maintenance

  • Why keep plugins up to date?

    I recently had another developer ask me why I work to keep plugins current, why I upgrade them. I realize it’s important to see that their question isn’t stupid, and the market out there, developers included, needs to know about software updates and why they matter. So here goes… Security & Bug fixes If you…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Video: WooCommerce simplified

    I recorded a video today for my YouTube channel. Check it out if you’re interested in WooCommerce basics.

  • Avoid WooCommerce template overrides

    There’s an irritating message we see whenever a site has modified WooCommerce template files and the WooCommerce plugin updates one or more minor versions. There can be one or more default WooCommerce template file(s) that had been copied into the child theme and the HTML code tailored for the design. It’s not unusual to see up…

  • Cleaning up your WooCommerce database

    There’s lots you can do to improve database (DB) performance, but each change comes with risks. Always thoroughly test changes in a development environment first before making permanent database changes in production. Growth in data requires a growth in hosting to handle the scale of database size and queries. There’s only so much you can…

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