In-Depth WordPress Tutorials for Developers
Welcome to WPShout, a website about WordPress development.
Below, you'll find some of our favorite WordPress development tutorials, news, and resources.
Whether you're just getting started or need a specific WordPress coding tutorial, you'll find we tackle technical topics in an easy-to-understand, friendly way.
You'll find some of our favorite WordPress tutorials below, and new posts most weekdays. Oh, and we're Fred and David—we're the WordPress developers who run this site.
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Check out our most recently published WordPress development tutorials, thoughts and advice on working as a WordPress developer, and WordPress development news.
Is WordPress Object-Oriented? A Thorough Exploration
Other Recent Articles
Object-Oriented PHP for WordPress Developers
PHP for Beginners: Starting on Backend WordPress Development
Six Ways to Start 2019 Off Right in WordPress
Most Hosting Recommendations for WordPress Suck. Here’s Why.
Links and Quick Guides
Rubber Duck Debugging
Over on Thoughtful Code I recently covered the topic of “rubber duck debugging.” It’s a pretty simple procedure but one I love because it works surprisingly well. Here are the basic steps:
- Explain your (broken) code and its goals, generally. Don’t worry about details, just set the context for your duck.
- Line-by-line, explain what the flow of the whole function or method that’s not working is. Don’t skip details, ducks love details!
- If your duck friend hasn’t spotted it yet, be sure to explain all the intermediate states and transitions in detail.
- Find your (stupid, obvious) solution! The reason we so love “rubber duck debugging” is that (typically) in the process of doing this, you’ll find your problem. You made a small typo. You were operating on the wrong variable. Your
ifcondition was checking the opposite of what you thought. Something is likely to be revealed.
You can read all of that, and my Malcolm Gladwelling about how it works in “Rubber Duck Debugging: The Psychology of How it Works.” I’m thought-leadering so hard right now! 😂
Sort Your Posts by Custom Fields with CodePress Admin Columns
One of the reasons I love WordPress is because there’s always something to learn. I’ve recently had two clients who, for different reasons, really need to sort their post content by custom field values within the posts themselves.
CodePress’s Admin Columns plugin is a great free solution for this, although the free version doesn’t allow complex sorting and filtering or a few other options. I tried out the cheapest premium version and it’s precisely what my client needed. The plugin itself is cleanly designed and developed and easy-to-use. Highly recommended.
Announcing Newspack by WordPress.com — A New Publishing Solution for News Organizations
WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google.
WordPress.com is launching a new Newspack platform, which will “develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations”. When Matt Mullenweg was on Kara Swisher’s podcast last year, he talked about solving this problem a fair bit, and it’s interesting to see what’s coming next from this.
The platform is trying to solve the technology problem for news organisations, letting them get on with their reporting. It comes with funding from, amongst others, Google. It will be free whilst “in development”, until 2020, and then $1k-2k/month after that. Interesting to see where this one goes.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
Quick Guide: How to Change a Username on WordPress
How to change username on WordPress seems like an easy question, but WordPress has never really supported the ability to change a username. Changing your admin username in WordPress is possible via three different kinds of work-arounds, and it’s just really a question of which you prefer. The easiest one is to create a new user account, but you might…
A CSS-Overload Proposal from Nathan Rice
On his personal blog, Studio Press lead developer Nathan Rice makes an interesting point about the block-derived performance issues that may come from having lots of Gutenberg blocks and lots of CSS rules to style them in WordPress after 5.0. I don’t know how serious the performance degradation will be over time — I don’t know if anyone does. But I do know that it’s worth some consideration that as you load more styles it does indeed impact the waterfall of the site, as Nathan highlights.
I didn’t really consider the opportunity to print CSS styles exactly where you need them that Nathan is highlighting, but I think it’s an intriguing and promising method that at a minimum I want to call your attention to. Here’s the briefest summary of the content I think Nathan is driving at:
When you enqueue styles this way, every stylesheet link gets output to the
<head>. Each stylesheet is registered with a unique handle, so the same stylesheet link doesn’t get linked more than once.I’m not suggesting that we start linking our own stylesheets outside the WordPress way. But something does have to change.
What if you could register stylesheets the same way, but instead of enqueueing them to be output in the
<head>, you could call a function manually that would output the stylesheet link (with any dependencies) immediately before a block. Once a link is rendered, the WordPress stylesheet manager could make sure it doesn’t get rendered again.As it turns out, you can!
I’m a very slow thinker
Derek Sivers will get back to you tomorrow.
“When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next morning, I have an answer.” I like this from Derek Sivers, and have been thinking – slowly – about this over the holiday period.
Derek’s arguing our that first reactions are based on outdated knowledge and biases and are thus unhelpful. If, however, we take a step back and think more deliberately, we’ll have a better answer. I don’t agree that an intuitive reaction is always unhelpful, but have been taking the point to heart so far this year: think harder.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
Quick Guide: How to Add Custom CSS Styles to Beaver Builder Elements
After reviewing WordPress's page builders in depth, I've found that Beaver Builder is my clear favorite, because it caters to people who want to do things right. Case in point: the Beaver Builder team have made it easy to add custom CSS styles to Beaver Builder elements. As with any front-end system, you can do a lot more with Beaver Builder if you…
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How WordPress Knows What Page You’re On
This post about how WordPress works with URL from Ryan McCue has almost everything I love in such things:
- A certified expert.
- A thorough examination of both history and details.
- Disambiguations of things that can trip people up.
- A little more detail that I need to learn.
In short, it’s new best place to go if you’re interested in or working on the way that WordPress handles processing URLs for your website. Here’s the part that most stuck with me:
Extra permastructs are typically generated by core helpers like
register_post_type()orregister_taxonomy(). Plugins don’t typically add permastructs manually, as the generation makes a lot of assumptions about things you want.Once all of this is done, WordPress saves the rules into the
rewrite_ruleoption to avoid having to regenerate them on the next request. However, if a plugin has flushed the write rules beforewp_loaded, this saving is deferred towp_loadedto ensure plugins don’t break the whole system.Now that we know we have rewrite rules (whether loaded from the option or generated fresh), we can finally get around to routing our requests.
Quick Guide: Set Up Your WordPress Translation Plugin
In this Quick Guide, I'll show you how to quickly translate your WordPress site into one or more different languages using the Weglot WordPress translation plugin. Once you activate the plugin, Weglot will automatically translate your site using machine translation. Then, you can use the Weglot cloud dashboard to manually edit translations and/or outsource them to professional translators. (more…)
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Quick Guide: Enable Automatic Plugin Updates in WordPress Without Code
One of the best things you can do for WordPress site security it run updates in WordPress often, ideally as soon as they're available. Making WordPress automatically pull in plugin updates for you is a great way to make that happen. Automatic plugin update can happen with some PHP code, but there's actually a great plugin that lets you get…
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Brian Krogsgard’s interview with Matt Mullenweg, 2018 Recap
I’m cheered and hopeful that Mr. Krogsgard is correct and Post Status will soon return to form. (It kind of limped out of 2017 and into 2018, but Brian recently emailed members about his new dedication.) This interview with Matt makes me think it may well. An independent journalist who has smart opinions and pushes (at least) a little on someone as influential as Matt is A Good Thing™️.
This interview is mostly cordial, which may not be warrented, depending on how you’re feeling about Gutenberg et al right now. But I think Brian feels, as I do, that Matt genuinely takes seriously at least a little of the critique I highlighted last week about the way that WordPress 5.0 just casually dropped on the world.
You can consume the interview across a healthy variety of formats, I just listened to the podcast while working out. But here’s the video (little necessary information was missing on the audio, although I heard talk of screenshare):
On the whole, I was cheered that Brian was back. And that (about 20 minutes in) Matt acknowledges that the Q&A of his WCUS State of the Word had some pretty awkward elements where he didn’t clearly express his feelings. I think the answer on Brigit’s question of prioritizing things that companies don’t care about was still not as well-answered as I’d like. But I know it was a hard question, and at least the “only contributions that large corporations will pay someone to make are worthwhile” that one could have gotten from the answer was cleared away.
I came back from WCUS very tired. I’m an introvert, after all. But I’m also cheered that the most-painful parts of the Gutenberg transition are probably behind us, and despite a few issues that Fred highlighted is generally looking to be manageable.
If you watch one video from WCUS, it should probably be Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word talk. If you watch two, this should probably be #2.
We analyzed 275,045 recovery campaigns to find out what kind of discounts really work
The discounts you should use in your cart abandonment emails.
If you’re sending cart abandonment emails, read this! This is great data from Jilt, the cart abandonment app: they looked at a huge dataset from their customers to see what levels of discount worked.
The data wasn’t quite what I expected: lower percentage discounts can be more effective than higher percentage discounts, and that trend increases the higher priced the product is: on carts priced over $200, a 5% discount is 50% more effective than a 10% discount.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
Gutenberg Arrives in WordPress 5.0 Tomorrow
WordPress 5.0 is releasing tomorrow. December 6, 2018. Yay!?
I don’t think–as I sit in the airport restaurant–I can or should try to write out all of the thoughts about Gutenberg and the chaos that has been the WordPress 5.0 release process and decision. I feel like this tweet from our friend Jeff over at the Tavern actually summarizes it pretty well:
There is Gutenberg the product and Gutenberg the process.
Gutenberg the product is rough around the edges but shows promise of being the future of the platform.
Gutenberg the process is simply Holy Shit.
I hope the lessons learned translate into a smoother phase 2 and 3.
— Jeff (@jeffr0) December 4, 2018
What Jeff gets very right here is that a lot of people have worked very hard to make something that they call “Gutenberg” and it’s very good. It’s not yet mind-blowingly good, nor “whole new game” good. But it’s very good, and it’s probably approximately stable enough to push onto “30% of the internet.”
But the process by which that decision was made, and the seeming capriciousness with which the process has been operated is very disappointing. And while I believe that saying this risks earning me a “no-longer-welcome” status in certain conversations (specifically with Matt himself), I think it’s undeniable that Matt Mullenweg’s general style as the leader of this release was the cause of a lot of the community agitation and pain.
Throughout, the process has seemed very arbitrary. No timeline was ever published, but neither were timeline-less acceptance criteria. This means that the whole community spent 2018 holding its breath, fearful of when Gutenberg would arrive and in what state it would be.
The most recent example is perhaps the clearest: it was just a few short months ago that Gary Pendergast posted a proposal of (roughly) three dates that WordPress 5.0 would drop: November 19, November 27 (19th schedule, slipped 8 days), or January 22.
Best I can tell, the December 6 date is not listed in the post about that. And because Gary is a rather prominent and trusted lieutenant, most casual observers (myself included) took his post as the clearest truth about the plan.
Then two days ago, first posted on Twitter and then on the official blog, we’re just told that Gutenberg is coming out Thursday. This is after Matt Mullenweg performed and somewhat-prominently promoted a “public listening tour,” which at least one participant now feels was a waste of time:
After a weekend where @photomatt had specific office hours. He reached out to me and we spoke on the phone because I thought I was making an impact on the release date and communication around it.
All that call did was delay my family from decorating our Christmas tree.
— Joe Casabona @ #WCUS (@jcasabona) December 4, 2018
One of the more interesting arguements in support of this new plan came from Helen Hou-Sandí, a person for whom I have tremendous respect:
I think mostly I’m surprised that anybody is surprised that releasing a huge update before the big conference for the year would be a significant motivator? I guess people wanted it said explicitly but then I wonder if all the fighting would just have been about that instead…
— Helen ?-Sandí (@helenhousandi) December 4, 2018
The fact that it’s understandable that Matt wants to release now so he can go on stage at WordCamp US and say “Yay! Gutenberg is here!” is completely “understandable.” That is: it makes a kind of sense looking at it from a distance. But after-the-fact understandable-ness doesn’t really permit people to have, develop, or execute a plan around that date. And “understandable” is a very long journey from saying that it’s either the right process or the best that Matt is capable of.
I know Matt Mullenweg has WordPress in his heart. I know he does care about the community. But this process hasn’t shown that, so it’s just been a long slow disappointment for me.
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
Times story on Facebook’s problems
This New York Times story on how Facebook has dealt with its crises over the last two-ish years has been doing the rounds this week, and for good reason: it’s really good. The primary insight is referenced in the headline: “Delay, Deny and Deflect”. This broadly describes how Facebook has dealt with all incidents, and is a cyclical process; when “deflect” has finished, the “delay” kicks in again.
The sheer scope of how many crises and how many issues Facebook has sought to sweep under the rug – including recently through inexcusably hiring a “opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters… [who also lobbied] a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic” – is boggling, as is the notion Facebook doesn’t understand and/or can’t control the machine it has built.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
Quick Guide: How to Use get_the_author_meta in WordPress to Show Author Info
Your author’s are the heart of most WordPress sites. They write your content, engage with your audience, and generally make the site work as it should. As such, you’ll often want to get WP author meta from the site so that you can show it off in your template. The way to get meta author tag information from WordPress is…
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Crypto-coin-stealing code sneaks into fairly popular NPM library
I’m not particularly into either npm (the JavaScript dependency library and installer) or cryptocoins (approximately “Bitcoins”), but I was talking some fellow WordPress developers and this pretty interesting and complex security story came up. The summary is this:
On September 9, right9control added
flatmap-streamas a dependency toevent-stream, and then on September 16, removed the dependency by implementing the code themselves. However, this latter change was not automatically pushed out to the library’s users. On October 5,flatmap-streamwas altered by a user called “hugeglass” to include obfuscated code that attempted to drain Bitcoins from wallets using the software.Thus, anyone using
event-streamand pulling in the cursedflatmap-stream, rather than the rewritten code, since October 5 would be potentially hit by the malicious script. The offending code has been removed fromevent-stream. If it’s any relief, the hidden malware is highly targeted, and not designed to attack every programmer or application usingevent-stream.
This is what’s commonly called a “supply chain attack“. It’s one of the less-common attacks a WordPress site needs to worry about, but it’s still real, and very interesting to see one in the wild. The heart problem in them is that not everyone can realistically vet all their dependencies, and the chain-of-trust in many software ecosystems is long and thus pretty weak. So it’s nearly impossible that the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem will prevent events like this. As awareness goes, I think thoughtful solutions will start to get executed. But right now it’s still quite a wild-west.
Want to know more about WordPress security? Check out our paid course on the topic, or this great free article.
How to Customize File Upload Inputs
This code demo saved my bacon on a client project that needed a very specifically styled file upload input box.
Why would that be difficult? It turns out there’s no default way to override the browser’s <input type="file"> styling! Isn’t that weird?
The key information is in the “Hiding the <input>” and “Styling the <label>” sections. Requires quite a bit of confidence with CSS, but very worth it for beautifully styled and customized file upload inputs.
What Is The Morning Writing Effect?
Writing as a proxy for “when do we work best”?
Grab a cup of coffee and indulge in this preposterously detailed post on the “morning writing effect”, which tries to understand whether the “I do my best work in the morning” effect often described by writers is actually real, and if so how strong it is.
The level of detail and insight is very interesting on its own, but it’s taking writing as a proxy for “when’s the best time to do creative work” that deserves further investigation. I tend to do admin-style work in the morning and creative work in the afternoons; after reading this I will have a look at switching it around.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
Two ways to build Gutenberg Blocks
Our friend Jason Bahl has put together one of the most quietly exhaustive tutorials I’ve seen on what it’s like to actually make a “Gutenblock” with all the code bits and where all of them go. One of my biggest uncertainties about Gutenberg is how many WordPress developers will need to be creating Gutenberg block and how easy they will find it. All of that points to the fact that regardless of how it turns out we’ll need a lot of different good tutorials about making Gutenblocks and the subtleties of that process.
That’s where tutorials like Jason’s come in. And because he highlights two rather-different methods, you get a well-rounded sense of how you’d actually make a Gutenblock. The extent to which people (myself included) are really excited that the method of Gutenblocks using Advanced Custom Fields is looking so PHP-focused. I think the jury’s still out on if the core-Gutenberg block registration being JavaScript focused is good or bad.
With tutorials like Jason’s, you can take a look and form your own opinion 🤓
Getting Black Friday right for WordPress products
Black Friday is a great opportunity for WordPress products, but offering a straight discount isn’t necessarily the best way to go: you need to balance existing customers, price-sensitive potential customers, and deal-searchers, and a straight discount leaves at least one of those groups dissatisfied.
The solution, then, is to look into bundling your product. This lets you offer a steep headline discount, whilst maintaining a high-ish purchase price, and giving you scope to reward existing customers.
Pricing is a really interesting and high-impact area, and this post gets into more detail on how to get Black Friday right for WordPress products.
This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.