Level Up

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

Code17 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,…

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…

Matt Shaw

Nov 25, 2023

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…

Iain Poulson

Aug 25, 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,…

Mike Davey

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Peter Tasker

Jul 2, 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…

Peter Tasker

Aug 21, 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…

Ashley

Jun 13, 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…

Peter Tasker

May 23, 2017

Hooks, Line, and Sinker: WordPress’ New WP_Hook Class

The hooks system is a central pillar of WordPress and with the 4.7 release a major overhaul of how it works was merged. The Trac ticket that initially raised an…

Peter Tasker

Jan 24, 2017

Creating a Custom addon for Local by Flywheel

Update: This post was originally written about Pressmatic before the app was purchased by Flywheel and had its name changed to “Local”. I have updated the post’s text and most…

Jeff

Sep 27, 2016

How My JavaScript Almost Crashed Your Browser and How I Fixed It

About a week before we launched WP Migrate DB Pro 1.6, I had my heart broken by Ashley Rich in our slack channel. It went something like this: /——dramatization——/ @bradt:…

Jeff

May 17, 2016