Author: Ethan Clevenger
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Publish Duplicate Content Without Getting Punished
Keeping up a blog is hard work. It’s almost never in anyone’s job description at a small business, so it falls through the cracks. You’re saying we need to blog regularly if we want to rank well in search engines? Hm, I think Jane at the front desk likes to write. She’ll do it! Literally…
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Convert WordPress Tables to utf8mb4
WordPress version 4.2 changed up the default database table collation. Swapping to utf8mb4 provides support for a wider range of characters, including emojis. If the contents of your content editor are deleted when saving with an emoji in it, this is probably your issue. If you upgraded to WordPress 4.2 while running MySQL version 5.5.2…
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Trust Laravel Homestead SSL Certificates
By default, Laravel Homestead generates a security certificate for all sites you register, allowing you to quickly develop via HTTPS on your local machine. To get your browser to trust Homestead’s self-signed certificates, you have some options: Click through the privacy warning every time you visit a local site Add each generated certificate one by…
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Setup a WordPress Child Theme for an Existing Parent Theme
Ever found yourself working on a site where someone has made modifications directly to a third-party theme that now has updates? It doesn’t take long in the WordPress business to start running into these. It makes updating really time-consuming. A lot of people will just punt on the updates and manage with their forked theme.…
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Using NextGen Gallery with Bedrock
Bedrock from Roots is a modern take on structuring a WordPress website. It leans on Composer to manage all third-party dependencies (WordPress core, plugins, and themes where possible), flexes PHP environment variables for configuring your site, and so ultimately results in a more robust setup that I’m more comfortable managing. Almost all WordPress projects at…
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Takeaways from Scott Hanselman’s “Scaling Yourself”
Recently a video hit my inbox. It’s a presentation from Scott Hanselman at GOTO conf talking about how to scale your own productivity. Yet another productivity video. I’m a notorious multitasker and my email is always open, responding to the latest thing to hit my inbox, potentially dropping everything to work on something new. He…
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Powering WordPress with Auto-Scaling AWS RDS
Sterner Stuff recently inherited a pretty massive site. With over 100,000 posts, 200,000 attachments, and site loads reaching 4000+ visitors and anywhere from 5-9 logged-in authors at any one time, it’s been one of the largest projects we’ve tackled. While a proper reverse-proxy solution can mitigate the majority of the front-end load on a project…
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Use Laravel Spark Notifications Without Breaking Laravel’s Default Database Notifications
Laravel Spark is a pretty nifty framework that allows you to get up and running quickly with your next software-as-a-service (SaaS) idea. I’ve used it in a couple places, including my leads group management platform called Pond. One of the many features it includes is a notifications system. The system supports two kinds of notifications:…
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2019 PHP Benchmarks – Why You Need PHP 7+
2019 is just around the corner, and with it comes Kinsta’s annual PHP benchmarking. You can check out their full post, or keep reading for a quick look at the stuff most important to WordPress or Laravel users. What is PHP and How Does it Affect SEO? PHP is the server language that powers popular…
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Baking the Perfect Christmas Cookie
Christmas is nothing without trees, stockings, and Santa. While most of us can handle trimming the tree and hanging our stockings, Santa has a few expectations before he comes bounding down the chimney. Mainly: You have to be nice all year! You have to leave cookies If you don’t feel confident that you’ve been nice,…
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FREE Gutenberg Webinar!
WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is here. It’s big, shiny, and a little scary. But it’s the future of WordPress! Features are going to be built around it, and while using the Classic Editor plugin means you don’t have to adopt the new editor right away, you’re only punting the football down the field. In my world,…
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Function to Check if Divi is Active
There are times you may want your WordPress page templates to behave differently depending on whether or not a page builder has been enabled on it. For example, I built out a custom page template for a client that had content that was populated via custom fields, but also space for whatever was in the…