WordPress and web development tips

Git aliases and a global .gitignore Two small pieces of Git configuration save time every day: aliases for the commands you type all the time, and a global ignore file for the junk your operating system and editor create in every repository. Both live in your home folder, so they work in every project without…

Master WP-CLI commands for search-replace, database export, plugin updates, thumbnail regeneration and cron management.

Make the WordPress admin lighter with a few functions.php tweaks A default admin loads things that a busy team rarely uses: dashboard widgets with WordPress news and a quick draft box, the emoji scripts, and the Heartbeat API that keeps sending requests to admin-ajax.php while a tab is open. None of them is needed for…

HelloAdmin is 3 years old: a birthday greeting in code Hi everyone! Today HelloAdmin turns three. To celebrate, here is a small trick for a birthday greeting that a developer, a system administrator or anybody else in IT will appreciate: a message that has to be decoded in the terminal before it can be read.

Get all pages that use a specific template We have a big site and a task to edit a page template. After the change we need to check all pages that use it, and a template may be used by many pages. So we need links to all of them. How can it be done?…

Force HTTPS instead of HTTP It is very good when a site works over HTTPS. But sometimes the site is still available over HTTP too, and that spoils the whole picture: visitors from old links and bookmarks get an insecure connection, and search engines see two versions of every page. To avoid this, all pages…

Organise theme templates with get_template_part() When a theme grows, the same markup appears in many templates: the post card in the archive, the search results and the related posts, the hero section on several page templates. Copies are quick at first, and then a design change means editing six files. get_template_part() loads a partial template…

The WP_Filesystem API: write files the way WordPress does When WordPress updates a plugin, it does not always write files with PHP directly. On some servers PHP runs as a user that may not change the WordPress files, and WordPress asks for FTP or SSH credentials instead. The WP_Filesystem API is the layer that hides…

How to add a /blog/ prefix to the default posts Let’s imagine that you or your client use the default posts for the blog. As you know, in this case the post URLs do not contain any prefix: https://example.com/post-title/. But you need to add one, for example /blog/, to separate the blog from the pages…