Webfonts are a boon to theme developers. They opens up a vast landscape of potential typefaces — a far cry from the bad old days when there was only a handful of web safe fonts to choose from. But webfonts have drawbacks: most significantly, page weight inflation. For many themes, fonts come second only to […]
PHP — the programming language behind WordPress, Magento, ExpressionEngine, and thousands of other applications — recently got its first major version bump in years. The move from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happened a decade ago, although the language has seen multiple minor version bumps in the intervening years, culminating in PHP 5.6, which was […]
WordPress was originally created as a blogging engine. It had posts and pages, which gave it all the flexibility it needed to support traditional blogs. To be properly regarded as a content management system, WordPress needed a more flexible way to arrange content. Custom post types were introduced way back in WordPress 3.0 and allowed […]
If you’re a WordPress publisher or writer, your browser is how you interact with your site; it’s where content is researched, drafted, edited, proofed, and published. If you spend a large proportion of your working day inside a web browser interacting with WordPress, it makes sense to customize the browser so that it’s capable of […]
The majority of WordPress sites use either WordPress’ built-in comment system or Disqus, a cloud comment service that can be embedded into WordPress and comes with a number of useful social features. But these are far from the only options. In fact, it’s not at all clear that the traditional WordPress comment model is the […]
SEO can be a confusing topic for site owners, not least because of the mixed messages they hear. There are the SEO optimists who say all you need is great content and a Twitter account. Then there are the SEO professionals who make it seems as if you need degrees in statistics and marketing to […]
Here’s the dream scenario. You have a hobby about which you are enthusiastic and knowledgeable. You suspect there’s an audience of like minded hobbyists interested in what you have to say on the subject. You start a blog. Hosting is inexpensive, social media promotion offers enormous reach. You write and publish a couple of dozen […]
WordPress is a relatively secure content management system. As we’ve discussed before, there is no such thing as completely secure software, but the WordPress development team do an excellent job of keeping WordPress users safe by introducing as few vulnerabilities as possible and fixing them when they arise. That said, WordPress is enormously popular, which […]
The developers of WordPress have to strike a careful balance between performance and feature-set or complexity. WordPress is so easy to use because it’s a dynamic site generator: it builds pages on the fly from PHP scripts and MySQL database entries. That’s not an inherently slow process, but it’s slower than serving static HTML, CSS, […]
With PHP 7 around the corner, we wanted to create a dev environment to test some apps and prepare for its arrival. PHP 7 installation for CentOS is not difficult and can be found here. With the precompiled builds, we created a VM with the appropriate software to start testing WordPress: Apache2, MariaDB and PHP […]
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