Articles Tagged WordPress

I recently learned about a browser feature where, if you provide a special HTTP header, it will automatically post to a URL with a report of any non-HTTPS content. This would be a great thing to do when transitioning a site to HTTPS, for example, to root out any mixed content warnings. In this article, we'll implement this feature via a small WordPress plugin.… Read article

I've only just been catching up with the news about Gutenberg, the name for a revamp of the WordPress editor. You can use it right now, as it's being built as a plugin first, with the idea that eventually it goes into core. The repo has better information.

It seems to me this is the most major change to the WordPress editor in WordPress history. It also seems particularly relevant here as we were just talking about content blocks and … Read article

As of WordPress 4.7 (December 2016), WordPress has shipped with a JSON API built right in. Wanna see? Hit up this URL right here on CSS-Tricks. There is loads of docs for it.

That JSON API can be used for all sorts of things. I think APIs are often thought about in terms of using externally, like making the data available to some other website. But it's equally interesting to think about digesting that API right on the site itself. … Read article

I recently came across an article by Rory Cellan-Jones about a new technology from Jigsaw, a development group at Google focused on making people safer online through technology. At the time they'd just released the first alpha version of what they call The Perspective API. It's a machine learning tool that is designed to rate a string of text (i.e. a comment) and provide you with a Toxicity Score, a number representing how toxic the text is. … Read article

We kicked a poll off three months ago asking y'all what kind of local development environment you set up for running WordPress locally. At the time of this writing, we got 2,623 votes, so a decent amount of significance here. Especially because the question was phrased:

If you're running WordPress locally (i.e running PHP, MySQL, and a web server), how are you doing it?

Presupposes that you are running a local environment. (Please do that.)… Read article

Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.

Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.

Let's lazy load them.… Read article

I just gave a talk at WordCamp Miami where I talked about, to some degree, how WordPress has been a great choice for CSS-Tricks over the last decade.

If I get a chance I'll try to re-give the talk to my computer locally here so there will be a way you can watch the talk with some real context.… Read article

I really have no idea how this will turn out. I suspect a ton of you have run or are currently running WordPress locally, but I have no clear guess on what the most popular way is to do that right now.… Read article

Of all the projects I've worked in the last few years, there's one that stands out as my favorite: I wrote a WordPress plugin called Great Eagle (Tolkien reference) that allows my team to install and update themes and plugins from our private Bitbucket repos, via the normal wp-admin updates UI.

This plugin has blasted our dev shop through the roof when it comes to development best practices, in ways we never expected or intended. It forces us to use … Read article

Working on your website locally means having the files that make your website tick right there on your computer. It's common those files live in a version control repository. You work on them, and push them up to the repo when you are ready. Other people work too, and you pull their changes back down.

What might not be in that repo, are images files from the CMS. WordPress is a classic example of this. When you upload an image … Read article

Let's say you manage a WordPress site. You chose, purchase, and install a pre-made theme. Say you added a few items you came across in the WordPress plugin directory to add some advanced features to the site. This is the awesomeness that is the WordPress ecosystem. It's relatively easy for anyone with light technical chops to get a website off the ground and wrangle together something powerful without having to build everything from scratch. It just works great and your … Read article

The following is a guest post by Trishah Woolley. Over the years, Trishah has collected a ton of code snippets that do the job of adding IDs and classes based on some variable information, like the URL or data from WordPress. Each of these snippets were either collected from documentation or a similar online resource, or written by Trishah based on standard features of the language and API's involved.… Read article

The following is a guest post by Erez Elias. Erez recently attended a WordCamp and wrote to me inspired to write something about WordPress. We agreed this was an interesting topic, and one I've been meaning to document myself as it's something I've done about 100 times in my life and there is always one little detail I gotta look up.… Read article