If you're still hesitant to learn CSS's Flexbox module, today's the day. This Flexbox guide from CSS-Tricks is so beautifully clear and so visual that, in my experience, Flexbox almost learned itself---you just need to point your open eyes toward… [Keep reading]

I really appreciated this list from Callie West of conferences for 2020 that may be of interest to WordPress developers. While I trust that her list isn't exhaustive, it does cover all the big conferences that were on my mind… [Keep reading]

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… [Keep reading]

I really enjoyed reviewing this post from Steve Burge over at PublishPress (whose plugin we recently published a Quick Guide about). What he covers is the dream of Google Docs-style collaboration in WordPress's native post editor. As he highlights, this… [Keep reading]

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… [Keep reading]

I was recently talking to my friend Jeremy and mentioned that I'd never quite made a "production" Gutenberg block, but had been meaning to learn for as long as that's been a thing. (For shame!) He pointed me to his… [Keep reading]

I've never really been someone who contributed to WordPress in a disciplined and direct way. (Which is to say, I've never had code I've written pulled into the WordPress project.) As a result, I can't really say what the cognitive… [Keep reading]

I have a great deal of interest in and respect for Ben Thompson, the proprietor of Statechery, one of the most interesting "tech industry analyst" publications I've come across. So this interview he did with John O'Nolan, the founder of… [Keep reading]

WordPress just released today (Tuesday, Nov 12). If, like me, this release kind of snuck up on you, the first place to stop should be this WordPress 5.3 Field Guide. What it does very well is touch on all the… [Keep reading]

I didn't attend WordCamp US this year, for the first time since it started. As such, I was eager and excited to watch the State of the Word, which is definitely the most attention-getting talk of the conference to me.… [Keep reading]

I was pleasantly surprised to learn about this WordPress 5.3 feature which in highlighted by Justin Ahinon on Make WordPress Core. The issue it's meant to solve is an uncompressed 12 megapixel fresh-from-the-phone type of photo being comically too large… [Keep reading]

Now that WordPress is actively pushing the community and sites that run it toward more modern versions of PHP, it's extra important to follow language changes. That's where this summary of the most consequential features of the forthcoming PHP 7.4… [Keep reading]

Almost everyone who reads us knows Matt Mullenweg, the leader of Automattic/Jetpack, and the WordPress project. And you may know David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) from his leadership of the Ruby on Rails project, or from their app Basecamp. And this… [Keep reading]

Found from Ben in the MasterWP newsletter, I love this hilariously short bit of advice about how to be a better programmer. In it, Pete Shirley, who calls himself "a poor programmer" says it's helped him as someone who thinking… [Keep reading]

Back in 2007, when I was just coming to terms with WordPress, Justin Tadlock was out at the forefront of what I understood WordPress to be. In the (gosh!) 12 years since, Justin's stayed busy in the WordPress space, but… [Keep reading]

Digital Ocean, a popular VPS hosting provider, recently announced a hosted-MySQL platform. The reasons you may want to do use this (vs putting the MySQL instance on the same server as your WordPress wed server) are a little more subtle… [Keep reading]

So, Chome 76 (or later. But what version of Chrome am I running anyway?) is getting a feature that would have saved me at least a little work on a few client projects. That is, it's making lazy-loading of images… [Keep reading]

I was recently working on a client project where I was faced with the question: should we have one WordPress multisite installation, or many "stand alone" WordPress sites? I gave the correct and scapegoat-y answer: "It depends." And I was… [Keep reading]

The weirdest piece of email I've gotten all month was courtesy of Brian Krogsgard and the Post Status newsletter: Automattic (owner of WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce...) has just bought blogging giant Tumblr. Tumblr is a site that normal people have… [Keep reading]

I like the direction that Josepha Haden is pushing WordPress. She's making strides to put the whole project on an even better trajectory. Toward better collaboration, better effectiveness, more inclusive. It's not the case that I (as a random person… [Keep reading]

This is a solid little article from the folks over at SpinupWP about caching in WordPress. "Caching" is one of the most simply and complicated words, almost simultaneously. The heart of the issue, there there are so many different kinds.… [Keep reading]

We were on the BoldLife podcast. It was a great time. We (well, especially Fred) talked a length about the complex reality of where generous human people meet the weird world of corporate policies. More than that, we talked about… [Keep reading]

Reviewing the SEO of small business websites. End-to-end (e2e) testing is a methodology used to test whether the flow of an application is performing as designed from start to finish. What’s actually happening on the hundreds of thousands of small… [Keep reading]

Tom Scott is one of my favorite YouTubers. (I know a lot of nerdy YouTube channels these days.) He is clear, knowledgeable, and a bit like what I'd make on YouTube if I'd started eight years ago and was British.… [Keep reading]

This is a fun and short little post over at Dev.to from Ananya Neogi. It's essentially a short-list of lesser known features for which you can just add some HTML markup and have cool features. What I love about it… [Keep reading]