This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks. Hooks are at the core not only of how WordPress plugins work, but nearly all code in the WordPress ecosystem: most WordPress themes use hooks heavily, as does “WordPress core” itself. WordPress hooks are absolutely a must-know topic in WordPress development.

This Quick Guide covers a common question whose lingo may confuse newbies: how do I make a Bash shell alias? For those for whom that sentence was Greek—let start here: Bash is the “Bourne Again Shell.” (There’s not relationship to the Matt Damon movie character, for better or worse. ;p) In the world of “command line interfaces,” Bash has been the go-to standard for decades, and is still the most common “terminal” in use. In the “terminal” world, Bash aliases solve a common problem: wanting to do things quicker and more effectively. So we’ll quickly and effectively walk you through how to make BASH aliases.

It’s a common complaint when you run your WordPress site through any “page speed score” tool: “defer parsing of JavaScript” and/or “remove render-blocking JavaScript.” Today, building on an article Fred first wrote in 2015, I’m going to discuss a was to solve that. It’s been possible since WordPress 4.1, which introduced of a new filter, script_loader_tag. This filter lets us easily change the HTML markup of enqueued script elements—that is, of JavaScript files that were correctly added into a WordPress site using WordPress’s wp_enqueue_script function.

Trying to decide whether SiteGround is the right place to host your WordPress site? We’ve had this SiteGround review published for over five years now, updating it as needed. Currently, this review was completely rewritten in February 2021 to cover recent feature and pricing changes.

It’s a very reasonable question: where are WordPress pages stored? There are a lot of ways to answer it though. Without getting too pedantic, we really need to understand a few different levels of the questions to really give a good answer. In this Quick Guide we’ll cover a few different of the answers you may be seeking.

It’s pretty common for WordPress folks to start looking harder at their page’s HTML from time to time. If you find yourself doing that, you may see this rel="noreferrer noopener" on some links. What’s noopener noreferrer? You’re in the right place to find out. Short answer: it’s a security measure for when you want a link to open in a new tab (or window) for your website visitors. It’s additional security related to target="_blank", if you know what that is. But we’ll get to that in a bit…

WordPress sites have lots of good backup options. But if you’re looking to save money on file-storage (and you already have a Dropbox account) I can’t recommend UpdraftPlus much more highly. It is quick-to-configure and very reliable as a place to keep a backup of your WordPress site. In this Quick Guide we’ll cover the steps to connect UpdraftPlus to Dropbox. Let’s get to it!

If you find yourself working with a lot of images or other media files in WordPress, chances are good that at some point you’ll need to change a file’s content while still keeping links and image placement the same. The best way we’ve found to do this is with a free plugin called “Enable Media Replace”. In this Quick Guide, we’ll teach you how to install this plugin and use it to replace images that already exists or media files on your WordPress site.

Whether you’re writing about technical topics or something even more visually demanding like art, sometimes you just want to make a picture bigger in WordPress. That can mean a number of things, from how it appears on the page to what happens when you click it. We’ll shortly cover the first case, and then spend most of our time introducing using a “lightbox” from the Simple Lightbox plugin to make our images appear over our content in a large size when clicked.

In this week’s Quick Guide we’re covering how to improve your “post lists” screens in WordPress. That is, we’re taking control the look of your “posts”, “pages”, etc lists by changing what appears in those columns. We’ll do that using that Admin Columns plugin (which was called CodePress Admin Columns until fairly recently 😉).