In my desire to create a better process for building and deploying at Zeek, I recently hit a road bump while trying to perform automatic visual regression testing immediately after deployment.

Purpose

Automatically load all PHP files in the specified directory. Recursively.

It’s nice to pre-populate terms, content or have the ability to only OCCASIONALLY run actions.

Make your code simpler to read and simpler to debug by breaking apart your conditional statements and exiting the function whenever possible.

Did you know you can not only use Composer to manage dependencies, but actually develop a package alongside your dependencies?

What are subtrees, why are they useful and how can they be used?

When working with caching strategies, it’s important to step through your invalidation strategies. Namely, thinking through at what point does the data that you’re caching get regenerated, how does it get regenerated and who is regenerating it. It could be regenerated any time a new post is published, on a save_post hook by an author or admin OR it might need to be regenerated every 15 minutes by anyone hitting the front page.

Recently I ran into an issue where an installation of WordPress that had never had any issues updating stopped being able to update via the admin update button.

One of the lowest hanging fruits to learn is how to fix code regressions quickly and easily with git bisect.

This was a fun little issue to come across - I’ve been using Nginx as my local development server and so far have had few complications, however anytime I went to upload an image I would get a very vague HTTP Error from WordPress.

I did a quick screencast on what the WordPress Template Hierarchy is and why understanding it is one of the first steps to becoming a good WordPress developer.

You know that feeling when you’re setting up a brand new server and it’s not set up the way you’ve spent years tweaking it to be?

Because I’m a huge nerd and my google search results failed to bring up anything resembling a true listing, I thought I would throw together a little curl, grep and sed magic.

First off, I have to give major thanks to Mr. Evan Solomon for very graciously helping me diagnose and fix a very hard to pinpoint bug with NGINX and WooCommerce.

Thought it’d be nice to demo how to set up and get your own repository going with Git.

Some thoughts I had on my way home from WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012:

Here are my slides from my talk on WordPress and Version Control from WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012 August 18th.

Something I hear all the time and that was initially the biggest learning for me was understanding the data and the structure of objects that we have to interact with.

Something that I’ve come across recently as I start to build dynamic queries is changing the arguments array ever so slightly.

Today was a good day. In fact, this weekend was a good weekend.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on WordPress and Version Control!

So I just got back home from the first day of Chicago’s WordCamp 2011 held at the lovely Depaul University in downtown Chicago. Man, what a great experience - I just love the inspiration and the idea sharing that goes on at these conferences.

I just had a client request that for his home page posts that were being displayed, have them link instead to a permanent page. The type of content that they were linking to was longer term and the posts that were being displayed were created just as excerpts.

I just stumbled across this on Mark Jaquith’s blog.

Internet Explorer 9

In building the Centegra physician directory back in WordPress 3.0, there was no real way to use WordPress to display out a listing or archive of your custom posts. The temporary workaround solution was a little plugin I found called ‘Simple Custom Post Type Archives’. It worked well and all I had to do was create a file in the theme’s directory in the format type-custompostslug.php.

So I recently ran across a situation on Centegra’s website where I had set up our header image to show an image based on the section or area it’s in. This was working fine utilizing a custom get_ID_by_slug('slug-of-post') function I built to get the post ID.

hifiDesign over on Reddit asked the question of how to use WordPress and SVN (or git in this case). Here is my more extended answer: