Have you ever accidentally saved the same post meta to a post in WordPress, and ended up with a duplicate? Of course, you could go through each post and check the meta, check for duplicates, and delete any of them but… I think I’ve figured out a beast of an SQL query that will give […]
…or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the slashes. Post Meta in WordPress is a great tool to store random bits of data associated with your posts. But did you know that it comes with its own set of problems? Have you ever tried storing a JSON string inside of post meta? Only […]
If you’re hosting your WordPress website on DreamHost, and use their cron system to offload your WordPress faux-cron for better reliability, be careful of what version of PHP you have in your code. I recently had an issue where my cron events weren’t firing, and after enabling email output, I ended up with something like this PHP […]
An interesting problem I came across recently was how to set up a WordPress blog with an anonymous user. Now, a simple way would be to create a brand new user with fake information, but that’s too easy. After looking for some prior art, I found the Anonymizer plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repository. Unfortunately, it’s […]
WordPress has a built-in function called wp_safe_redirect(). This allows you to create redirects in code, but only to whitelisted domains (via the allowed_redirect_hosts filter). The downside to this is that you have to remember to whitelist the domains. It’s easy to forget if you’re doing a lot of redirects, for instance with the WPCOM Legacy Redirector […]
One of the best ways to ensure that a WordPress site–well any site really–stays performant and not broken is by leveraging caching. WordPress by default doesn’t do much caching other than some in-memory caching of objects, and the odd database caching via the Transients API. This site currently has three layers of caching: PHP OPcache […]
The WordPress WP-Cron system is a decently okay faux cron system, but it has its problems, such as running on frontend requests and not running if no requests are coming through. WP-Cron works by: on every page load, a list of scheduled tasks is checked to see what needs to be run. Any tasks scheduled […]
I know that auto-updates are a bit of a (#wpdrama) touchy subject, but I believe in them. In an mu-plugin I enable all auto-updates like so:
One of the most important things to do when working on new themes, plugins, or debugging issues in WordPress is to turn on WP_DEBUG. According to the Codex: WP_DEBUG is a PHP constant (a permanent global variable) that can be used to trigger the “debug” mode throughout WordPress. It is assumed to be false by […]
One of the great things about Gutenberg is the ability to compartmentalize different types of content within blocks. One of the blocks that I’ve been using a lot of recently is the code block. This block by default will render something like this: While this is acceptable, it’s not very pretty. I used to use […]