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.

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?).

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.

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.”

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.

From time to time, you’ll need to change the post type of one or more of your WordPress posts. One common need is to change a Post to a Page, when you realize a piece of previously published content is more “evergreen” than “blog.” You could create a new Page, cut-paste the Post’s content and title, and delete the Post—but doesn’t it make more sense to just change the one thing that’s the actual problem, which is the Post’s post type?

I have a client who needs to be able to create PDFs of his WordPress posts, including for custom post types that he specifies. I tried a few solutions, and WordPress PDF Templates is definitely the best I’ve found.

Open source illustrations for your projects

I recently found myself hunting for a solution that would allow a visitor to click a button to automatically download a free ebook. If you need to allow your users to download files from a WordPress site, today’s post will help.