Category: WordPress

Building My Network

Over the past three years, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit on a single project. It started off innocently. Since then it’s grown to occupy a significant place in my daily thoughts.

As you read this, you’re experiencing the product of these efforts. Perhaps you clicked on an eth.pw short URL to get here. If not, your browser still had to figure out how to get to ethitter.com. Now that you’re here, maybe you need to contact me via email. To make any of these endeavors possible, I’ve built a personal “network” of servers and had endless fun doing so.
Continue reading Building My Network

Hello PHP 7!

With relatively little difficulty, I’m now running PHP 7 alongside PHP 5.6. PHP 7 was released at the beginning of the month, and WordPress was one of the platforms tested against. Given that I can’t stop tinkering with this server’s configuration, I really had no excuse not to set up PHP 7.

Given the myriad services I’m running, I couldn’t switch to PHP 7 outright. While WordPress and YOURLS (powering my url shortener, eth.pw) both support PHP 7, the compatibility list basically ended there.

As I went into this with a fair bit of trepidation (and many backups), what follows is a bit about my experience.

Continue reading Hello PHP 7!

Ten Years of Automattic?!? Crazy.

My employer, Automattic, recently marked its tenth anniversary. For a web company, that’s pretty impressive.

Really, think back ten years to the online services you were using and I’d bet that only a few–though notable ones–still exist. Even as I’m approaching my three-year anniversary with the company, I still find it hard to believe that I get paid to do what I do, without leaving my apartment.

In addition to this video, we’ve a post on our primary product’s blog that highlights the scale of what Automattic and WordPress have accomplished in those ten years: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/celebrating-10-years-of-wordpress-com-automattic/.

What I Wish I’d Known When I Started–WordCamp Winnipeg 2015

I’m presenting today at WordCamp Winnipeg. My talk is titled What I Wish I’d Known When I Started and I described it this way:

WordPress provides many convenient functions, perhaps too many. All too often, new developers reinvent the wheel, as the cliche goes, when Core already has a function or utility to accomplish the same. Five years on and thinking back to when I started building WordPress plugins, I could’ve saved a lot of time and avoided a lot of anxiety if I’d known where to look.

Slides are available at https://speakerdeck.com/ethitter/what-i-wish-id-known-when-i-started; video will be posted as soon as it’s available. I’ve also embedded the slides below.

A copy of the slides along with their presenter notes is available at https://slides.ethitter.com/wcwpg-what-i-wish-id-known/slides-with-notes.pdf.

My plugins and WordPress 4.2

WordPress 4.2 comes out tomorrow, and one of the important changes for developers relates to how taxonomy terms are handled. As part of a multi-release effort to improve the database schema for taxonomies and their terms, an antiquated feature of WordPress is being undone. In short, terms with the same name are no longer shared across taxonomies, and 4.2 will start splitting shared terms on update. For example, if you have a category called Musings and a tag of the same name, they’ll no longer share a term ID once edited in WordPress 4.2 and later.

Continue reading My plugins and WordPress 4.2

From URL to Query–WordPressDC Meetup

Tonight I’ve been invited to present my talk, From URL to Query, to the WordPressDC meetup group. I recently gave an introductory version of this talk at WordCamp San Francisco, and tonight’s version is a more-detailed expansion akin to the version I’ve presented at past WordCamps. I’ve described the talk as follows:

Ever wonder what process WordPress undertakes when someone visits your site? Or how it translates that nice permalink to the database query that ultimately delivers the content your visitors requested? Or what it takes to load the appropriate template from your site’s theme?

In this talk, I’ll walk through WordPress’ loading process and shed some light on the various APIs used. I’ll also discuss how these APIs work together to make the software function.

Slides are be available at https://slides.ethitter.com/from-url-to-query-wpdc/. If the session’s recorded, I’ll embed the video once it’s available.

From URL To Query–WordCamp San Francisco 2014

WordCamp San Francisco is today, and I’ve been invited to present a five-minute lightning talk as part of this afternoon’s program. Drawing from my longer talk of the same name (given at past WordCamps), From URL to Query describes the process WordPress undertakes to deliver the right content for each URL.

Ever wonder what process WordPress undertakes when someone visits your site? Or how it translates that nice permalink to the database query that ultimately delivers the content your visitors requested? Or what it takes to load the appropriate template from your site’s theme?

In this talk, I’ll walk through WordPress’ loading process and shed some light on the various APIs used. I’ll also discuss how these APIs work together to make the software function.

Slides from today’s presentation are at https://slides.ethitter.com/from-url-to-query-wcsf/. The complete deck is also available at https://slides.ethitter.com/from-url-to-query/.