Category: WordPress

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What You Need to Understand When Building SaaS for Business with WordPress Multisite

We have built 7 successful SaaS solutions on top of WordPress, some having tens of thousands of subsites in a Multisite environment. I’ve personally consulted and built extensions for a couple more with over 100K subsites in a network, which was pretty cool. Basically, no project is complicated or problematic until it grows. Real issues are faced once your regular traffic and user base grows and you start hitting various limits in terms of performance and security when serving data to your visitors.  1. You Need to Bridge the Disconnect Between SaaS and Enterprises Let’s leave WordPress aside for a… Continue Reading
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What Does Technical Debt Mean?

What makes a $2,000 development project different from a $40K one? Code quality. The $2,000 project incurs the so-called "technical debt". A messy, spaghetti-like codebase is 5x, 10x, 20x more complicated to maintain, which skyrockets the maintenance costs over time. Technical debt is a well-known phenomenon in tech. But due to the price cuts, it happens all the time. The chart below shows the result of a survey conducted by CodeAhoy among software developers. Accordingly, the majority of the respondents are swamped with projects that have technical debt. [Tweet "There is a fine balance between providing a usable piece of… Continue Reading
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Fighting the Scope Creep

Scope creep is the process of adding more and more features to a fixed-cost project at the end of the development process or during delivery. Long story short, the client expects more features, better UI, or additional services within the agreed quote, which is not expected and hasn’t been planned by the web development agency. We have written a long Scope creep post for the DevriX tutorials section defining the problem, how to identify it, and the possible resolutions (at least for new projects). The CHAOS report identifies the majority of the projects as projects that failed or led to… Continue Reading
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How to Manage A Network of Websites

A common question that we get from companies maintaining multiple sites, advanced or medium businesses with multiple publishing websites, and other forms of organizations that have to maintain several websites at once is: How do you manage and maintain a network of websites? Most of their concerns revolve around finding the best ways to offload, outsource, or work with maintenance and development companies to ensure efficient management of these websites.   Here are several steps that you need to consider when you need to offload your websites to a third-party vendor or build the right team that will help maintain this… Continue Reading
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Submit iframe Form To External Site

Many advertising services and external APIs provide iframes to be embedded on external sites, but also require some data to be transferred from one site to the other. iframe tags are being restricted for many reasons, mostly security. There are iframe busters (or framekillers) that export the iframe behavior in the parent window, takeover the browser, so to speak. If you need something 'in-between', i.e. a controlled iframe on site 1 which, when submitted, loads a new browser page with the request data valid, then add a _parent target to the form, i.e.: [php] <form method="POST" action="http://example.org/someurl.php" target="_parent"> // form… Continue Reading
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On WordPress, Windows, Knowledge and Testing

I had an interesting conversation with a friend earlier today. It started with the persistent state of WordPress in some point of time, backing up and restoring a state after a failure, testing plugins here and there and keeping the site as useful, flexible and stable as possible at the same time. The gist of that was the conflict between "keeping up and using the best tools" and "making the software fast and stable". Windows I haven't been using Windows for several years now, but I am supporting and maintaining my family's hardware and software (and there is a Windows-specific… Continue Reading
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Building a WordPress Website

With 2.5 billion people using Internet over the world (and counting) positioning a business online is crucial. Picking the right solution for your business website is just as important, as it would determine different factors, such as: the cost of building a website the ease of maintenance and extensibility availability in terms of experts being able to create and extend the platform in time available resources for the look or functionality Why WordPress? WordPress has been available for 10 years now and unlike many platforms, it's user base has been growing with time. With approximately 70 million websites based on WordPress… Continue Reading
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The Cost of a Project

I just got back from the supermarket. While leaving with my groceries, I overheard the following conversation: Come on, you even teach while sitting - that's such a lack of motivation!I do what I got paid to do.So, if you were earning X extra every month, you would be more excited?Sure. The Human Motivation There are various psychological research studies out there on human motivation, the bounders one would like to reach, the progressive lust for more and so forth, but it was an honest and valid response. Normally I would argue because it's a lousy job in a way… Continue Reading
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1000+ Downloads of DX Plugin Base

Almost 2 years ago I built the DX Plugin Base plugin as a skeleton for my own plugins - to copy-paste snippets that I regularly use like: adding custom post types, metaboxes, implementing the Settings API and so forth. Few days ago it hit the 1000 downloads mark and I'm pretty happy that other people find that useful. Recently I saw a plugin published on WordPress.org by another author (I kinda inherited that since the author left my contributor name in the readme too) completely built on the top of the Plugin Base. As a reminder, I welcome all contributions as… Continue Reading
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Choose Your Leaders – Time and Knowledge

The world is built and based on several simple rules and everything else relies on them. One of the main concepts is the leadership - each group has a leader (or few) responsible for managing everything important for a community. The Big Picture On a larger scale this could be the president, the God, the corporation's CEO etc. Leadership unites masses in a way that the effort is channeled in the same direction, leading to better results and team work. Open Source On a technology level, there are leaders who have been significantly helpful for a given product, language, platform,… Continue Reading