I’ve been a WordPress user for years and I’ve written many thousands of words in the WordPress editor. I’ve seen the editor develop from a barely usable and — at times — frustrating writing experience into a functional tool. Gradual iteration over more than a decade has created a polished interface for writing and creating […]

The Magento Marketplace is a rich source of extra functionality for Magento eCommerce stores. The core Magento application can’t fulfil every requirement an eCommerce merchant might have: every store is unique and a Magento that could be all things to all retailers would be a bloated and unwieldy application. Instead, Magento is a modular system […]

A typical WordPress theme consists of the same basic components put together in novel ways. Almost every WordPress site has a logo, navigation components, blog posts, blog indexes, and so on. Many theme developers create their own spins on each of these components or adapt existing front-end frameworks to work with WordPress. Rebuilding or repurposing […]

Any large WordPress blog has a hinterland of content that isn’t exposed on the homepage. Site owners use tools like “Recent Articles” widgets to surface some of that content, but users still only see a tiny fraction of published posts. Frequently, the only place users are exposed to older articles is in Google search results. […]

The web doesn’t have a native mechanism for protecting content from copyright infringement. Aside from complex digital rights management solutions, which aren’t really appropriate for photography sites, there’s little a photographer can do to prevent determined infringers from copying images and using them without regard for the photographer’s chosen licence. This is a huge problem […]

If you’re a WordPress pro, the awkwardness of deploying from a testing or dev server to a live server will be all-too-familiar. It’s easy enough to replicate a WordPress site, and there are plugins that will do the job for you, but the reality is usually messier than a simple migration. Ideally, a WordPress staging […]

Most WordPress users realise they should backup their site. It’s a dangerous world, and if a business depends on its WordPress site, a backup — or preferably several backups — is a necessary safety net. However, a backup is worthless if it isn’t tested and verified. I’ve come across many sites where the owners have […]

Local development of any web application can be complex, especially if the developer works on several projects at the same time. To make it easier for developers to get up-and-running with a standardized Magento installation on their local machine, Magento has released Magento DevBox Beta, a Docker-based tool for local Magento development. If you’re not […]

WordPress 4.7 was released towards the end of last year and brought with it a host of new features, including a new default theme, theme starter content, and REST API content endpoints. As is usually the case with a major new WordPress version, WordPress 4.7 was closely followed by a minor release with bugfixes. WordPress […]

Monetizing WordPress blogs has become increasingly difficult over the last few years. If you want to blog for a living, throwing up a few Google AdWords units next to your content is unlikely to cut it unless you have a huge audience — and even if you do, ad-blockers will take a bite. There are, […]