This week, I had a client send me a bug that only appeared in iOS Safari. As much as I’d love to say “tell your visitors not to use iOS Safari,” it’s definitely a popular enough way to browse the web to merit fixing the bug.

The issue is that I don’t have ready access to an iPhone when my wife’s not home—and even then, I have no idea how to inspect things in iOS Safari to see what’s actually going on. What to do?

So I started searching browser-based emulators of mobile devices, and was surprised to learn that there’s basically nothing out there that’s very good, at least that I could find.

What I finally found is Ripple. It isn’t perfect, but it could at least reproduce the iPhone Safari bug. It’s free, as well, and sits nicely in a little Chrome extension that you can toggle on and off at any point. Worth a look anytime you run into mobile-device browser compatibility issues.

WordPress made easy, as a service – a fascinating product.

This is interesting from a product point of view: this “All in One WordPress Website Builder” came to my attention last week but seems to have been around for at least. It’s essentially “easy-to-use hosted WordPress as a service” (ETUHWAAS for short, which I’m sure will catch on).

You get Google Cloud powered hosting with Elementor and a bunch of plugins for anything between $10 and $100/month. This has a nice dashboard which has a WordPress installer, which presumably bundles a bunch of plugins. It’s not clear if you get the standard WordPress Dashboard or a simplified version, but everything else is “builder-ified”.

This is very much aimed at the mass market and “x million small businesses without a website” we hear about, and it’s interesting that its main selling point can be “WordPress is hard to use”, and that – as they’ve been around for over a year – that more or less by itself is a value proposition which stands up in the marketplace.

It’s also interesting how this is pieced together: you get a bunch of plugins bundled and the sales pitch leverages how many installs and reviews these plugins have as social proof for why their product is good. And yet, their bundled eCommerce solution is a plugin with only 1,000 active installs. It may well be a great plugin, but it’s curious such specific solutions are being chosen.

If you’re interested in products the execution of this is fascinating.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Businesses big and small, and doing great WordPress work

Rich has been doing some of the most exciting and innovative work around Gutenberg, and recently had his theme shop ThemeBeans, and Gutenberg project CoBlocks (plus others) acquired with him joining GoDaddy as a Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience.

I had the pleasure of working with Rich on CoBlocks, and I was very very impressed with him. Rich is has superb vision for the future of WordPress and the web, and this interview on Post Status treads a nice line between Rich’s future working on WordPress at a bigger scale at GoDaddy, and his past experience running multiple successful WordPress businesses:

All of which is a way of saying when Rich gives advice like this, he has “skin in the game” in having done it. Well worth a read, and well worth keeping an eye on GoDaddy’s WordPress experience in the near future.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

I know, you know: “not very realistic” is the knock against hacking in the movies. It’s like an old joke for people in the know.

Mostly this is for simple reasons: watching a person write code in a realistic way is way too boring for television and movies. It’s just a lot of silence, some random exclamations of disbelief or cursing, and then and exclamation of excitement that “IT worked!” Not the most compelling pitch I’ve ever heard. Any way, I just thought this was a fun an interesting little diversion relevant to the topic of WordPress security, that I’ve been focusing on for a while. And it’s pretty cool that it turns out that some of the sequences the video highlights actually merit “pretty realistic” explanations. Anyway, without further ado, get to watching:

This week I’m running a (my first ever) fundraiser for a non-profit where I do a lot of volunteer work, Code for Fort Collins. And I figured it make sense to share it pretty widely. And that may as well include right here on WPShout.

If you don’t live in Fort Collins (I know most of our readers don’t; it’s a single mid-size city in the middle of the USA), you might want to check out either the rest of the Code for America Brigade Network or the Code for All set of such organizations around the world. The hashtag #CivicTech is the meeting point for a lot of people around the world who want to make their community and country better by using technical skill to do good. Think of it like the WordPress do_action events, but without the WordPress focus.

Anyway, back to my specific pitch: Code for Fort Collins has done a lot of good things in the community, but it could do even more with a few hundred dollars in working capital. So that we can entice new volunteers to meeting with pizza, pay for some basic server costs, and a few other such things. We have realistically modest goals for our relatively small scale. Anyway, I wrote up a fuller pitch (plus a party invitation that truly makes sense only if you live near Fort Collins) on the Code for Fort Collins blog.

While yesterday’s story about security was just about common *WordPress* security issues, today I want to share a cool site that helps you more with overall personal security planning. It’s got one of those cutesy URLs: SecurityCheckli.st. But other than that, there’s a lot to recommend the site. Primarily: it lists all the tools you should know about if you’re trying to be holistically security conscious in all areas of your life. And they’re all presented in a clear context with a simple and elegant design.

Like my recommendation from yesterday’s article about having a password manager. But SecurityChecklist lists not just the big three that come to my mind, but at least a few others I’ve never heard of. While I do think most people will be happier with 1Password, LastPass, or Dashlane, highlighting other options (and elegantly showing what computing platforms they support) is very cool and helpful.

Hat tip due to Post Status‘s email newsletter, where I found this one.

Akin to Fred’s thorough answer on “the best page builder for WordPress”, Ryan Sullivan recently published over on WP Site Care a thorough analysis of six of the biggest form plugins for WordPress. He goes in depth, and doesn’t leave out much I could think to have wanted compared. So if you’ve already got a favorite form plugin, and or want to know how your personal favorite compared, give it a look.

To not reveal any spoilers, I’ll pull for you his quick summary of the six he did compare:

1. Caldera Forms (Freemium) – Caldera Forms is an intuitive grid-based form builder with a free option and premium upgrades like their PDF add-on and backend services for more reliable email delivery.
2. Contact Form 7 (Free) – Contact Form 7 may be the original WordPress forms plugin and is extremely popular. It also has a library of add-ons available in the WordPress plugin directory.
3. Formidable Forms (Freemium) – Formidable is a fantastic free form builder with premium add-ons to take on advanced calculations and display beautiful reports based on form submission data.
4. Gravity Forms (Premium) – Gravity Forms is unique in that it’s always been a paid plugin. It has an extensive add-on library that streamlines integrations with third-party services and software.
5. Ninja Forms (Freemium) – Ninja Forms is a simple and streamlined forms builder with powerful options and a paid extension library to take its functionality even further.
6. WPForms (Freemium) – WPForms is touted as a “beginner-friendly” forms plugin that focuses on the user experience. It provides pre-made templates (additional template available with paid upgrade) and  has a marketing-focused approach to form creation.

It’s a funny time to be alive. We haven’t yet reached that part of the technology singularity where rogue nanorobot clouds disassemble us all into carbon dust (bad), or where we transfer our consciousness into massive sentient spaceships and colonize the stars (good?).

But we have reached that part of the singularity where if you Google something, it probably exists. And that’s pretty cool.

Case in point: Font Squirrel’s Matcherator, which can read what fonts an image file is using. All you do is upload any image, specify which part you’re looking at, and its AI gives you back what it believes are the closest-matching fonts.

I’ve used Matcherator to try to figure out a client’s logo typography, and it worked perfectly, returning the exact (somewhat obscure) premium font that the previous designer had used. Highly recommended for any image carrying a mystery font.

An important post from Carole Olinger.

Carole wrote on Twitter this was a difficult post to write, and I’m not surprised: this covers a number of themes, including Carole’s attempts to improve the diversity of the WordCamp Europe organising team last year. She was told:

“[My application to create an Awareness team were rejected as] my passion and performances from the past two years were remarkable and exceptional but that it could make other people around me feel uncomfortable and that might make me not the best fit for a team… Also, I truly wonder if I would have been told the exact same reasons if I was not a woman but a man?”

Carole then goes on:

“I truly wish my situation would just have been an isolated case. But neither was I the only woman to be rejected or removed for very dubious reasons from the WCEU organizer team nor was I the only person whose contributions have been treated with a lack of respect inside the WordPress project in general: in the months following my rejection, other people got either eliminated or urged to resign from different projects on different levels. Others have been continuously ignored and their efforts belittled. Several people had to take a tough decision by stepping back from projects very close to their hearts for the sake of their own mental health.”

This is not the first example of women in the WordPress community stepping back, and it’s something we need to urgently work on.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

If you’re neither worried about PHP internals nor PHP 8, skip this.

If you’re a fellow nerd, this is pretty cool. First JIT compilers (which stands for “just in time”) are just a cool idea. Rather than up-front optimization, you get to do it as it’s necessary. But that they’re coming to PHP 8 isn’t the only news. It’s awesome that PHP will get a JIT in PHP 8 means that we can expect that server-side language of WordPress (which has already been steadily getting faster for the last 5 years), will get better. Pretty great!

But the post I’m linking to is more than an announcement abput the future of PHP. It’s also a smart “stuff you should know” article by someone who knows, Joe “Krakjoe” Watkins who has been doing PHP internal stuff for years. Here’s my favorite of his clarifying points:

Will the JIT make my website faster ?

In all probability, not significantly.

Maybe not the answer you were expecting: In the general case, applications written in PHP are I/O bound, and JIT works best on CPU bound code.

Not many people review WordPress plugins, and that’s not too surprising.

This is pretty interesting, if slightly annoyingly written, research on the review to install ration of popular WordPress plugins. The average ratio of active installs to reviews on WordPress.org is 0.2%, which is low. Basically all WordPress plugin users don’t review plugins.

Yet, these reviews are important! Users use them to make decisions about whether or not to install a plugin, and I know of a lot of plugin authors who, anecdotally, obsess about how many five star reviews they have.

This shouldn’t be surprising: most internet users consume rather than create; you hear a similar thing elsewhere on the internet: 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half the site’s edits. We’re seeing that, except with plugin reviews.

It is noteworthy how big a difference there is between individual plugins: Yoast SEO, for example, has a 0.5% ratio, which is more than double Wordfence’s 0.2%. Clearly something makes a difference, and presumably it’s as much to do with asking people for reviews as it is to do with the product itself.

Also – shout-out to WP Staging, who have a record-breaking three percent review ratio! People really like that plugin! That’s vastly higher than most – I, for one, will be looking to see how they do it.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Next Thursday, I’m giving a talk at SiteLock. If you’re a person who has thought about learning how to develop WordPress themes for a while and never really gotten around to it, this is the perfect talk for you. We’ll cover things that make the whole of WordPress theming make sense. The idea is that we’ll essentially cover the prerequisites so that you’ll be better able to make sense of the next steps and maybe ever dive right in.

So we’ll give a whirlwind tour of WordPress programming languages, the loop in WordPress, the template hierarchy, and WordPress child themes. It’ll be fun. See you then!

Large, collaboratively-created systems almost always contain pitfalls: misleading bits that don’t work the way they should. When someone thinks of these pitfall-prone systems, the English language, with all its/it’s inconsistencies, often comes to his/her/his or her/their/there/they’re mind.

WordPress is another example. One pitfall in WordPress is the process of creating a custom post type that is hierarchical: able to be organized into parent and child posts. (“Caramel Popcorn: Main Review” could be a parent Review post, for example, and “Popcorn: Taste In-Depth” and “Popcorn: A Deep Dive on Texture” could be child posts.)

The crux of the pitfall is that you need to register two properties to properly create a hierarchical post type. From the linked article:

To make a hierarchical custom post type, you have to have the ‘page-attributes‘ set in the ‘supports‘ array and the ‘hierarchical‘ flag set to true.

Please read the full linked article for details. It helped me out of a tight spot on a project where I needed to register CPTs by hand (rather than with a plugin like CPT UI). Much appreciated!

Focus for longer, and understand the cost of admin work.

Long-time readers will know Cal Newport’s books and ideas are a favourite of mine – especially his “Deep Work” philosophy. This post combines Deep Work with some of the themes from Cal’s new book on Digital Minimalism, and he argues that admin work, and email in particular, is stopping leading academics from doing the work they’re best at, and having the creative breakthroughs that their predecessors have enjoyed.

This post specifically is applied to Cal’s “home” field of academia, but there are plenty of ideas which can apply to the WordPress world. The primary item is understanding the impact of any work which isn’t whatever you’re the very best at, how this interrupts your ability to focus for sustained periods, and what the opportunity cost of this is.

Slack comes to mind immediately; it’s an integral part of making WordPress, but it also demands our attention, all the time. Perhaps we need to create boundaries, and urgently get much better at doing so.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.