In the last 14 years, WordPress has grown into a fully flexible content management system. However, with that growth comes the need to add non-standard endpoints to our workflow. Because these endpoints aren’t covered by the theme template hierarchy, wp-admin, or the default notes of the WordPress REST API, they have to be created from scratch. In this article, I will cover common strategies for dealing with these situations such as adding custom rewrite rules, custom REST API endpoints to give an idea of the variety of methods that exist. Then I will look at how you can use the […]

In the immortal words of George Elliot, “Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions, they pass no criticism.” Having an animal to come home to or around your workplace can really improve your life. I wanted to know how the WordPress community embraced animals, so I asked several WordPressers in the community to share photos and stories of their own animals. The results were nothing short of adorable. Bob Dunn’s cat, Rochester “Rochester came into our lives about two years ago – we call him Chester for short. He’s a rescue cat (our 5th one over the years) that […]

The term Progressive Web App refers to a group of technologies, such as service workers, and push notifications, that can bring native-like performance and user experience to web apps. The term got coined back in 2015 by designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell. Some of the characteristics of PWAs are: Progressive – Work for every user, regardless of browser choice because they’re built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet. Responsive – Fit any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or forms yet to emerge. Connectivity independent – Service workers allow work offline, or on low-quality networks. App-like […]

This month, the city of love, Paris, had a couple thousand more tourists than usual. Yet, instead of the Eiffel Tower, Louvre or Champs-Élysées, these particular people headed to the Paris Docks in the North of the city, where WordCamp Europe 2017 was taking place. The fifth WordCamp Europe once again stole the crown as the biggest WordCamp ever, though WordCamp US will probably, once more, reclaim that title in December. For now, however, 1900 participants from 79 countries and more than 1000 people taking part in the live streams is nothing to scoff at. I was in attendance for […]

WordPress allows you to translate your sites, themes, plugins, and everything into any language whatsoever. It’s part of what makes it such a global and accessible CMS. To be able to translate WordPress sites, you as a developer need to write high-quality code to make your themes and plugins translatable. Today, I am going to talk about how to write WordPress code to help make it translatable via i18n and l10n. Not only this, but I have also prepared a boilerplate which you can use to auto generate .pot files for translation both via WP-POT CLI + NPM Scripts or Gulp. […]

At WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris, I had the opportunity to sit down with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg for an interview on feature-focused releases, The Gutenberg Editor, niche WordCamps, and more. During the 2016 State of the Word, Mullenweg announced the move away from scheduled releases, toward a feature-focused process, specifically focusing on three major areas: The Editor, The WordPress REST API, and The Customizer. By eliminating the pressure of a specific release date, WordPress can make more revolutionary changes to the software. The Editor, nicknamed Gutenberg, is a product of the new feature-focused process. The Gutenberg-focused release aims to […]

One of the many great uses for the WordPress REST API is improving your plugin or theme settings screens. Once you add custom REST API endpoints, getting saved settings via AJAX and saving it via AJAX — IE with no additional page loads — is simpler. Using the WordPress REST API instead of admin-ajax is not only more performant but also lets WordPress core do most of the heavy lifting in terms of sanitization and validation. In this article, we will walk through each of the steps to create a settings form page and process that form using the WordPress […]

Part of WordPress’ success stems from how easy it is for new developers to contribute to the platform. However, on this type of collaborative project it’s particularly important for coding styles to remain consistent. Without set guidelines, the code can quickly become unmanageable. The WordPress PHP coding standards emerged to help address this problem. Following these standards results in code that is easier for contributors to read, update, and manage. As an independent developer, learning standards like these will help you write stronger code as well. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the WordPress PHP coding standards and explain why […]

WordCamp Europe took place over the weekend in Paris, France. The global conference, which brought together 1,900 developers, designers, professionals and enthusiasts from 79 different countries all over the world, sheds light on the globalization of WordPress and highlights the diversity of the community. Sessions covered topics ranging from internationalization, to security, design, the open web, and beyond. Inclusivity and an idea to think global was a theme which echoed throughout the event. Several of the talks offered advice on how to be successful (and impactful) within an increasingly global online community. Online community basics Polyglots team lead Petya Raykovska kicked off […]

Many digital agencies are small businesses, building upon intimate relationships with each of their clients. Others are in pursuit of growth, either to be the creatives for Fortune 500 companies or to scale with volume. My company works with many different agencies as their development partner, and they all have in common the wish to be sustainable and profitable. It’s a tough market out there, and agencies face competition on many fronts. So how can a WordPress agency go from good to great? This article presents four strategies that can increase an agency’s profitability. From break-even to profitable – four […]