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]

Great reporting and case studies from the Tavern. This is a great good-news Gutenberg piece, and some great reporting from Sarah at WP Tavern: Sarah looks at some of the newest Gutenberg innovations, and how they’re coming from theme shops… [Keep reading]

Toni Morrison on doing your best creative work I really enjoyed this short interview with author Toni Morrison on her daily routine. None of this is overcomplicated, as is often the fashion; instead, it’s what allows her to do her… [Keep reading]

Great little guide from Mike at WP Bullet about how to figure out, using WP-CLI and grep the options that are related to a specific WordPress plugin. There's nothing here that surprised me. And I'll not that you can do… [Keep reading]

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. Relevanssi is… [Keep reading]

Obsessively tracking detail I enjoyed the almost obsessive attention to detail in this post, from an engineer who’s been tracking a set of data on day-to-day happiness. The analysis is interesting for its self-introspection, and willingness to ask mildly uncomfortable… [Keep reading]

I really appreciated this article from Carl Alexander about getting better at developing WordPress plugins. When most people (myself included) first hear about unit tests, you want to go set all old code on fire. But you can't do that,… [Keep reading]

I really loved this talk from Lara Schenck. Part of that's because I love to have abstract technical conversations about things like "What is a programming language?" and "What even is life?" Part of that is just because she does… [Keep reading]

The three of us (Alex, David, and Fred) had the pleasure of being on last week's WP Tavern podcast. We discussed what we've learned about teaching and learning WordPress development, and why we believe the WPShout Pro Community solves learning… [Keep reading]