At some point in the life of a WordPress site, its owner will want to make changes significant enough to justify blocking access to the site. It’s not a good idea to leave a site online when major changes are being implemented. A site with rough edges looks unprofessional and visitors won’t know that it’s […]

Every November, aspiring novelists come together online to write 50,000 words of a novel. National Novel Writing Month — which attracts participants from around the world — helps writers put aside their trepidation and focus on getting the words out. 2016 will be NanoWriMo’s 17th year, and it’s expected to be just as popular as […]

Images make up a large chunk of the bandwidth used by most websites. That makes them an obvious target for optimization. Any reduction in the size of images can have a positive impact on the performance of a website. Over the last couple of releases, WordPress has introduced several new image optimizations that happen by […]

Google uses incoming links as a signal of the quality of a web page. Working under the assumption that links to a page are a vote in its favor, Google uses links to determine where pages should appear in the search engine results. Links are only one of the signals Google uses for ranking, but […]

Successful WordPress sites follow a fairly predictable path. They begin with an idea, which — because no one has a clue it will be successful — is built on a small shared hosting plan. Shared hosting plans are perfect for moderately trafficked sites, but as the sites grow, they need something more. A WordPress site […]

WordPress is a complex piece of software comprising many thousands of lines of code — a mixture of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s under constant development, which means that all those files are subject to change. Often, those changes will address security issues; that is, they are edits to code that caused a vulnerability. […]

One of the major motivations for the creation of the WordPress REST API is that it allows developers to easily — or more easily — build WordPress client applications. With the API, developers can build applications that can control most aspects of a WordPress site. However, great though the API is, authentication has been a […]

Last year’s release of Magento 2 was a massive rewrite of the application on which tens of thousands of eCommerce businesses are built. The update brought Magento in line with modern web technology, and gave the Magento team a solid foundation to build on. With the release of Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1, we’re beginning to […]

It’s been more than a year since the release of Magento 2.0 — an almost complete rewriting of the enormously popular eCommerce application, and yet many eCommerce retailers have yet to upgrade. I understand why. An eCommerce store is the central plank of any modern retail business, and those businesses depend on the reliability and […]

When most of us think of content management systems, we have in mind a tool that can be used for building websites and blogs. But content management systems — including WordPress — can be used for much more than web publishing. The ability to categorize, process, filter, display, and control access to information are the […]