In WordPress your thumbnails will be cropped to exactly 150px by 150px regardless of the original aspect ratio. With this setting, if your original image is very short and wide, the left and right edges will be removed to make the image square. This is called “hard cropping”. In many cases this works well, but […]
Dev Tips
Round Gravatar Hovercard Problem
I see this problem on a lot of WordPress blogs using a round Gravatar with Jetpack Hovercards. When you hover over a user’s Gravatar (often in the comments) there is a hover state that appears while the Hovercard loads and this hover state has the Gravatar image but it has the wrong aspect ratio. Below […]
Amazon S3 URL Redirect
Recently I found it necessary to create an Amazon S3 URL redirect. In the case where the Amazon S3 bucket is setup to act as a website, you can setup this up by adding the redirect directly to the file metadata. Instructions to setup an Amazon S3 website URL redirect Unfortunately, in this case the […]
Loading a Private WordPress Plugin with Composer
Previously, I described my process in loading WordPress.org plugins via composer, however, a number of plugins I use are private plugins (either because they are commercial plugins I’ve purchased or internal plugins I’ve written). One can use composer to load these plugins by doing two things: Create a repository for the plugin (this can be […]
Install WordPress with Composer
You can setup WordPress in a sub-directory using composer, thanks to John P Bloch‘s WordPress Core Installer. Below I’ve outlined the bare minimum steps to get this running. Step 1: composer.json Create a composer.json in the root of your project with the following content. { “require”: { “johnpbloch/wordpress”: “*” } } Step 2: Execute composer […]
WordPress Development Setup
Inspired by Sam Hotchkiss’s post What’s your WordPress Development Setup?, I decided to give a quick run down of the tools I use as a WordPress developer. My WordPress Development Setup Hardware 2013 MacBook Pro 13″ Retina with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for me this machine is the perfect combination of screen size, speed, […]
Composer WordPress.org Plugins
I’ve recently been introduced to managing WordPress.org plugins via Composer. This makes it more convenient when excluding plugins from your working repository. Composer is capable of doing far more than managing plugins but at this point, that is the extent of how I’m using it. This allows me to exclude my plugins via .gitignore yet […]
DNS Name Servers by Company
I’ve started compiling a list of name server domain names and the companies associated with them. This list has been helpful in guiding clients to the correct company to contact when modifying DNS records. You can determine your clients’ name servers by using a command line utility like whois or dig (e.g. whois salferrarello.com or […]
Mac pfctl Port Forwarding
Historically, I used ipfw from the command line to do port forwarding on my Mac. Unfortunately, as of Yosemite OS X 10.10 ipfw has been removed. (In all fairness, ipfw has been deprecated for some time but I continued using it because it was way easier than pfctl on the command line). Command Line pfctl […]
Vagrant VVV Setup for WordPress Development
Update I am no longer using this setup for local development. Instead I am using Local by Flywheel, which I find to be a more polished experience. I’ve made the jump from MAMP to Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) on my Mac and I wanted to document the process. Specifically, I want to address the changes […]