Migrating WordPress websites is something that happens all the time. Either because it needs to move to a new host or motivated by downtimes and malicious attacks, any webmaster has already needed to proceed a migration at least once. However, no matter how good those migration plugins become, we are still facing issues here and there. Well, so let’s talk about the most common issues on that and how to solve them easily. URLs can be found Right after migrating, you experience some pages that return a 404 or images and assets may have disappeared out of the blue. That happens because some plugi ..read more

WordPress has been around for almost 20 years and never stopped evolving. If we took a look within the original code, that’d prove to be completely different than the current. Whether you like it or not, as a dev or even web designer you must agree: there is no comparison with any CMS from that same era. Drupal, Joomla, Typo3 and many others. They are still evolving and releasing new versions here and there, but their shape and structure remain basically the same. Finally, in terms of modules, plugins, extensions and themes, there is no match for WordPress’ community. Literally you can find d ..read more

Best practices, in spite of their name, are rarely used. When it comes to add any code piece for WordPress, that becomes evident. Perhaps 99% of web designers and even some devs have been widely using the theme’s (or the child’s, for God sake) functions.php to include their own snippets. While this sounds like safe and a good practice, using any of the theme’s files, or even those from a child, can be taken as serious work in terms of WP development. Why? Two reasons: one of them regarding the basic approach, and another really technical. What approach? WP has been thought, and that’s maybe i ..read more

WordPress became the world’s largest CMS platform for a bunch of reasons. However, the main reason is certainly the way it can be enhanced with both plugins or code. Most people working for building WP websites nowadays are web designers, rather than fullstack or PHP devs. No problem here, and some of them already use top-notch frontend tools which avoid JS/CSS bloat or redundancy. Unfortunately, when it comes to create or tweak themes or plugins, add new widgets or components or any other development task involving CSS, people not just forget about good practices, but also ignore some of WP ..read more

Lately I’ve been involved in a couple of WP dev projects that also involved some other professionals. Sadly, that proved an old theory of mine: most WP plugin “devs” don’t use Git. While programming nowadays without any version control sounds like suicide, many so-called devs are sending ZIP files attached in e-mails or even via WhatsApp. Let’s not talk about the hundreds of tools for testing, deployment or code linting made possible by using Git and repositories on GitHub, Gitlab or similars. Git also works as an important backup tool for coders, and helps organizing changes and the whole pr ..read more

Well, a simple search in the web nowadays and you can find thousands of tutorials about using WordPress in a headless way. As modern as it sounds, the very conception of WP goes against this approach. Look, a system is just as good as the use we make of it. WordPress, limiting our analysis to its PHP architecture, is a heavy and complete CMS design in a procedural way. The reason is quite simple: at the same time their developers needed to think of legacy resources and extensions, all the way since the beginning, it evolved from functions and hooks to provide a comprehensive way of creating n ..read more

WordPress 5.8 will ship with the new template editor. Like Elementor and some other editors, this can be a game changer not only for designers – but especially for devs. It is a step towards creating a full site editing tool using the block editor, which means you can expect it to get better with future releases. After complex integrations and plugin/module development jobs, I can certainly say: building templates for apps is a pain in the arse. Mostly, the best option is simply cloning single and archive templates and sparkle hooks here and there. Yeah, that is definitely not nice or glossy ..read more

SEO gurus and website owners became paranoid with Page Insights’ issues lately. Although most of them simply refuse to understand how a 100% optimization may affect the number of features they still want their sites to show, they keep asking devs to fix them all. When it comes to WordPress websites, particularly those using sophisticated plugins, deferring or running JS asynchronously sometimes prevent snippets, blocks or even entire pages to render properly. Yes, we can still fix the dawn issues from Page Insights, but for getting a 100%, your clients need to compromise. Having that said, it ..read more

Before any trend of using Composer, NPM, Yarn or any other command line tool within WordPress’ themes and plugins development, devs have already been using a set of command line tools which had been particularly designed for managing WP instances. WP-CLI is a command line tool which is extensible, comprehensive and easy to use. Even for tasks like plugins’ updating, reinstalling the WP core or optimizing the database, it should be the first option for those who are properly developing under a WP-based environment. Most popular VPNs and cloud servers already have WP-CLI installed and running ..read more

Website builders and block editors are consolidated within WP community. And even for devs, losing time with layouts is useless when you cancache just build templates in minutes. So, if using them is key, how can devs choose the best option? Well, excluding the UI characteristics, we should always look for three aspects: Possibilities of extending features Documentation Interference with the rest of the code By all means, if any builder may harm or crash your code, interfering with other plugins and making the WP core more exposed to fatal errors or even hacking, it should be put away. Fina ..read more