Level Up

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

Posts tagged: WordPress Development Tips

How to Set Up AMP on WordPress

Should your WordPress sites use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. In this article, we’ll cover how AMP works, how to use both… Read more

Mike Davey

Feb 1, 2024

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

Handling AJAX Requests in WordPress: WP REST API vs admin-ajax.php vs Must-Use Plugin

The WordPress REST API was merged into WordPress core in version 4.7. Before that, developers relied on the default AJAX implementation, otherwise known as admin-ajax after the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php file that… Read more

Matt Shaw

Oct 17, 2023

Mastering Migrations: Faster, Easier, and Safer Ways to Move Your WordPress Sites

Every WordPress developer knows the feeling of despair when a migration fails, balanced by the immense feelings of relief when one succeeds. It’s a frustrating process for many devs, with… Read more

Kevin Hoffman

Mar 9, 2023

DE{CODE} 2023: Developer Focused WordPress Education

You know code…but do you know DE{CODE}? Hosted by WP Engine, this 100% virtual event is dedicated to helping WordPress developers build smarter, maximize conversions, and modernize the user experience.… Read more

Mike Davey

Mar 3, 2023

Remotely Back Up Your WordPress Database and Media With WP Migrate CLI

Keeping regular backups of your WordPress installs is one of the most important things you should do after you launch a site. If you search for the term “backup” in… Read more

Mike Davey

Oct 25, 2022

The Developer’s Advanced Guide to the wp-config File

How well do you really know wp-config? There’s a surprising amount of power in those few lines of PHP! This article is a tour of some bits of wp-config that… Read more

Ross Wintle

Sep 27, 2022

Installing, Updating, and Managing WordPress Plugins With WP-CLI

WP-CLI allows you to do practically anything you can do in the WordPress admin, but on the command line. This saves a lot of time and provides a cleaner workflow.… Read more

Erik

Jul 26, 2022

Our Guide to WP-CLI Command Structure

The WordPress command line interface (WP-CLI) is an incredible tool for improving your development workflow. Understanding how commands are structured is key to using WP-CLI to its full potential. In… Read more

Erik

Jun 28, 2022

Understanding WordPress GUIDs: What They Are, and Why Change Them

The WordPress GUID is a unique identifier for individual posts, pages, media, and practically any other custom post type. As such, it’s a key element in rendering your WordPress content… Read more

Brad

Nov 17, 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

Why You Should be Using WP_DEBUG_LOG in Your WordPress Development

Whether you’re a developer, or a site owner troubleshooting a problem with your site, understanding the WP_DEBUG_LOG constant for turning on the WordPress debug log is very important. In this… Read more

Brad

Apr 13, 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

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

The Ultimate Developer’s Guide to the WordPress Database

Here at Delicious Brains we eat, drink and sleep databases. However, we believe that any developer working with WordPress should have some level of knowledge about the database that sits… Read more

Iain Poulson

Jun 3, 2020

Vagrant vs Docker: Which is better for WordPress development?

Before Docker came on the scene Vagrant was the go-to solution for creating development environments that can be configured independently of your machine and shared with a team. There are… Read more

Gilbert Pellegrom

Mar 31, 2020

Amazon S3 vs CloudFront: Why Delivering WordPress Media Directly From S3 is a Bad Idea

Amazon S3 is a sensible choice for storing your website’s assets in the cloud, but for delivery the benchmarks show that using a CDN is necessary to see any major… Read more

Matt Shaw

Mar 10, 2020

Blog Comments Are Dead. Or Are They?

Blog post comments are dead. Or wait, they’re back. They’re definitely a pain. But also maybe they’re worth it? The debate about blog post comments and whether they’re worth it… Read more

Iain Poulson

Jan 2, 2019

How We Create WordPress Plugins: From Idea to Release

How We Create WordPress Plugins: From Idea to Release

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ve probably seen some of our tutorials on developing plugins using different technologies like React and Vue. But when not writing… Read more

Matt Shaw

Apr 24, 2018

How We Built Full Composer Support For Our Premium WordPress Plugins

Composer is the dependency manager of choice for PHP. It allows you to declare a list of project dependencies and will install and update them directly from the command line,… Read more

Ashley

Feb 27, 2018

Using the New PDF Preview Images in WordPress 4.7 in the Real World

When WordPress 4.7 was released at the end of 2016 most of the response was around the new REST API endpoints for posts, comments, terms, users, meta, and settings. However,… Read more

Iain Poulson

May 16, 2017

Introducing WP Image Processing Queue – On‑the‑Fly Image Processing Done Right

I’ve been bugging core contributors and plugin authors about background processing for a year and half now. To the point where Krogsgard even made fun of me for it at… Read more

Brad

Mar 7, 2017

Automating Local WordPress Site Setup with Scripts Part 3: Automating the Rest

This is article 3 of 3 in the series “Automating Local WordPress Site Setup with Scripts” In my last post in the Automating Local WordPress Setup series, I created a… Read more

Matt Shaw

Feb 21, 2017

Deploying WordPress Plugins with Travis CI

Ever since I built my first WordPress plugin, the process of deploying the code to the WordPress.org Subversion repository has been a painful one. With Git as the widespread VCS… Read more

Iain Poulson

Dec 6, 2016