This week, I’m going to walk you through setting up WP-CLI’s dist-archive so you can easily zip up new versions of your plugin. Over the last year, I’ve built a handful of plugins that need to be run through manual testing before new versions are officially released. Typically I would manually “right-click” and “compress” the folder on my […]
SWPD #004: Effectively Planning New Development
In this issue, I’m going to explain why planning should always be your first step when working on a new plugin or feature. When you start a new plugin or feature, planning will save you a tremendous amount of time. Some of the worst mistakes of my career can be attributed to how much time […]
SWPD #003: Setting up a local development environment with Lando
Recently, I’ve been working with a new tool for local WordPress development called Lando. Running WordPress on your local machine is essential to being a productive plugin developer. Your computer provides all the tools you need to develop, debug, and test out your plugin efficiently. However, there are so many different ways to set up […]
SWPD#002: Improve Your Code Quality With Static Analysis
In this week’s issue, I’m going to explain why you should be using static analysis in your development process. Static Analysis is a process of evaluating code without actually running it. It scans code for bugs that could easily be missed by peer code reviews or other manual checks. With static analysis, you can catch […]
SWPD#001: How to add a Github Action to your WordPress plugin
In this issue, I’m going to walk you through adding a Github Action to your WordPress Plugin. Github actions are tools to help you automate parts of your development process. Actions help automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on more important development. Unfortunately, a lot of plugin developers don’t know how to automate the […]
Is Too Many Plugins Harmful For a WordPress Site?
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about plugins and how they can be as simple or as complex as you want. If you need to change one specific aspect about your WordPress’ theme, you might create a single file with a handful of lines in it. There are also plugins that create an entire application […]
How to Rebase Git Branch Onto Another Parent Branch
We had a long running feature that I originally branched off of for a new feature. When I finished, I realized I needed it before our long running feature would be done. Since it didn’t have any code changes that were dependent on our big feature, I thought it would be easy to just rebase […]
Selective SQL Exports with WP-CLI
Sometimes you need to perform a selective SQL export of rows in a database table. Recently, I found out that you can pass extra arguments to the mysqldump command through wp-cli. Taking a closer look at the wp-cli documentation shows that you can use –<field>=<value> to narrow your query. For example, you can use the […]
Custom Post Type Naming
Today I was working on a new version of a site when I noticed that I had changed how I named a custom post type. It triggered me into figuring out the best practices for naming custom post types. After some quick research from a couple of sites, I came to a conclusion. Custom Post […]
Software Versioning and WordPress
There are several ways software maintains version numbers, but in WordPress, plugins & core typically follow Semantic Versioning. This is where 3 different numbers explain the current version of software: Semantic versioning has very detailed rules when changing each of those 3 numbers. MAJOR – Non-backwards Compatible API Changes This number should change any time […]