WordPress and web development tips

How to add social sharing buttons to WordPress without a plugin Social sharing buttons let visitors post your content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks. There are many ways to add them without a plugin; here are two. The first uses plain links and loads no third-party scripts at all; the second uses the…

How to add Google Analytics to WordPress Google Analytics tracks your site’s traffic, user behaviour and conversions. There are two ways to add it to WordPress: a plugin, or the tracking snippet added from functions.php. The code way takes a few lines and gives you full control.

Essential WordPress plugins every site should have After years of building and maintaining WordPress sites, a short list of plugins earns a place in almost every project. They solve real, recurring problems (security, performance, SEO, forms, backups) without introducing bloat or vendor lock-in.

JavaScript array methods: map, filter, reduce and more Lists of posts from the REST API, products in a cart, form fields: front-end code works with arrays all the time. The built-in array methods transform, search and sum them without hand-written for loops, and they can be chained into short, readable pipelines.

Is someone using my webcam? It’s no secret that attackers can activate a webcam without the owner’s knowledge. In response, some laptop manufacturers have started adding physical privacy shutters or LED indicators. You can also buy stick-on covers, or just use a piece of tape: cheap and effective. But if you want to know whether…

Import large SQL databases into MySQL As a rule, most WordPress sites have small databases, and by “small” I mean under 100 MB. But e-commerce stores and news portals can easily grow to several hundred megabytes. Trying to import a file that size through phpMyAdmin usually ends with an error: the upload size limit, the…

Create a WordPress child theme in two files When you customise a theme by editing its files, every theme update overwrites your changes. A child theme solves this: it takes all templates and styles from the parent theme, and you keep only the files you change.

How to detect the default page template in WordPress This is a quick post. When you need to check which template a page is using, you’d normally call is_page_template(). But how do you detect that a page uses the default template, the one without a name in the Page Attributes box? There is no template…

Format a date as ISO 8601 in JavaScript ISO 8601 is the standard format for date-time strings used in APIs and databases: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS. JavaScript’s built-in toISOString() always returns UTC. If you need local time in the same format, you have to pad and join the date parts yourself.