While working with a client recently, I found that deploying to WP Engine with Git had stopped working. The Symptom The following appeared on the command line when I ran git push production remote: – warning: syntax Error Found in wp-content/vendor/composer/autoload_static.php … remote: – failed: we detected a PHP syntax failure. The Problem The file […]
Dev Tips
How to Avoid Mucking Up Your DNS
At WordCamp Lehigh Valley 2018, I presented How to Avoid Mucking Up Your DNS. When I started working with websites, modifying DNS settings terrified me. We’ll discuss the things I wished I knew then: A records, CNAMEs, TTLs, name servers, and how to test these things. We’ll look at things I broke and how the […]
WordPress Responsive Images Increased Page Size
Let me establish right away, I think WordPress Responsive Images are a good thing and I am an edge case. Unfortunately, in my case the page size has increased rather than decreased with responsive images. Background As part of my Friday night fun I’d planned to review the positive impact of responsive images on my […]
WordPress Maintain Aspect Ratio Thumbnail
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 […]
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 […]