Category: Development

Introduction to End-to-End Testing with Cypress.io

The topic of testing comes up often at WebDevStudios—whether we’re on-boarding a new project, or we’re digging out bugs on existing work, and even when we talk about our own internal tools. Testing is a common part of software development that often...

Beaver Builder Custom Fields

At WebDevStudios (WDS), we’ve used Beaver Builder for several projects because it provides a quick and intuitive way for our clients to customize their websites. The development documentation for Beaver Builder is pretty good, however it falls short in one particular area: custom...

Leaving Homestead: Finding the Best All-Around Local Development Environment

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about using Laravel Homestead as my local environment. At the time, my only real options were Vagrant or MAMP as an Apple user. Since then, the number of options has increased slightly to include...

The Journey to 1.0 — WDS Blocks and WordPress Gutenberg

WordPress made a big leap into the world of modern web development with its announcement of Gutenberg last year—reimagining what WordPress is and can be by providing a new interface for creating content built partially on the React.js platform. Since it will...

Google Chrome 63: Goodbye .dev, Hello .test

December 7 is a date which lives in infamy. Chrome 63 was officially released. Okay, so really the attack on Pearl Harbor is what is worth remembering about this date, but let’s talk about why the release of Chrome 63 is important to...

Rubber Ducking

One of my favorite things to do as a developer is rubber ducking with other devs. If you aren’t familiar with rubber ducking, the term comes from the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a dev would explain, line by line, their...

Fixing Things: Git Reset vs. Revert

Here at WebDevStudios (WDS) we use a GitFlow-like process during development. The branch and merge strategy allows for multiple developers to work on a multitude of various features concurrently. In practice, it allows us to have greater development speed and product stability with...

What Programming Language Should Aspiring Developers Learn First?

TL;DR? JavaScript is eating the world, often with PHP by its side. To give some background, my programming introductions went something like: 1986 – Logo on an Apple IIe 1994 – Programming on a Texas Instruments TI-81 graphing calculator 1995 – BASIC,...

Using Elasticsearch on Your Local Dev Environment

Using Elasticsearch (ES) on your site can help boost performance, especially with complex search setups. When using Elasticsearch on your local development environment, it can be tricky, because the names of indices are based on URL and can be the same as...