Why Custom WordPress Websites Outperform Page Builders for Long-Term Growth

Page Builders Don’t Save Time I’ve had many clients come from Wix, Squarespace, or page-builder-heavy WordPress sites. They’re tired of slow load times, confusing interfaces, and limited flexibility. They have a vision but it’s being blocked by a one-size-fits-all page builder. Custom Websites Creating a custom website from your design is a better approach. We’ll … Read more

Why Your Website Needs a Care Plan

Regular Website Care is a Good Investment for your Business Make sure you have a plan for your WordPress website Every website needs a plan if something goes wrong.  Websites don’t exist in a static environment and they need to stay up-to-date in the ever-changing environment of the web.  Your customers rely on your website … Read more

Maine WordPress Meetup, March 16, 2016

Here are the slides for my talk about the WordPress JSON REST API at the Maine WordPress Meetup in Westbrook, ME on March 16, 2016.   http://www.slideshare.net/AndreGagnon1/maine-wordpress-meetup-json-rest-api-3162016   Thank to all those who attended.  We had a great discussion about development after talk.

Learn Javascript, deeply.

That’s the homework assignment given to the WordPress community from Matt Mullenwegg’s State of the Word address.  To repeat: ‘Learn Javascript, deeply’. A lot of sessions and conversations at WordCampUS 2015 backed up the notion of WordPress and the rest of the web moving towards JavaScript development.  The examples were many: Adam Silverstein of 10up … Read more

WordCamp US 2015, Day 2

The Setting Another day of great people and interesting conversations.  Lunch was amazing today, for a conference.  BBQ chicken, beef brisket, corn bread!  Soda! Not just water, ha.  The after-party at Lucky Strike bowling alley was perfect.  Open bar, catered food, fun people, though I couldn’t find the ping pong tables.  I wanted to challenge … Read more

WordCamp US 2015, Day 1

The Setting From the beginning, this WordCamp US felt a little different than the WordCamps I’ve attended previously.  Many people I’d seen as speakers previously were attendees.  Many popular WordPress twitter folks and bloggers were there, just walking around.  The topics of the talks seem higher level, more for developers and there was a lot … Read more

Web Developer Productivity, Workflow, and Motivational Tricks

Being self-employed also means being a self-starter, and keeping yourself motivated, because no one else will be there to tell you to get started.   I’ve read a lot of books and increasing productivity, and tried a lot of things. The best productivity book I’ve read recently is Essentialism by Greg McKeown.  Letting go of … Read more

Seacoast Dev WordPress Meetup, December 2, 2015

After introductions among a dozen folks we learned we had a mix of developers, users, and those curious about WooCommerce. WooCommerce David Long is talking about his experience with WooCommerce and WordPress.  WooCommerce (WC) is the rare, really solid WordPress plugin that is used to create online stores using WordPress.  David had a client with … Read more

WordPress, JavaScript, and Me

With the release of Calypso, Automattic has shown their view of the future of WordPress.com and how users will interact with sites.  JavaScript driven applications offer a faster interaction for folks working on their sites. Time to jump in and learn how to use JavaScript to create interfaces and allow clients to interact with their … Read more

Seacoast NH WordPress Dev Meetup – An Open Forum

wordpress-developmentA [swd] took place on June 3, 2014 and, due to a last minute schedule change, we had no presentation.  This gave us the opportunity to switch to an open forum, because there’s nothing easier for us than to talk about WordPress development for 2 hours.  Thanks to Alpha Loft on Green Street in Portsmouth, NH for providing our venue.

Custom Templates for Custom Post Types

We started off talking about an issue David Long was having with creating custom templates for custom post types. David found himself generating a bunch of templates to query a custom post type for different meta values on a meta key.   David wanted to re-use WordPress Loop code and not repeat the code in the templates (DRY).  One solution (of a few) was to pass in the desired query meta value in the page URL and use the HTML/PHP $_GET[ ‘value_name’] variable .  Code was then written to grab the value of this variable (with error checking) and pass it to the Loop query.  Now David could write one template to handle all the queries.

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Seacoast NH WordPress Meetup – Amp Up Your Admin

wordpress-developmentA [swd] took place on May 7, 2014 and Amanda Giles gave a presentation on some simple tricks to customize and improve the WordPress Admin pages.  Thanks to Alpha Loft in Portsmouth, NH for providing our venue.

The meeting was well attended with 10 WordPress developers.  Brief introductions from around the table spurred a conversation about the best WordPress plugin to use for backups.  BackupBuddy and UpdraftPlus were recommended, but we all agreed the wide variety of client  server configurations made consistency a challenge for backup plugins.

Tonight’s presentation was very PHP code-based and Amanda dove right in with some working demos.  The functions.php file and other data can be found on our Meetup page.

Amanda covered the following topics

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