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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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 have moved toward more frequent use of modern structures…

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There’s currently a bug in WP Bakery (version 6.0.5) that enables or disables the block editor, Gutenberg, for an entire post type based on a single post on the various “All [Post Type]” admin screens. You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve installed the Classic Editor plugin and have switching editors enabled. You’d expect to be…

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Slider Revolution demo screen

If you’re a WordPress developer moving sites between environments, you might find yourself using the WordPress command line tool WP-CLI to run database search-replaces fairly frequently. This lets you quickly swap out one URL for another in the database (so if I want to replace https://sternerstuff.dev with https://sternerstuffdesign.test, for local testing). I inherit a variety…

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Situation: You’ve got your local codebase for a site in place, but the database got wiped, intentionally or otherwise. Maybe you destroyed your Vagrant box. To quickly pull the production database, I’ll often use a tool like WP Migrate DB Pro. Of course, using that tool (or any other plugin-based database migration tool) depends on…

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Beaver Builder logo

Here at Sterner Stuff, we find that many of our clients benefit from using a flexible and performant theme that can fit a variety of needs. It helps us deliver projects faster, and for many small businesses, it’s a great fit for their needs. We turn to Beaver Builder to fill this role. While most…

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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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