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.

A very good guide to the work philosophy I swear by.

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.

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.

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?).