Category: Development

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Why Most Software Engineers Don’t Contribute to Open Source?

People contribute to open source for different reasons and with different agendas in mind. There are different philosophies and theories about open source products. Some claim that there is reciprocity if you use something for free. Others demand a regime similar to socialism and Marx’s slogan - “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That doesn’t resonate with everyone. People are somewhat selfish by nature and solving global problems isn’t always at the top of their minds. That’s the reality we live in. Some do genuinely support the philosophy and spend a significant amount of… Continue Reading
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How to Identify, Debug, and Improve Messed Up WordPress Code

Debugging and improving upon a messed up WordPress project is quite a challenge. A common misconception in the WordPress world is that a website would work "just fine" by setting up a few WordPress plugins combined with a premium theme. Sure - you can also set up a massive enterprise platform that consumes 8GB of RAM for the first load but it doesn’t make it efficient or the right choice for a successful project. Building a website that is supposed to scale and grow with time by bundling a few dozen plugins in it is “doing it wrong”. WordPress Plugins… Continue Reading
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How Does WordPress Maintain Backward Compatibility Over Time?

Backward compatibility is one of the pillars of the platform that comes with the highest priority. Over the past ten years, the technological progress in WordPress has been moving somewhat slowly, but that ensures that no WordPress website would be left behind. For quite some time now, WordPress is officially supporting all PHP versions starting from PHP 5.2.4. Of course, PHP 7 is the recommended version for all hosts, but it would be unfair to bump it up to 5.6 and screw tens of millions of websites that still run on low-quality hosting infrastructures. Stats gathered by all websites running… Continue Reading
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Quora AmA Recap – Enterprise WordPress Development Business

I've been spending plenty of time on Quora over the past months. In fact, it probably is my primarily place online - excluding work-related activities with my team, clients, and partners. It's a brilliant platform for various reasons: I educate myself on areas where I lack enough expertise. I validate my theories through the answers of others. I receive instant feedback on my comments and answers through views, upvotes, and the overall ranking system. Some of my answers have been republished on Forbes, Inc, HuffPost, Apple News. I also follow a number of CEOs and directors from companies that I respect and… Continue Reading
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New: Group Mentorship for WordPress Developers and Agencies

Over the past few years I've been receiving a steady flow of incoming inquiries for mentorship, coaching, consulting and general assistance coming from WordPress freelancers, consultants, developers, agency owners and tech leads in WordPress agencies. [caption id="attachment_12365" align="aligncenter" width="960"] A technical presentation on WordPress Code Architecture at WordCamp Netherlands[/caption] Currently, I work with a small group of people who reach out once or twice a month and ask for strategic decisions, sales strategy, technical advice on building a reliable infrastructure, marketing help, getting involved with the WordPress community and so forth. Some of my peers are actively growing and I'm super… Continue Reading
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Bulgaria PHP Conference – Day 2 Recap

Today was the last day of the Bulgaria PHP Conference and after my Day 1 review, here's my recap post from Day 2. First off, I'd like to thank the organizers for the splendid event - great organization, incredible speakers list, solid WiFi, several areas for hanging out and a great atmosphere - looking forward to the 2016 version! Drupal 8: The Crash Course Larry Garfield gave a great talk explaining the transition from their handcrafted code built until Drupal 7 to their current code base in Drupal 8 based on a lot of open source libraries and tools. His Drupal 8: The Crash… Continue Reading
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Bulgaria PHP Conference – Day 1 Recap

Bulgaria is hosting its first official Bulgaria PHP Conference this weekend and I was honored to attend and present my WordPress Core Architecture talk today. I usually don't do recaps here - mostly because lots of my readers attend WordCamps with me, watch the talks on WordPress.tv, follow Twitter hashtags and so forth, or I go to other conferences that focus on different areas unrelated to what I tend to blog about here. PHP, however, is the core of the WordPress platform, and the line-up this year is magnificent, which is why I feel obliged to share a quick overview about some of the… Continue Reading
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WordPress Installs in Root and Subfolder With nginx

We've been hosting various WordPress installs on the same server, as well as subdomain and subfolder multisites on nginx, but I had to fix a new subsite on a WordPress install that included another WordPress instance as a subfolder. The scenario was related to a large WordPress setup with bbPress that had to be split up for performance and security reasons, including a redesign of the main site. The forums install was left untouched in terms of UX, the main site was drastically improved - with a new theme and hundreds of thousands of post entries down thanks to bbPress install… Continue Reading
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DX Plugin Base – Ongoing Updates

I built DX Plugin Base several years ago as a general plugin framework that we could use internally, and something that could serve as a code repository for most of our projects. I'm really happy that some folks got the plugin and built their own reusing most of our code, such as the Metwit Weather Widget. Since we hired a few more folks helping with both client work and internal projects, over the last couple of weeks we have been brainstorming on what could be added to our existing code base in order to improve our plugins - new features, enhancements, and… Continue Reading
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BackPress and WordPress Development

Today WP Tavern announced that BackPress is coming back from the dead. For those of you unfamiliar with BackPress, it's a collection of PHP scripts (or a library, or a sort of framework if you want) for building web applications. On top of that the syntax is quite similar to the WordPress APIs, since it's a "simplified" version for building web applications with classes and collections of functions that you can find in the WordPress core as well. Now, the project has been abandoned for quite some time, and most of the code is no longer usable. It has been updated in… Continue Reading