I’m always looking for tools that can give me a leg up on design, and I find that choosing a good color palette is one of the hardest and most subjective parts of designing a site.

WordPress has a number of lazy loading solutions, but the one I’ve most recently used to improve Writers.com‘s performance on our image-heavy pages is a3 Lazy Load, and I’m very happy with my choice.

Since I found Unsplash in 2018, it’s been my go-to for free, unrestricted stock images of all kinds. However, I’m also very happy to have a backup source of images when Unsplash doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for. Pexels has been great for that.

I really really appreciate this rundown of the major options for setting up a local WordPress development (which is to say—on your own computer) that Ram Ratan Maurya updated for Delicious Brains. I feel like on the whole for those of you new to the concepts involved, I don’t (currently) know of a better place I would point you to get a sense of what the major options are for setting WordPress up on your local computer are, and what their major strengths and weaknesses. (Perhaps we should work on one here… 🤔)

I’m working on a WordPress project that needs custom post types, custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom taxonomy meta. To do this, I installed three entirely separate plugins: CPT UI, Advanced Custom Fields, and a taxonomy metabox solution that I regret using (its code dates back to before WordPress had taxonomy meta, and uses its own custom data structure).

As someone who has been tracking both the WordPress world and the Laravel world for years, I was intrigued by Ross Wintle highlighting something I didn’t really know much about. (If I’m honest, it’s been about a year since I was dipping into Laravel regularly.)

If there’s one problem that developers have with the WordPress.org Plugin (and Theme) directories, it’s most likely to be that the process of deploying the Subversion repositories used by that site is annoying, complicated, and cumbersome. I’ve been looking for a solution for a while, and this (pre-Christmas 🙃) post from Helen Hou-Sandi has me really excited for 10up and Github’s new “Actions” feature.

Among the most difficult challenges in WordPress development is finding out where a piece of code actually lives. Up to two themes and infinite plugins could be hooking into any part of WordPress and changing things, and if you want to track down a specific change it’s often the most time-consuming part of an otherwise easy job.

As far as I know, I’ve never gotten editing a hosts file to work. That’s a bummer, because sometimes you need to preview a site you’ve just migrated to new hosting, without pointing the DNS over and dealing with the horrors (wonders?) of DNS propagation. hosts is supposed to make that easy, but—at least in my experience as a Windows peasant—it’s super-hard to work with and doesn’t perform as advertised.

Ever just wanted to be able to easily run a text search against literally every theme on plugin in the WordPress repository? Honestly, me neither. But isn’t it cool to know that you can?! WPdirectory is fun silly tool that I just like knowing exists. And like I said, it make if fairly easy for you to search every plugin and theme freely distributed on WordPress.org in a quick and effortless way.