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?).

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.)

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.

Metabox Glue is a very niche plugin: its page on the WordPress plugin repository says “30+ active installations,” and that sounds about right. When you need it, though, it fits the job exactly.

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.

WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google.

This tool is incredible. It gives you beautiful, readable data visualizations of people’s real search queries for any phrase you type in, from “wordpress hooks” to “meaning of life.”

There are lots of people who can help you understand Git. Some of them are quite exhaustive, like Dan Gitcodeschooldude (who I covered here). His free video tutorials are great. But they’re also unequivocally not a cheat sheet. They’re essentially in-depth tutorials that will give you incredibly deeper understanding but require sustained focus.

Great reporting and case studies from the Tavern.

I first wrote up Relevanssi back in 2015, when it saved my bacon on a client project. Last week it did the same thing again, and I remembered why I’d found it so cool in the first place.