Over on Thoughtful Code I recently covered the topic of "rubber duck debugging." It's a pretty simple procedure but one I love because it works surprisingly well. Here are the basic steps: Explain your (broken) code and its goals, generally.… [Keep reading]

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. CodePress's Admin… [Keep reading]

WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google. WordPress.com is launching a new Newspack platform, which will “develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations”. When Matt Mullenweg was on Kara Swisher’s podcast last year, he… [Keep reading]

On his personal blog, Studio Press lead developer Nathan Rice makes an interesting point about the block-derived performance issues that may come from having lots of Gutenberg blocks and lots of CSS rules to style them in WordPress after 5.0.… [Keep reading]

Derek Sivers will get back to you tomorrow. "When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next morning, I have an answer.” I like this from Derek Sivers, and have been thinking – slowly… [Keep reading]

This post about how WordPress works with URL from Ryan McCue has almost everything I love in such things: A certified expert. A thorough examination of both history and details. Disambiguations of things that can trip people up. A little… [Keep reading]

I'm cheered and hopeful that Mr. Krogsgard is correct and Post Status will soon return to form. (It kind of limped out of 2017 and into 2018, but Brian recently emailed members about his new dedication.) This interview with Matt… [Keep reading]

The discounts you should use in your cart abandonment emails. If you’re sending cart abandonment emails, read this! This is great data from Jilt, the cart abandonment app: they looked at a huge dataset from their customers to see what… [Keep reading]

WordPress 5.0 is releasing tomorrow. December 6, 2018. Yay!? I don't think--as I sit in the airport restaurant--I can or should try to write out all of the thoughts about Gutenberg and the chaos that has been the WordPress 5.0… [Keep reading]

Times story on Facebook’s problems This New York Times story on how Facebook has dealt with its crises over the last two-ish years has been doing the rounds this week, and for good reason: it’s really good. The primary insight… [Keep reading]

I'm not particularly into either npm (the JavaScript dependency library and installer) or cryptocoins (approximately "Bitcoins"), but I was talking some fellow WordPress developers and this pretty interesting and complex security story came up. The summary is this: On September… [Keep reading]

This code demo saved my bacon on a client project that needed a very specifically styled file upload input box. Why would that be difficult? It turns out there's no default way to override the browser's <input type="file"> styling! Isn't that… [Keep reading]

Writing as a proxy for “when do we work best”? Grab a cup of coffee and indulge in this preposterously detailed post on the “morning writing effect”, which tries to understand whether the “I do my best work in the… [Keep reading]

Our friend Jason Bahl has put together one of the most quietly exhaustive tutorials I've seen on what it's like to actually make a "Gutenblock" with all the code bits and where all of them go. One of my biggest… [Keep reading]

Black Friday is a great opportunity for WordPress products, but offering a straight discount isn't necessarily the best way to go: you need to balance existing customers, price-sensitive potential customers, and deal-searchers, and a straight discount leaves at least one of those… [Keep reading]

A sort-of goal of starting my Thoughtful Code hobby site was to use it it say a little more on theory than "here's how to set up Java projects" or "here are five cool things you didn't know about PHP."… [Keep reading]

Last week I linked my piece on marketing channels, and the importance of testing new channels to see what works. This is a great write-up of a marketing channel experiment – YouTube sponsorships – and how it really didn’t work. The… [Keep reading]

This article from Pascal Birchler about text domain in plugins got into some territory I'd not considered. I shouldn't be surprised, Pascal is very smart, a regular contributor to WordPress itself. Discussing it in light of a new WP-CLI command… [Keep reading]

A member from the WPShout Facebook Group blew my mind last week with this set of instructions for either resetting WordPress user passwords or adding new users using only an FTP connection. This was in response to our Quick Guide that… [Keep reading]

Alex on his marketing philosophy. My day job is doing marketing for WordPress businesses, and I wrote this to explain how I approach marketing strategy, and how this offers an extremely good way of thinking about and running your marketing. The… [Keep reading]

Over at WPTavern, Sarah wrote up an important issue as Gutenberg speeds toward delivery. (For those who haven't followed, sometime about a month ago, it was announced that WordPress 5.0--the Gutenberg includer--would try to launch before American Thanksgiving, on November… [Keep reading]

I've always had pretty mixed feelings about the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. I still do. But I do love the construction of this headline from Iain Poulson ("Advanced Custom Fields: The Hero WordPress Needs Right Now, but Not the One… [Keep reading]

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." If you ever want to know exactly what people wish they knew… [Keep reading]

Make something you’re proud of. I enjoyed this post from Justin Jackson, who’s been exploring the various methods of “bootstrapping” recently. Specifically, there’s a lot of assumptions wrapped up in the term, and Justin challenges readers to work through those… [Keep reading]

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… [Keep reading]