David ArtissPlugin developer, Core contributor and support volunteer. Yeah, I’m a WordPress fan!
No, not the year, the WordPress theme. Yesterday I moved this site from Twenty Nineteen which, I’ll admit, I hadn’t done much with. The latest theme, however, is so much more and it was a pleasure creating a new design. I hope you like it.
Update: And now hosted on PHP 7.4!
Whilst new rules are sorting out many aspects of WordPress development that causes headaches for users (e.g. standardised admin messaging), how plugins (and, in some cases, themes) allocate menus in WP Admin are not currently covered.
As a result, some developers (and it’s note-worthy that most of those that fall into this category are making a living from their plugin work) are happy to push the level of acceptability.
So, in this article I’m going to demonstrate some of the things that developers will do with their menus and compare that to the standard approach taken by the core version of WordPress.
My WordPress plugins have been in desperate need of a lick-of-paint when it comes to the images used on them for a while – and by “images”, I mean those used in the WordPress repository.
There are actually 2 you can provide – an avatar and a banner image. I’ll come to the banner in a bit, but I decided that I needed a single source for the avatars, so they all had a matching design.
I ran the above using a carbon footprint calculator available at websitecarbon.com. Bearing in mind I’ve done nothing to keep the footprint low, I’m quite happy with the result of this.
WP-CLI is a rather splendid command-line method of interacting with your WordPress site. You can use it to automate installs, update plugins and all sorts. At WordPress VIP, clients use it, in particular, to power batch updates – maybe some image compression that they’ve not done in the past, re-categorising articles, all sorts.
If you’re using WordPress and don’t use WP-CLI, I would highly recommend checking it out (especially so if you’re looking for a job in the VIP team 😉). However, this post isn’t about using it but to give recommendations on how to best write your scripts.