Level Up

A collection of resources for WordPress Developers, written and curated by experts

Code35 resources

Two Ways to Create Custom WordPress Blocks

The WordPress block editor was made the default editor for WordPress in December 2018. Adoption may have been slow at first, but the pace of development has increased exponentially. Today,… Read more

Mike Davey

Mar 6, 2024

Using JavaScript FileReader to Upload Large Files in Chunks and Avoid Server Limits

If you’ve spent any amount of time messing with PHP config files to get a file to upload, you know that uploading large files can be a real pain. You… Read more

Matt Shaw

Nov 25, 2023

Why You Should Use the WordPress HTTP Functions to Make API Requests

Sometimes your WordPress site needs to talk to other services around the web. This almost exclusively happens using the HTTP protocol. A common example is when your WordPress installation contacts… Read more

Erik

Oct 27, 2023

Examples of Refactoring PHP Code for Better Readability

Examples of Refactoring PHP Code for Better Readability Refactoring code is when you restructure existing code without changing its external behavior. Basically your aim is to make “bad” code better… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

Sep 15, 2023

PHP Static Analysis

Get Started with PHP Static Code Analysis

Imagine a world where your IDE or code editor detected problems before you even ran the code. Imagine if whole categories of errors could be automatically identified and easily eliminated… Read more

Ross Wintle

Dec 21, 2021

The Ultimate Overview of the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) for Developers in 2022

I’ve been loosely following the noise and #wpdrama surrounding Gutenberg for as long as it has been around and honestly for the most part I’ve had negative feelings around it… Read more

Iain Poulson

Aug 25, 2021

How to Use Xdebug for Advanced PHP Debugging

You could just debug your PHP code using dump debugging functions such as error_log, print, and var_dump, and let’s be honest, we’ve all done it a lot! While helpful sometimes,… Read more

Iain Poulson

Apr 21, 2021

PHP and cURL: How WordPress makes HTTP requests

cURL is the workhorse of the modern internet. As its tagline says, cURL is a utility piece of software used to ‘transfer data with urls‘. According to the cURL website,… Read more

Peter Tasker

Mar 24, 2021

Vue vs React: Which is the Best JavaScript Framework in 2021?

React or Vue.js, which JavaScript framework should you choose? React powers WordPress’ new editor while Vue.js is a popular framework in the Laravel community. In this post we’ll go over… Read more

Peter Tasker

Mar 17, 2021

How Unicode Works: What Every Developer Needs to Know About Strings and 🦄

What is Unicode? Waaay back in 2003 Joel Spolsky wrote about Unicode and why every developer should understand what it is and why it’s important. I remember reading that article… Read more

Peter Tasker

Jan 12, 2021

How We Use PhpStorm for WordPress Development

Many of the Delicious Brains team use PhpStorm, the PHP IDE from JetBrains, as their go-to code editor, development environment, and all-round PHP best friend. Some on the team swear… Read more

Iain Poulson

Dec 9, 2020

Set Up Visual Studio Code and xDebug as the Ultimate Editor for WordPress Development

If you keep up with the many text editors and developer tools available, you may have heard of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a free, open source code… Read more

Matt Shaw

Aug 5, 2020

SQL Query Optimization for Faster WordPress Sites

You know that a fast site == happier users, improved ranking from Google, and increased conversions. Maybe you even think your WordPress site is as fast as it can be… Read more

Iain Poulson

Apr 7, 2020

Inertia.js: Building Single-Page Apps the Old Way

Update: We’ve written a newer, more detailed tutorial on Inertia using Laravel Jetstream. I’ve been building Laravel apps for years now. From large, data-heavy apps like Mergebot (RIP 😢) and… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

Dec 4, 2019

PHP Scoper: How to Avoid Namespace Issues in your Composer Dependencies

Composer. If you’ve worked with PHP for any period of time you’ve likely heard of or used Composer. We’ve written about it whole bunch on the blog before, and it’s… Read more

Peter Tasker

Jul 2, 2019

Optimizing Laravel Part 2: Improving Query Performance with Database Indexing

This is article 2 of 4 in the series “Optimizing Laravel” In my last article we looked at some simple commands and some basic code tweaks we could use to… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

Mar 26, 2019

Optimizing Laravel Part 1: The Basics

This is article 1 of 4 in the series “Optimizing Laravel” Laravel is a very popular PHP framework these days and can be used for a range of web applications,… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

Feb 5, 2019

Vue vs React: 2018 Edition

Just over a year ago I wrote a 🔥-y piece comparing Vue.js vs React. Today, the argument about these two JavaScript frameworks is as alive as ever, but over the… Read more

Peter Tasker

Aug 21, 2018

Improve Page Load Time For Your WordPress Site with WP Offload S3: A Case Study

One of the great things about working at Delicious Brains is working on products that I use and love outside of work. I was a WP Migrate DB Pro customer… Read more

Iain Poulson

Aug 7, 2018

Getting into Go for PHP developers

How many programming languages do you regularly work with? But you probably have your favorites. Myself, I’ve built my career on PHP and JavaScript. I’m always looking to learn something… Read more

Peter Tasker

May 30, 2018

The WordPress Developer’s Guide to ES2015 (ES6)

The WordPress developer community is currently abuzz with JavaScript talk, specifically around which JavaScript framework to use in WordPress core. Regardless of which framework is chosen, it’s clear that WordPress… Read more

Ashley

Jun 13, 2017

Building a Command Line Daemon in PHP to Emulate AWS SQSD

Sometimes when you’re building a project there are parts of the architecture that exist on production that don’t exist on your development machine. Those missing parts (like proprietary software that’s… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

May 30, 2017

Refactoring JavaScript: How to Avoid Technical Debt While Working with Legacy Code

Do you have a legacy JavaScript codebase you’re avoiding refactoring? So does WordPress. If you’ve been paying attention to WordPress core lately, you may have noticed that there has been… Read more

Peter Tasker

May 23, 2017

Dependency Management and WordPress: A Proposal

‘Dependency hell’ is a problem faced by all software, and it has been rearing its ugly head in the WordPress space over the last few years with more and more… Read more

Iain Poulson

Mar 22, 2017