The Developer’s Advanced Guide to the wp-config.php 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
Level Up
A collection of resources for WordPress Developers, written and curated by experts
Posts tagged: WordPress Development Tips
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
WP REST API vs admin-ajax.php vs Must-Use Plugin: Handling AJAX Requests in WordPress
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
Feb 22, 2022
Quickly Set Up Google AMP on Your WordPress Site
Should your WordPress sites use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. When it was announced in 2015, Google billed the AMP Project as… Read more
Mike Davey
Jan 13, 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
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 of this is when your WordPress… Read more
Erik
Sep 8, 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
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
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
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
Jan 2, 2019
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
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
Dec 6, 2016
Finding Bottlenecks in WordPress Code
A few months back Iain wrote about how our team pushes each other to be better developers, which included insights into how we improve code quality using tools such as… Read more
Ashley
Nov 15, 2016
Automating Local WordPress Site Setup with Scripts Part 2: Creating a WP-CLI Package
This is article 2 of 3 in the series “Automating Local WordPress Site Setup with Scripts” In my previous article in this series, I discussed some simple ways to make… Read more
Matt Shaw
Oct 18, 2016
Tips for Power Users of WP Migrate DB Pro
As a developer, I love simple tools that do a specific set of tasks really well and then get out of your way. I use tools like MAMP, WP-CLI, Grunt,… Read more
Jeff