Are chatbots on the way out? Some seem to think so, declaring the concept a passing fad that never lived up to its potential. However, while it’s true that chatbots have seen a slump in popularity over the past few years, they’re not even close to going away. Given the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the popularity of automating ‘mundane’ tasks in general, many people have begun to rely heavily on algorithms to streamline their workflows. It comes as no surprise that a lot of developers dislike dealing with customer support, for example, so a chatbot can be a […]

Is there a WordPress plugin you can’t live without? An awesome tool that helps you promote your site or optimize images? Perhaps there’s an administrative plugin that’s saved you hours of work? Now is the time to say thanks! Torque’s Plugin Madness 2018 is taking nominations from now until March 1st. Nominate your favorite plugins by going to PluginMadness.com. Plugins will be divided into four categories: Marketing Maintenance Optimization eCommerce. We’ll take each of your top nominations and put them through a bracket-style competition throughout March until we’ve landed on the ultimate plugin! Voting in March is important, but if […]

Recently Matt Shaw from Delicious Brains published a post about a new library they created to help in one of their products. This library WP_Queue provides a Laravel-like Job management system for WordPress. A job queue is a system that allows you to schedule jobs to run in the future. We tend to use jobs for two reasons. First, we may need to wait awhile, like if we want to schedule a follow-up email in a week. The other reason is performance. Maybe we need to do something computationally expensive and don’t want the user to wait. A job manager […]

For some time, people who owned and ran WordPress websites thought of being mobile-friendly as more than an option than a necessity. That changed a couple of years ago when the mobile user population surpassed the number of desktop users. With the gap widening with each passing year, it would seem foolhardy for webmasters to stick with non-mobile friendliness. When mobile users come across a website that isn’t convenient to explore, they will bounce off to another without a second thought, and you will miss out on the conversions that are the main goal of the website in the first […]

Test-driven development (TDD) is a philosophy of software development that is based on writing tests before writing a feature or bug fix. This is a big difference in terms of how you think about development. I find it to be very hard to move to TDD, both because it’s a different mental model and because it’s hard to change how you approach a code base. Before TDD, I wrote code that should work, tested it manually in my browser to see why it didn’t work, fixed it and then wrote tests. With TDD, I write functions declarations and tests that […]

If you’ve done any work in web development so far, then chances are very good that you’ve heard of Bootstrap. Basically, Bootstrap is a popular CSS, HTML, and JS framework that is used for developing a fast and responsible mobile project on the web. Bootstrap can be divided into three primary files: 1. Bootstrap.css, 2. Bootstrap.js, and 3. Glyphicons (fonts).  jQuery, a very popular JavaScript library, is also required in order for Bootstrap to function. The primary reason behind Bootstrap’s high popularity is the fact that its templates are highly customizable. So long as you have some knowledge in regards […]

One of the largest multilingual plugins in WordPress, WPML, was breached this weekend when customers received an email claiming the plugin released sensitive information. The email encouraged customers to check their databases and passwords and not rely on the plugin’s customer service to fix the problem. FYI: someone hacked @wpml‘s website and sent this out to everyone pic.twitter.com/lMml23qUjD — Ben Word (@retlehs) January 19, 2019 A tweet sent out on Sunday claims the hacker was an ex-employee using a backdoor. It says the plugin itself wasn’t compromised but customers should change their account passwords. We’re very sorry to report that our […]

Which web host to choose is an important question for the majority of new site owners (not to mention some experienced ones). This is because there are so many to choose from, and many questions that need to be answered to find the best option. It can leave you looking to simple, yet restrictive solutions such as ‘site builder’ websites – and they’re not usually cut out for decidedly ‘pro’ use. Fortunately, self-hosted WordPress is easy to install, the hosting options are plentiful and powerful, and what’s more, you always control (and own) every aspect of your site. Even better, […]

So, you have an awesome WordPress website and you’re investing a lot in optimizing it for search engines. Yet, you’re not sure what strategies work or don’t work for you. This is where a content audit steps in. Yep, I know. This is definitely one of those words that send chills down every marketer’s spine. Even though this an extremely frustrating practice that may make you pull your hair out, it is still an integral part of your SEO strategy. It helps you assess the effectiveness of your tactics, identify and fix problems on time, and make wiser, data-oriented decisions […]

I recently wrote a series of posts on testing React apps and a series on using phpunit for testing WordPress plugins. Those covered testing brand new code and writing it in a way that is testable. One of the tricky things about adopting tests in a legacy code base is that the code is often written in a way that makes testing harder. In this article, I’m going to look at two ways that jQuery is hard to test. First I will show how to use mocks to artificially isolate your code from jQuery itself. Then I will give an […]