Category: Development

The Basics of Developing Accessible Websites

Imagine not being allowed to buy a gallon of milk because you’re color blind. What a ridiculous scenario right!? But the reality is: Grocery stores don’t discriminate against those with disabilities…but your website (probably) does. The reality is that there are millions and millions of...

Handling AJAX in WordPress in Style

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) isn’t something that should be feared by anyone. It’s insanely powerful, versatile, and can provide your users cool experiences like processing forms without page redirection, dynamically loading posts while a user scrolls the page, and much more....

A Beginner’s Guide to the Best Command Line Tools

As someone who loves the command line, I’m always striving to make my workflow easier, more efficient, and just overall better. Hopefully, by walking through my set up and my recommendations for the best command line tools, you’ll find some nifty tips...

CMB2 WordPress Plugin: What is it good for? Absolutely everything!

What happened to Custom Metaboxes and Fields for WordPress? Is this an actual plugin? Do I need to use CMB2 instead? These are a few of the types of questions I get asked when talking about CMB2. I agree–it IS confusing! With...

Call for Beta Testers: Custom Post Type UI 0.9.0 Beta 1

Custom Post Type UI has been around for the better part of five years and is one of WebDevStudios’ oldest plugins in the WordPress.org repo. It has amassed over 640,000 downloads and maintains a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Since its...

Getting started with Vagrant & VVV for local development

When I started doing web development, I think I started the way a lot of us did. You have a site you want to work on, so you connect with FTP, download a file, modify it, upload it back up, and then...

Removing PHP4 Compatibility in WordPress Custom Widgets

There I was. Working on adding PHP docblocks to widgets.php in /wp-includes, like you do, when I came across this: So I set about trying to figure out the appropriate @since parameter to use. Do I base the @since on when the...

Using Transients with WordPress to Cache All the Things!

Update 12/8/2014: I’m not going to tell you not to cache all the things. You should absolutely cache all the things. However Otto wrote up a convincing argument about why you shouldn’t cache all the things using transients in the comments. So,...

Debugging with Xdebug, VVV, and Sublime Text

ARE YOU READY TO TAKE YOUR DEBUGGING TO THE NEXT LEVEL?! ARE wp_die AND print_var JUST NOT CUTTING IT!? XDEBUG IS THE ANSWER! Xdebug is a PHP extension that provides advanced debugging capabilities such as breakpoints, watch expressions, and more in-depth error reporting.