripts

Optimizing your development workflow is one of the most important things a developer can do. Being able to leverage your tools quickly and efficiently lets you spend your time working on actual development–instead of fighting your tools or doing boring, repetitive things....

Helpful Books for Front-End Developers

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” –Patti Smith There are many great pathways to glean new information out there, whether it be on the...

Welcome New Front-End Developer & Designer, Jo Murgel!

Another week, and another awesome dev joins the WDS team! Meet our newest front-end developer and designer, Jo Murgel. A little bit more about Jo: Jo Murgel comes from a design and illustration background. Upon graduation from Boise State University (go Broncos!)...

Unit Testing Your Plugins with Dockunit

I think we can all agree that unit testing is pretty neat. An automated system for checking if your code changes break any functionality is almost magic, and if you aren’t sure where to get started with it, you should read my previous...

Getting Started with Flexbox: First Impressions, Tips, & Tricks

Recently, here at WDS, we started incorporating Flexbox into our projects. I wanted to share some great resources I’ve come across to get going with Flexbox and highlight some of the early first impressions and some of the struggles you might encounter...

Another Two Devs Join the WDS Team: Meet Shannon and Carrie!

Shannon MacMillan Shannon’s illustrious web development career began in 2006 with a $100 online class in HTML/CSS, intended to supplement her (non-)income as an actor/theater director in NYC. She took the leap into WordPress a few years later (v. 2.8.2) and never...

What Are You Paying For When You Hire a Developer?

Usually folks hire someone else for a task for one of two reasons: They are either short on time or skill. In particular, when it comes to creative works like design, development, writing, marketing, et al., it means you’re also paying for a unique perspective...

The PHPStorm Debugger is Pretty Awesome

In a previous post, I wrote about how awesome PHPStorm is in the context of being a front-end developer. In this post, we are going to look at getting the PHPStorm debugger setup to work with Xdebug and then test it to...