In September’s WordPress plugin acquisition news, StellarWP acquired LearnDash, the de facto learning management system plugin for WordPress. We don’t do a lot of LMS work over here at Sterner Stuff, so, you know, whatever. But if you receive any kind of business-minded WordPress newsletter or are otherwise plugged into “the business of WordPress”, you…

Read More

A great way to organically increase your Instagram followers is to run promotions specifically for followers. We recently organized a promotion for Porterhouse Clothing where followers were automatically entered in a gift card drawing, plus an extra entry for tagging friends in comments. Of course, this meant pulling a list of followers, which Instagram doesn’t…

Read More

Here at Sterner Stuff, we don’t like throwing away existing websites and content. We call that stuff “equity”, and no one wants to throw away equity. When possible, we’ll repurpose as much of a WordPress site as possible when implementing a new design, features, etc. So while it may seem like a brand new site,…

Read More

If your WordPress website is proxied behind Cloudflare, the IP address reported to your server isn’t the actual IP address of the original request. It’s a Cloudflare IP. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter, but if you’re using WP fail2ban, this causes issues. The Problem By default, fail2ban in combination with WP fail2ban works…

Read More

WP User Avatar, now commandeered by ProfilePress, is significantly more bloated than it once was. There are a variety of alternatives to turn to if you want to replace it, but I’ve chosen (and recommend) WP User Avatars, maintained by WordPress core contributor John James Jacoby. The migration here is pretty simple. WP User Avatar…

Read More

If you’re generating PDFs from HTML in the Laravel world, you’re likely using something like Snappy, wrapped conveniently in a service provider by barryvdh/laravel-snappy. Snappy depends on the wkhtmltopdf binary to function. Per the documentation, this binary is conveniently available via Composer: But that package hasn’t been updated in 4+ years, meaning the binary is…

Read More

This question has been documented about a million places around the internet with a variety of convoluted answers. How can we upgrade Laravel Homestead without losing our MySQL databases? Instead of writing your own mysqldump commands, or copying and pasting one from an internet stranger, there’s actually functionality for this built right into Homestead. If…

Read More

Google is rolling out a new set of metrics designed to evaluate the performance of websites across the internet. How your site performs, according to these metrics, will directly impact your website’s organic search engine results page (SERP) ranking – that is, how close to the top of Google you are. Site speed has always…

Read More

One of the biggest struggles facing both the maintainers of WordPress and individuals tasked with maintaining WordPress sites is updates. Running updates often gets ignored by non-technical users afraid of breaking things, and the WordPress core team is doing everything they can to mitigate the security risks involved with not updating. If you don’t install…

Read More

Often, it’s very simple to disable a filter or action in WordPress. Core’s adherence, merit notwithstanding, to working in the global namespace meant many plugins and themes followed suit. So unhooking a function was as simple as: But as PHP has matured, plugin and theme authors are more often using modern structures and practices, like…

Read More