Nexcess Blog

Unless you’re a PHP guru, WordPress theme development has a steep learning curve. WordPress is popular among users with a modicum of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge, but unless you have a fair bit of PHP under your belt, attempting to develop a WordPress theme can be a confusing endeavor. Drag-and-drop page builders exist to […]

Magento is fast, but, each time a Magento page is built and loaded, billions of instructions are executed on the server’s CPU and memory resources are consumed. On a busy server, that can lead to slow page loads and insufficient resources to serve every page quickly. The solution is caching. When pages — or parts […]

The web has come a long way since the days in the early nineties when Tim Berners-Lee first published his ideas about a new way to organize information. But the web as we know it would be recognizable — if astonishing — to its early users because the core technology of the web, the link, […]

If you are a relatively successful blogger who wants to enhance the revenue your site generates, what are your options? Premium content is the obvious avenue, with many bloggers opting for paywalled articles, podcasts, and ebooks, but one of the best revenue spinners for bloggers — and one that I see used relatively infrequently — […]

This February was the first anniversary of the discovery and patching of the Shoplift Magento vulnerability. In spite of a patch being made available immediately after the vulnerability was discovered, it appears that a significant number of Magento eCommerce retailers have yet to patch their store or upgrade to a version of Magento without the […]

Pricing is one of the most difficult tasks facing online retailers. Customers are willing and able to go to significant lengths to compare prices, and there are many comparison marketplaces that will do the job for them. Set prices too high, and sales will be lost to the competition. Set them too low, and retailers […]

In an ideal world, web design presentation would be separated from the logic of web applications. To some degree, that’s the case in WordPress, but for theme developers, much of the functionality and the presentation is mixed. Theme files are a combination of HTML and PHP, which can make developing and editing WordPress themes complex […]

WordPress may be one of the most powerful content management systems in the world, but that doesn’t mean that it’s flawless. It can still be misused, and you can definitely still make mistakes if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’re planning to upload rich media like images, video, or audio to your site, […]

Over the last few years, web development toolchains have grown increasingly complex. It wasn’t all that long ago that web pages were coded in HTML and CSS in a text editor. But, with the introduction of CSS pre- and post-processors, template languages, greater demand for site optimization, and the plethora of other helpful little tools […]

A decade ago, Subversion (SVN) was the version control tool of choice for many open source and enterprise software development projects. That’s why the WordPress.org plugin and theme repositories are based on Subversion — at the time, it was the obvious choice. But times change, and now most open source developers use Linus Torvald’s Git […]