If you've been around WordPress for long, you've likely heard of a "CDN." A CDN, or content-delivery network, is one of the most common parts of speeding up a WordPress site, especially for visitors who are far away from where… [Keep reading]

As you might have noticed, in WordPress 5.5 you can now tell WordPress itself to keep specific plugins up to do. This is a great feature and one that I'm eager to turn on for more than a few plugins… [Keep reading]

I recently bought a drawing tablet (googling "Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphic Drawing Tablet (Medium)" should find it for you), because I had no way I liked to write out visual notes, especially timelines and complex process flows. It was one… [Keep reading]

I have to admit that one of the places I feel I most conspicuously show my age is how little interest I have these days for the latest of web-dev hype. I would consider the "JAMstack" hype train one of… [Keep reading]

I admit I haven't been following the concept and execution of Gutenberg Block Patterns very closely. Primarily this is because visual design has never been with a strong suit for me, nor (consequently) something I spent much time on. It… [Keep reading]

I need to A/B test lots of parts of Writers.com, and I've been putting it off because I wasn't sure which tool to use. Third-party SaaS solutions and WordPress plugins both feel to me like they'll be a bummer to… [Keep reading]

I've somewhat intentionally given this little story about a new WordPress 5.5 feature a silly title. But as this story from Sarah Gooding over at the Tavern illustrates, people are already putting the new WordPress wp_get_environment_type() function to good use.… [Keep reading]

Ben Gillbanks has been a minor celebrity in my internet world for over a decade at this point. Even back in the 9rules days (if you knew what that was without looking, please sound off in the comments. I love… [Keep reading]

Over on her blog at Lireo Designs, Deborah Edwards-Onoro has been collecting an amazing array of great content about web design and development for while. And I had no earthly idea. It was only when I randomly noticed that she'd… [Keep reading]

We use Slack to coordinate our work, and the Slack Notifications by dorzki plugin makes a very handy addition, by allowing us to create Slack alerts based on WordPress events on the WPShout site itself. We currently have it configured… [Keep reading]

I'm a sucker for small useful programmer features. While most of the WordPress peeps are chockablock with opinions on Gutenberg blocks vs PAGE BUILDER OF CHOICE, I just want you to know that you can now pass some variable around… [Keep reading]

I'm always looking for tools that can give me a leg up on design, and I find that choosing a good color palette is one of the hardest and most subjective parts of designing a site. Colormind.io is one of… [Keep reading]

Our site Writers.com has a lot of 404s stretching back across its long history. As I've started to work to clean them up, I flirted with simply 301 redirecting every 404ing link to the homepage. (There are a few plugins… [Keep reading]

WordPress has a number of lazy loading solutions, but the one I've most recently used to improve Writers.com's performance on our image-heavy pages is a3 Lazy Load, and I'm very happy with my choice. Lazy loading speeds up a site… [Keep reading]

Since I found Unsplash in 2018, it's been my go-to for free, unrestricted stock images of all kinds. However, I'm also very happy to have a backup source of images when Unsplash doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for. Pexels… [Keep reading]

The Wordfence Security team has found a security vulnerability in Elegant Themes's themes Divi and Extra, as well as in the Divi Builder plugin. Elegant Themes writes: Today Divi, Extra and the Divi Builder plugin were updated to fix a… [Keep reading]

I really really appreciate this rundown of the major options for setting up a local WordPress development (which is to say---on your own computer) that Ram Ratan Maurya updated for Delicious Brains. I feel like on the whole for those… [Keep reading]

I'm working on a WordPress project that needs custom post types, custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom taxonomy meta. To do this, I installed three entirely separate plugins: CPT UI, Advanced Custom Fields, and a taxonomy metabox solution that I… [Keep reading]

More than a few weeks ago now, my friend Jeremy Green talked at the Fort Collins WordPress Meetup about how to make Gutenberg blocks. One of the struggles he mentioned was the lack of great tutorials on the details of… [Keep reading]

I know that this is a WordPress-focused site. But I also know that programming is as central to WordPress as writing. So I thought I'd share this fun little article that simply and clearly lays out the (classic) "Hello world"… [Keep reading]

In just about two weeks (depending on when you read this 🤓) the WordCamp that I (David) have been helping to organize for a few years---I actually forget if I helped in 2017 🤷‍♂️---is happening. That is it's WordCamp Denver… [Keep reading]

I really love this little tour from Iain Poulson at Delicious Brains about the WordPress database. There isn't a lot in this that I didn't know or couldn't guess. That may well be true for you too. But if you… [Keep reading]

It being the year of COVID (to say nothing of America’s very recent confrontation with our persistent problems with racial injustice) means that WordCamp Europe—now very online and starting tomorrow—had slipped my memory and attention. If that sounds interesting to… [Keep reading]

A quick little uplifting story I missed a few weeks ago: as the COVID-19 lockdowns were setting in worldwide, more and more people were doing web searches for "wordpress." Or so reports Alex Denning, the original creator of WPShout, and… [Keep reading]

Another catchy little diddy bankrolled by my friend Zach Katz over at GravityView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl56USnGkUk I could put other words here, but they would only demean the importance of this video. 🤓[Keep reading]