Tag: WordPress
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Image Lightbox Gallery
A common requirement when building websites is to implement some sort of lightbox for viewing thumbnail images at a larger size. These image thumbnails are displaying throughout the content, as opposed to being displayed in a dedicated gallery layout. What I wanted was a simple way to enhance the core Image block to support a…
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Reading Time Block
Part of migrating my custom Bootstrap-based WordPress theme to a block theme involved re-implementing various custom plugins and functionality I had built over time. One of these was a shortcode that displayed the estimated reading time for a post. While I could have simply ported the shortcode into the new theme, I saw an opportunity…
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Dashboard Widgetizer
Typically, when you log into a WordPress website, you are redirected to the admin dashboard. Here you’ll usually see some default widgets. These range from useless, such as the Welcome widget and WordPress Events and News widget, to quasi-functional, like the Quick Draft widget and Site Health Status widget. But for many users, none of…
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Cron Zombies
WordPress has an internal task scheduling system called WP-Cron, which handles automated tasks such as publishing scheduled posts or checking for updates. While similar to Linux cron, WP-Cron only triggers during page loads, meaning tasks won’t run unless someone visits the site. For most websites, this design is sufficient. However, some plugins register cron jobs…
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Generate Draft Posts
This is the first post in a series relating to Project Backlog. The first step was to review the list of projects to see where the starting point should be. This was a time-consuming process, considering one of the rationale for the project is to get a better sense of the backlog itself. What I…
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WordPress, Google PageSpeed Insights and WebP Image Formats
If you evaluate your website using Google PageSpeed Insights, you may find it complaining that you’re not using the WebP image format. First Scan The first scan with PageSpeed Insights gave me pretty good results for desktop, and somewhat poor results for mobile. The highest rated opportunity promised to save seven seconds in load time.…
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Bash Script To Create WordPress Site
A few months ago, I wrote a bash script that creates a database with a few simple prompts. Even though I knew the database commands from memory, it was still more convenient to only input the necessary data. I decided to build out a similar workflow for creating WordPress sites. At the core of this…
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A Plugin For Developing WordPress Plugins
There are a number of helper functions that I often find I’m missing when developing WordPress plugins. I’ve decided to put some of those in a WordPress plugin itself. I called this plugin Helpful Strangers because the functions are strangers to the platform, and only helpful functions are included. Because this plugin includes functions that…