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.

Deploying a WordPress plugin to the WordPress.org repository has been challenging for most developers for at least a few years. Why? Mostly because almost no one learns Subversion (the version control system that WordPress.org uses) anymore. So we’ve all cobbled together different versions of things that kind of work. And at least for me, I often forget what mine is, and how to use it. (For those real nerdy folks, what I have used a variation of Scribu’s scripts: http://scribu.net/blog/deploying-from-git-to-svn.html. It works for me, but I wouldn’t really recommend it as the perfect system. It’s just good enough that I’ve not sought an alternative.)

For that reason, many people including me were quite excited to see this post on the 10up blog from Helen Hou-Sandi. What she announces is that using the new GitHub Actions (still in beta) feature, they’ve developed a way to fairly seamlessly deploy a GitHub repository as a plugin on WordPress.org. To get it working you’ll need to be approved for the GitHub Actions beta, or wait for its wide release. (I’m still waiting for approval.)

But anything that makes deploying plugins easier for most developers is very welcomed, so I’m excited for this. Yay Helen and 10up!

Alex on his little notebook.

I carry around a little notebook for recording ideas, and – this sounds a bit odd but go with it – it’s totally changed the way I approach ideas, and being creative. Like most readers, I’m sure, I have lots of ideas! They come and go, and using the little notebook is a way of making sure they stay and then get put into practice. For my work this has led to moving forwards on a bunch of ideas which would have otherwise been forgotten. This is a fun post, and worth a read.

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

This is one of those articles that I’m linking 50% for its substance (which I regard as good but too brief) and 50% for covering and important topic. Specifically, how to manage and think about self-education. A lot, probably most, web developers I know and readers of WPShout I’ve talked to are self-educated in the web development field. Maybe you got college degrees, but few of those were “computer science.” Even if you did, Computer Science Degree often covers very little about web development. So most of us are just learning as we go.

What I really valued in the piece was Sarah’s transparency about the fact that she’s still learning (even while writing in a vaunted space like CSS-Tricks), and that she lays out specifically how she thinks about doing it:

If there’s an API I’m trying to learn, I’ll go to the main documentation page (if there is one), and list each of the things I’m trying to learn. Then I’ll divide the sections into what I think are manageable chunks, and spread the sections over my schedule, usually shooting for about a half hour a day. I do this with the understanding that some days I won’t find the time, and others, I’ll dig in for longer. Typically I aim for at least 2.5 hours of learning a week, because that pace seems reasonable to me.

This is so concrete, and quite different from the way I’ve ever thought about learning. (I’m much more “learn as needing by doing projects.”) But her success speaks for itself. It’s not easy to manage the continuous learning that computer-professionals require. But even you dismiss the specific schedule, Sarah covers also some great things about how to think about learning–how to practice, cognitive load theory–that’ll entertain and inform you as well.

From an internet marketing firm called Data Driven Labs comes this outstanding introduction to Google Data Studio, a Google product I’d like to know a lot more about.

I’ve just started trying to use Google Data Studio to pull together information on WPShout that I’m currently accessing through Analytics and Search Console separately. Like seemingly all Google interfaces designed for technical people, Google Data Studio is super confusing, and without the Data Driven Labs tutorial—which at least gives you sequential steps to start to follow to see stuff on the screen—I’d be staring at empty grid lines right now. Much appreciated!

The WordPress Governance Project working out who we are.

The WordPress Governance Project is trying to explore and influence the governance of WordPress and the open web, and it’s issued some new research. This identifies the stakeholders involved in the WordPress project, and does so with the aim of better understanding the needs and desires of those stakeholders.

The hope is that: “Understanding the nuances of each stakeholder and their preferences, actions or relationships can better articulate the needs for governance in the WordPress project.”

Some of what the research uncovers will be familiar, but it’s worth a read as it’s a great example of exploring “common knowledge” and working out what’s actually driving it. It’s also a great example of really nicely done project management: “Deep understanding of a target audience is fundamental to creating exceptional products”.

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