How can I improve my freelance business? That’s a question many in the WordPress community are asking themselves. According to the WP Engine WordPress industry survey 2016, freelancers make up the largest single group working with WordPress. And why wouldn’t they? One of the reasons for the success of the platform is that it has enabled countless individuals to go into business for themselves. From web design and development to marketing and content creation – the employment possibilities in the WordPress sphere are countless. And that doesn’t even take into account the many companies selling themes, plugins, and other products. […]

Breadcrumbs are an often overlooked, yet valuable form of website navigation. They help users establish where they are on your site, and can even offer a potential improvement to the way your content appears in search engines. Adding breadcrumbs to your site used to be a long, manual process for each HTML page. Thankfully, WordPress makes adding them in quite simple. In fact, there are several options available to you, depending on how customized you’d like your breadcrumbs to be. Because it’s so simple and quick, there’s no excuse not to get started. In this article, we’ll explain the benefits […]

Even the most experienced developer is faced with the inevitable challenge of adding an unexpected element to a design that’s already been scoped out and started. The pressure adds on when there’s little time remaining until launch, no additional budget, and a maxed out schedule that can’t handle much more work. Here is how you can deal with scope creep. Types & Causes of Scope Creep Technopedia provides one of the simplest definitions of scope creep, saying that it “refers to a project that has seen its original goals expand while it’s in progress.” The term also refers to the […]

In my last article for Torque, I talked about the advantages of using a container in your WordPress plugin or app. I walked through the process of designing a container from scratch to manage three classes Twitter – Feed, Account, and Client. This week I’m going to go over very similar concepts, but I will talk more about structuring a plugin around the container. Also, we will use Pimple – an excellent, and fairly standard composer package — for the container instead of rolling our own. A Look At What We Are Improving Here is where we left off last […]

Today we are talking about a topic that, frankly, I am a bit on the fence about: web push notifications. Why am I skeptical? Well, to be honest at least on my phone I switch them off as much as I can and rarely enable them inside apps. For that reason, if a website asks to send me push notifications (as happens more frequently lately), I am immediately taken aback. For me, that comes close to a site that has popup overload. However, push notifications are definitely making a push (see what I did there?) around the web. Some big […]

It is the era of speed and WordPress! You will agree that no one likes a slow site. A visitor will never spend more than three seconds on a site, if it loads with the speed of a turtle gallop. The search engine giant, Google, ranks sites loaded under two seconds in its search engine results pages (SERPs) and WordPress powers of more than 28 percent of the entire web. There are a number of techniques to speed up a WordPress site and one of them is cache. Every time a visitor visits a site, browser sends a request to […]

In this article, the first in a series, I will introduce the concept of a container and show you how to build and implement a very simple, but limited container. This article illustrates the concept using a singleton, which is not optimal but is simple. Note, this example code will start with using a singleton. I know this isn’t the best practice but it will make it easy to teach about containers. In the end, I will remove the singleton pattern from the container class as a way of explaining the true problem with singletons. Getting Started With Containers Think […]

At last year’s State of the Word speech, Matt Mullenweg announced there had been 115 WordCamps in 41 countries and 3,193 held across 58 in 2016. Those are staggering numbers and point to the reason people love WordPress so much, the community. While the CMS powers almost 29 percent of the web, the thing that makes it special is the relationships forged around the world. In December, thousands will descend upon Nashville to attend WordCamp US. This year, organizers created the Community Bazaar to celebrate WordPress communities from all over the world. The setup will be similar to the sponsorship […]

Whether people are saving a PDF format or printing out pieces of paper, visitors sometimes want to have a permanent version of your content (especially if you are posting evergreen articles). Unfortunately, most default website styles don’t translate well to the printer. Optimizing your WordPress website for printer-friendly design is a subtle, yet powerful way to go the extra mile for your visitors. This not only impacts physical printouts but downloadable PDFs as well. In other words, you can offer beautiful PDFs on demand and even encourage the reader to download your articles for safekeeping. In this article, we’ll show […]

As WordPress has matured, more people are using it as an application platform. As we move towards Matt Mullenweg’s vision of WordPress as the open source OS of the web I think it’s important to question some of our conceptions of the way we tend to use WordPress. Traditionally a WordPress site is executed as a single monolithic unit. This is counter to a growing trend in web development towards microservices — many small single-purpose applications configured to act as one unit. For example, consider static HTML caching. If you are following the monolithic approach you would add a plugin […]