WordPress

  • Presentation: WooCommerce Product Landing Pages

    On November 9th, 2024 presented on the topic of WooCommerce Product Landing Pages at WordPress Santa Clarita Valley Meetup. We had a great turnout with a hybrid setup, taking questions from audience members physically present and over Zoom. Here’s the event description and slides: He’ll talk about best practice design and where this concept of…

  • 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…

  • Fixing Jetpack Contact Form SPAM

    We have so many contact form plugins within the WordPress community. We also have several CAPTCHA systems available for these plugins, usually via Google reCaptcha or Cloudflare Turnstile. It’s all a lot to take in, and these plugins and services can add a lot of weight to a small site. Sometimes I prefer to use…

  • Jetpack CRM implementation

    I recently migrated into Jetpack CRM free edition (no premium add-ons used). This is a great free plugin with significant premium add-on capabilities, supported by the same company as WordPress.com and WooCommerce.com Here’s my experience with it so far: I like how the admin menu offers regular main menu item mode versus individual main items…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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 –…

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