Sean D. Conklin

  • Local WordPress development via Homebrew

    August 2024 update: Switched the below from Apache and MariaDB to Nginx and MySQL to match SpinupWP setup. Here’s a follow-up to my March 2022 article on LocalWP power usage. LocalWP has gotten too slow and eats-up loads of precious storage space. Some sites won’t shut down. The ones that do shut down take time…

  • Avoid WooCommerce staging environments

    Over the years I’ve faced lots of problems with staging environments. A cure-all for me has been deleting them and using LocalWP for local sandbox environments. Plus it adds so many useful features! I’m inspired to write this post because to this day I hear technical support representatives ask to try something on staging, or…

  • WooCommerce multi-vendor setups

    On a few occasions I’ve heard of multiple shopping cart sub sites, sometimes powered by a WordPress Multisite Network that supports multiple WordPress sites within one via URI path, subdomain, or domain name. Examples of this include: business product lines, departments, or clients of a solution provider. Each sub site has some base requirements to…

  • Database Cleanup 2023

    I’m presenting again on WooCommerce and WordPress database cleanup. This time my presentation is for our WooCommerce and WordPress Meetup group event. I’ve previously covered this topic in my WordCamp Los Angeles 2020 presentation and I posted on it in my blog post Cleaning up your WooCommerce database. This is a popular topic with evolving…

  • Testing Custom Order Tables / HPOS

    Have you heard? 2023 is the year that High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) also-known-as Custom Order Tables (COT) becomes standard in WooCommerce. HPOS is opt-in based, but the core team has announced: “Orders will stop being synchronized to posts and postmeta tables in WooCommerce 8.0 in August 2023”. That sounds to me like our timeline for…

  • Discontinuing products in your store

    Products come and go while search engine caches remain. It’s a popular practice to switch a product’s status to draft (un-publish it) or delete a product when it has an undetermined status or has become permanently discontinued. Search engine caches, bookmarks, and overall “juice” for the product page can be be damaged when URLs get…

  • Emailing secure messages

    How many times have you received a text with a password, an encrypted spreadsheet file and a separate email containing the password (sitting in the same mailbox!), or an unprotected Google Sheet? There’s better solutions! Here’s some worth taking a look at: For heavier security have a look at asymmetric cryptography (like PGP) Apps or…

  • Blocks versus Page Builders

    Blocks came out in late 2018 initially for blog posts and page contents. The Block Editor project, originally named Gutenberg, has gradually expanded since. Starting January this year WordPress core introduced Block Themes (AKA Full Site Editing) where Blocks are used for templates, headers, footers, sidebars and more. That made 2022 a game changer because…

  • You’re running PHP 8 by now, right?

    WooCommerce had a little blip in this week’s release of version 7.1.0 where the PHP requirement was bumped to PHP 7.4 prematurely. They’ve fixed it, supporting PHP 7.2+ at the moment, but took the opportunity to issue a warning that PHP 7.4 is losing security support in just two weeks time. See PHP supported versions.…

  • Online store Maintenance Agreement

    I’ve adopted a new Maintenance Agreement. This came about following several occasions where I suddenly found new Administrators and plugins on a site that I was maintaining. It’s come mostly from clients I hadn’t worked with for some time. Still, surprise! I understand the reasons folks have for introducing new parties to help out. To…

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