Sean D. Conklin

  • Hello Elementor. Goodbye bloated themes

    My favorite WordPress and WooCommerce theme nowadays is Hello Elementor. It’s more of a theme placeholder than a traditional theme really. Haven’t you heard? Themes are dying!

  • Importing into WooCommerce

    I recently imported over 100,000 orders for a client who was migrating into WooCommerce. This is a complex process as disparate systems are never easy to get in sync, even when doing a one time export/import operation. Here’s some findings that may help you with your next big data import project.

  • WordPress as a component system

    Remember component stereo systems? WordPress is a component system too. Or it’s supposed to be if you’re using it optimally. From sites I’ve inherited I’ve observed developers breaking this by: WordPress is best used as its core, hosting, theme, and plugin components. Add to that a thin layer of custom design code or business rules…

  • Storefront and WooCommerce Blocks

    Check out the WooCommerce Storefront theme and the new WooCommerce Blocks Cart and Checkout feature releasing within the week.

  • WordCamp LAX 2020 presentation

    Video on database cleanup, prune legacy plugin and theme cruft to free-up resources

  • Abandonment issues

    Theme and plugin abandonment is common. Themes and plugins need to be updated about monthly to reflect testing with latest core components, addressing community requests, fixing issues and developing new features. It takes a critical mass for the business side to work.

  • WordPress Santa Clarita presentation

    I’m presenting on the topic Database Cleanup at two events coming up. Everyone’s invited! The first venue will be WordPress Santa Clarita Valley Meetup the evening of Tuesday Sep 15th 7:00pm over Zoom. The second venue will be taking place mid October and will be announced soon…

  • WooCommerce maintenance

    Since WooCommerce is self hosted and self maintained software it has earned somewhat a reputation for ongoing maintenance. The degree of maintenance will vary widely. I strive to build WooCommerce powered sites to be as low maintenance as possible, but there is some maintenance responsibility. I often work on catch-up projects applying neglected maintenance and…

  • The Internet re-imagined

    Last week I enjoyed a webinar with partner company Pantheon by the same title covering strategies during the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. Pantheon is a provider of enterprise-grade developer-operations friendly managed WordPress hosting. Following are my notes.

  • Local WordPress development update

    Update: See my more recent post about LocalWP There’s myriad options for local WordPress development environments. Some are quite simple to set-up, usually connected to a paid hosting service that funds the local dev project. Some automatically install WordPress while others require manual installation into the web root htdocs plus database initialization. For Linux users…

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