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]

Notes on working deeply in a remote team Long-time readers will remember in 2016 I had a post, Deep Work in practice, hit the front page of Hacker News and enjoy fifty thousand or so visitors. That post discussed the… [Keep reading]

In one of the least-relevant-to-WordPress articles I published there, I recently covered the difference between an active record ORM system vs one using the data matter pattern. ORMs are essentially systems by which PHP (or any language) objects are stored-to… [Keep reading]

Innovative usage of what Gutenberg is really good at. This is the kind of thing which is really exciting about Gutenberg: taking innovative plugins and giving them scope to work with WordPress really well. This post shows how Logic Hop,… [Keep reading]

I really liked the WordPress term glossary put out by Bridget Willard and the WordPress marketing team a few months back. This project seems to have no relationship to that other than a similarity of intent. What's really cool about… [Keep reading]

Happy Labor Day! SiteGround has bumped its sign-up discounts up to 70% for all shared hosting products through September 9th. If you've been needing hosting for a new project, or wanting to change hosting for yourself or a client, now's… [Keep reading]

A literally incredible tale This is, quite honestly, the best technology conference talk I’ve ever seen. From the abstract, which states the keynote: “will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to join a monastery or another penance-focused organization”, to… [Keep reading]

My link post last week was inspired by my attendance at Southeast PHP. In response to the talk I gave there, a fellow speaker reminded me of this talk from Rich Hickey, a creator of the Clojure programming language. It's… [Keep reading]

Secure your work, then copy the methods. A couple of weeks ago Google launched its Advanced Protection Program, which more or less looks like a response to state-sponsored hackers targeting Google accounts. It’s pretty interesting, requiring the usage of two… [Keep reading]

I gave one of my most-loved conference talks last week at Southeast PHP. (That's Southeast United States 🤓) In preparation, I recorded the talk as a video and put it on YouTube. And, I made a valiant, but ultimately failed… [Keep reading]