Technical tips

  • 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.…

  • WooCommerce Technical Growth Strategies

    Over time customers, order histories, and overall data will grow. Business conditions continually shift. Marketing experiments revolve and typically require new technical implementation to support, past ones to remove. How does one manage a growing website and keep it performing well, besides continually buying a bigger server? Following are some strategies to manage the growth…

  • Defining plugin classes

    During my plugin triage work I group plugins into different classes before digging deeper into the pros and cons of each. Whether a plugin is good or bad for a particular site depends on how necessary it is, how deeply it’s being utilized, whether there’s any preferred alternative, and how difficult it would be to…

  • Older Safari web browsers

    I’ve noticed a trend where several clients have forwarded to me trouble their users have faced using outdated versions of the Safari web browser. While it’s more typical to only support the latest version of popular web browsers that can normally be upgraded; there is meaningful traffic on the previous version of this browser –…

  • Tips on using LocalWP sandboxing

    LocalWP, known as Local and formerly Local by Flywheel, is a free, user-friendly and popular sandbox hosting environment for developing WordPress sites. Local sandboxes run directly on your workstations and are generally isolated to each machine as opposed to being available on the Internet. They also bundle useful features for site installation, migration, database administration,…

  • WordPress blocks, templates, and themes

    Full Site Editing (FSE) is here. This was just released for production with WordPress 5.9 yesterday, January 25, 2022. This follows earlier development and testing of this new core technology via the Gutenberg beta tester plugin and a variety of block based themes that made early inroads into the tech. With full-site editing now in…

  • It’s time to upgrade sites to PHP 8.0

    PHP 8.0 was released over a year ago. Version 8.1 released this past November. That’s right – most of us are behind on this one! PHP 8.0 is a significant change that improves performance with a just-in-time compiler. While there’s clear benefits to making this upgrade as soon as possible, the reality today is most…

  • eCommerce emergency preparedness

    I was chatting with a lawyer friend of mine recently and he suggested the topic of emergency preparedness and management as we approach one of the year’s busiest shopping seasons, BFCM. No doubt, lawyers typically deal with things after they have become serious. I concur this is a great topic and is timely especially for…

  • Who should have Administrator access?

    I often come across sites that have questionable WordPress administrator accounts. I work with clients to reduce this exposure. It’s dangerous offering full privilege accounts to anybody besides fully trusted and technically capable vendors and staff. Regular review is recommended since there tends to be shifts in staff and roles over time. Here’s why admin…

  • WooCommerce subscriptions for rentals

    We recently launched a project that utilizes WooCommerce Subscriptions, in particular variable subscriptions, to achieve rental management. This makes for an interesting use case of the official Subscriptions add-on. WooCommerce Subscriptions is a large application. It’s quite popular, reasonably well documented, affordable, and critical for businesses that rely upon recurring revenue and automation. Using this…

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