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  • WooSesh 2023 presentation on Block Theming

    Registration for WooSesh 2023 October 10th-12th is now open 🙂 This is a free three-day annual event operated by WP Sessions. It features excellent speakers and topics for WooCommerce Store Builders. Don’t miss this event if you work on or own a WooCommerce powered storefront. My presentation on Block Theming is scheduled to air at…

  • Beware of hosting company practices

    I had a troubling exchange with a hosting company yesterday that I feel is worth sharing. A new client with a smaller site has been paying ~$60 monthly for a 4GB (RAM) virtual private server. It’s large for her use (compared to the 2GB server that I run my own sites on). She pays for…

  • Cart and Checkout Blocks are going mainstream

    We have newer WooCommerce Cart and Checkout experiences powered by WordPress Blocks, AKA Gutenberg. These have been available for years via the WooCommerce Blocks beta plugin and were wrapped into WooCommerce core starting in version 6.9 from September 2022. Plugin compatibility has been consistently improving ever since. As-of the recently released WooCommerce 8.0 this is…

  • PHP 8.2 is rolling out now

    All sites should be running PHP 8.0+ by now given PHP 7.4 lifecycle ended late last year. PHP 8.0 will hit EOL later this year and sites should be upgrading at this time. PHP 8.1 was released in December 2021 and was succeeded by PHP 8.2 in December 2022. PHP 8.1 speeds-up WordPress 3.5% according…

  • Why you should update your Shopify theme

    Shopify’s process for updating a theme varies based on several circumstances: Tip: You can see which files were edited by clicking into the Theme Code Editor and looking for the dots next to the file names containing changes. It’s also a good idea to download the theme files and compare to the new theme using…

  • Onboarding WordPress VIP Go

    I recently helped migrate a client into WordPress.com VIP Go enterprise hosting. This hosting is for larger sites with hosting budgets starting around $25,000 per year. It’s an opinionated platform that applies perhaps the greatest degree of WordPress management available. Here’s notes I took on the process: For more details on WordPress VIP, see their…

  • Hear me chat with fellow developers Zack Stepek and Carl Alexander on today’s (6/6/2023) Do The Woo Podcast episode! We covered a large gamut of WooCommerce development – from plugins to the full site editor, blocks, performance, staging, AI and more. Click the button to open the episode on the Do The Woo website. There’s…

  • After careful consideration, I’ve decided to join the Shopify Partner Program and start working on proprietary Shopify powered sites as well as continuing to work on open-source WordPress + WooCommerce powered sites. Recent statistics from BuiltWith indicate that Shopify leads greatly over WooCommerce Checkout, particularly in the United States market. Information I hear from colleagues…

  • Local WordPress development via Homebrew

    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 to save backups each time. Starting up sites takes much longer than it used to. It’s become a…

  • 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…

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