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Selecting Data from a Serialized Array in MySQL

February 5, 2020

Recently I needed to produce an export of some data from a client’s WordPress site. Unfortunately the data they needed was stored in the wp_postmeta table as a serialized array. Pro Tip: Want to make sure you migrate your WordPress databases without breaking serialized data? Check out WP Migrate DB Pro Of course, I could […]

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How To Set up Password Authentication on a Site with MAMP Pro

July 30, 2019

Recently I needed to debug an issue that was happening on a staging site that is protected by basic authentication. To try and recreate the issue I needed to password protect my local development site in the same way. I’m using MAMP Pro for my local sites and as I couldn’t find a post about […]

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Clearing the WordPress oEmbed Cache

May 31, 2019

WordPress has great support for embedding content from other services just by using a URL. For example, if you paste a YouTube URL into the editor, when WordPress displays the post it will render an embedded YouTube player on your site. However, sometimes oEmbeds don’t load and you’re left with the text of the URL […]

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Adding New ACF Repeater Items to the Top

May 27, 2019

Last year I wrote about using an Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) repeater field to manage data in a custom table for storing versions of the Delicious Brains plugins. In the table, the versions are rendered in descending order, so the latest version is at the top. However, when a new row is added to the […]

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Managing WordPress Custom Tables with an Advanced Custom Fields Repeater Field

November 28, 2018

Whilst working on the deliciousbrains.com site we had the need to store some data about a custom post type. Because of the nature of the data it didn’t make sense to try and shoehorn it into the post meta table as a serialized array. Instead, creating a custom table to store it was the better […]

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Key Person Dependency in OSS Projects or: Do We Need to Talk About Ryan McCue?

June 1, 2017

The latest discussion happening amongst WordPress core contributors and developers is about which new JavaScript framework to adopt in WordPress core. I’m not going to wade into that debate here, but rather pick up on something in this WP Tavern article about the debate, as an argument against using Vue.js: “I’m uncomfortable relying on a […]

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Unit Testing Custom WP-CLI Commands

November 1, 2016

Recently I’ve been spending pretty much all my time working on Mergebot for Delicious Brains, which mainly consists of building the WordPress plugin part of the project. I’ve also been spending a good deal of time refactoring code, making code testable, and generally implementing best practices to ensure code is maintainable and has high unit […]

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Workflow Automation for WP App Store

July 26, 2014

This is the second post in the series about WP App Store. The series aims to chart the progress of the project since purchase, from experiments in marketing to technical aspects of the site. In this post I will cover the improvements to the workflow around on-boarding and managing of deals. There are some aspects […]

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ACF PRO and the Great Backward Compatibility Debate

July 22, 2014

The developer release of Advanced Custom Fields PRO two weeks ago caused quite a stir in the WordPress community. It sparked a debate about backward compatibility, business models, and developer entitlement with free plugins. However, for me this debate actually highlighted wider issues around WordPress site development and perhaps more importantly the community. So in […]

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Marketing WP App Store

June 1, 2014

Writing code is easy. Marketing is hard. I have been marketing  on a small scale since launching the premium version. This has been mainly through Twitter engagement and blogging. In the beginning I tried using Google AdWords but found the return on investment was low and didn’t pursue paid advertising methods any further. When I […]

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