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How I automate WordPress Plugin Releases with a Script

Creating WordPress plugins is a big part of what I do. Part of that is distribution with releases. There’s a lot of files that don’t need to be in the finished product. In fact, some plugins would be 10x the size if I included the node_modules directory, for example. Even when size isn’t the concern, all those useless files cluttering up the directory – like the .DS_Store files have no business being in a production release.

Sometimes, I manually create a copy of the plugin and strip out the extra files and then zip it up, but it just feels wrong to have to do that. At one point, I had a gulp file that would build and minify the resources and then create a copy of the plugin without all of the build files and zip it up. The trouble with that is that it was an extra step in creating a new plugin, and it felt a bit redundant to have the same file in all of my plugins.

The Solution: An Interactive Build Script

So, today, I decided I wanted a shell script to live in my plugins directory that would create a plugin release for any given plugin. I gave Claude Code the general requirements of what I wanted, and I wasn’t even thinking about versioning, but it captured the version from the plugin without my asking for it and added it to the zip file.

How It Works

The script follows a straightforward process:

Version Detection: First, it reads the plugins’s main file and extracts the version number from the header.

Clean Build Directory: It creates a temporary directory and uses rsync to copy the plugin files while excluding everything that doesn’t belong in production. The exclusion list is comprehensive, covering version control files ,development dependencies, documentation, and more. To make it a bit more versatile, I just added support for a .buildignore file to add custom exclusions or override default exclusions.

Archive Creation: Once the clean copy is ready, it creates a zip archive with a proper name format. If an older version already exists, it removes it first, to avoid confusion.

No Build Step: Despite the name, you might notice that there’s no build step listed. My immediate need was the packaging step, but I’m currently working on adding a build step, complete with a buildconfig.json file to handle any use case.

Building It with Claude Code

I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code for several months now, and this project was a perfect test case. I spent 5-10 minutes on something that might have taken an hour or two, because, while I understand it, shell scripting is not something I do everyday. One thing I like about Claude Code in general is that it is very good at documenting a project’s architecture through markdown notes. Having AI remember your decisions is incredibly valuable.

The initial version of the script came together quickly, but then I remembered that I didn’t want to have to type a full plugin name as a parameter. I was really impressed with how Claude Code Handled refinements. When I asked it to scan the plugins directory and give me a menu, it quickly restructured the script to accommodate both approaches without breaking existing functionality.

One thing I’ve learned from building tools with AI assistance is that the quality of your results depends heavily on how well you can articulate what you want. If you can describe the problem or feature in a clear an detailed way, the AI can produce something genuinely useful, but also, not all AI models are created equal. I’ve also worked with OpenCode, which is a similar tool that allows you to several different models, and, despite having a similar markdown context storage, Grok Code Fast 1 is laughably bad at producing the desired output.

The Broader Picture: AI-Assisted Development

This script is a small example of how AI coding tools can be remarkably useful. It’s not about replacing developers or magically generating perfect code. It’s about accelerating the tedious parts of development so you can focus on the parts that actually require human judgement and creativity.

Just like you wouldn’t use a hammer for every construction task, you need to know when AI is the right tool for the job. There are some things it excels at, like simple scripts or UI layouts. You also need to know what you’re building and why. You need to understand the code well enough to review it, test it, and maintain it. AI coding tools are extremely powerful, but they’re not fully autonomous – not yet. I like to think of them as highly flexible scaffolding tools.

Getting Started

If you want to use this script for your own WordPress plugin development, the setup is straightforward. you’ll need a standard Unix environment with bash, rsync, zip, and a few other common utilities. If you’re running Windows, WSL is a good choice. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, obviously, you’re already set. Place the script in your plugins directory, make it executable with chmod +x build-release.sh, and you’re ready to go.

You can find the script on Github

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AI-Powered Culinary Alchemy: Transmuting Recipe Torment into CookCloud Magic

I enjoy cooking, but I usually like to have a recipe to guide me so I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time by making subpar food. Cookbooks get expensive and don’t quite have the variety I need. The internet is full of great recipes, but sometimes it’s hard to find exactly what you want. And then, when you find what you want, there’s a whole essay about the dish that you have to scroll through to get to the recipe. And then there’s using the recipe. Do you print it out? Do you scroll back and forth between the ingredients list and the instructions? Do you keep the printouts in a binder or in a favorites folder on your computer or phone? I just want a way to be able to quickly find recipes, collect the ones I like, and easily use those recipes. Why am I writing about cooking on this blog, you might ask? It’s because I’ve spent the last six months building a solution, and that solution is https://cookcloud.me/ Sure, there are other recipe / meal planner apps out there, but I wanted a project to test out a lot of the emerging AI technology out there while building a tool that did everything I wanted.

The Vision: What CookCloud Needed To Be

Once I had decided on the thing I wanted to build, I used a combination of ChatGPT and Claude to help me brainstorm the core features of the app and to plan out a reasonable roadmap for features to build along the way. In hindsight, I think the set of features that I defined as the MVP weren’t minimal enough, and I probably could have launched sooner if I had been a bit less ambitious. My initial plan, which I announced on social media was the following:

Core Features

  • Recipe Search
  • Personalized meal planning – Generate weekly meal plans based on user preferences ( diet, allergies, goals)
  • Grocery List Automation – Auto-generate shopping lists from meal plans
  • Recipe Suggestions – Provide curated or AI-recommended recipes based on available ingredients
  • Nutritional Tracking – display calorie and macro nutrient breakdowns for meals
  • Meal Scheduling – Allow users to assign meals to specific days/times
  • Ingredient Substitutions

I realized fairly early into the process that the recipe suggestion feature was going to have to be a roadmap item. I’m going to need to collect lots of user activity data points to be able to achieve this one. Also, looking back, I realize that I could have had a very useful app much sooner if I had left the meal planning/scheduling and grocery list items as roadmap items as well. These added a lot of effort to the project that I didn’t anticipate, and I committed to them far too early to pivot.

User Experience Enhancements

These are some of the roadmap items I initially planned to add:

  • Smart Pantry – Track ingredients at home and suggest meals based on what’s available
  • Barcode Scanner – Quick-add grocery items via barcode scanning
  • Grocery Delivery Integration – Connect to Instacart or other similar service for easy ordering
  • Multi-User Support – Family meal planning with a shared grocery list
  • Custom Recipes
  • Progress Tracking – Track meal adherence to health goals
  • Meal Prep Mode – Enhanced interface for cooking recipes

As it turns out, custom recipes was a natural progression once I got a handle on how I wanted to save recipes in the app, so that made its way into the core features. Meal Prep Mode was something that I wanted too much to wait on a later release. I think Grocery Delivery integration is going to be a fairly light lift, but the rest are going to involve significant effort.

Because some of these features are going to be so effort intensive, I also decided to build a feedback system. I built a GitHub integration so select GitHub Issues get published on the site on the Roadmap page. Registered users can upvote features they want the most as well as comment if they have ideas of how they want to shape those features. And, since I was already integrating with GitHub, I decided to also add a Release Notes page. These are select merged pull requests, showing the relevant issues (labeled as features).

AI Tools Arsenal

I used Claude and ChatGPT for brainstorm what features it should have and how I should plan them out. I started out with a Saas starter project based on Django, and leveraged Cursor to build out most of the features. Cursor didn’t always build exactly what I wanted, but it got me at least 80% of the way – think of it as advanced scaffolding. Amazon Q is an advanced autocomplete engine. The places where it stood out the most were times where I wanted to make several similar changes (things you might use a regex for if you wanted to take the time to build the expression). It sped up my progress writing code tremendously.

Sometimes Cursor would change things I didn’t want it to change or put things in the wrong places. To some degree, this is something that rules can prevent, but I’ve also had several instances where it did things that the rules I had in place told it not to do. AI coding tools aren’t perfect, and they aren’t magic, but they can be highly useful in the right hands. The meal planner interface, I built out as a separate submodule using MGX.dev. It may be gimmicky, but the results I got from it were far better than most tools I’ve tried. It asks a lot of followup questions and asks for periodic feedback along the way. I had to ask it to make a few revisions, but overall, I was very impressed. The down-side is that it’s token based, and you get a fixed number of tokens per month, and I spent them all in a matter of a few days. So, it’s not something I’d want to use regularly, but for quickly standing up a complex interface, I would strongly recommend it. Currently, I’m working with Claude code, and while, like Cursor, doesn’t always give flawless output, it is miles ahead in terms of quality and reliability. One of the big advantages of it is that it makes notes in markdown files to keep track of the project details since it can’t possibly hold the entire codebase in its context window. It has been much more consistent with putting things in the right place, maintaining conventions, etc, and it even creates unit tests without being prompted. It can also run test cases and linting tools and fix the issues that arise.

Final Thoughts

Building CookCloud has been one of those projects that started relatively simple and turned into something much more complex than I had anticipated. What began as “I just want to find recipes without scrolling through life stories” evolved into a full-featured meal planning platform with AI integration, custom recipe creation, and community feedback systems.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that even with the most powerful tools, the fundamentals stay the same: Measure twice, cut once. Planning is everything. I wish I had been more rigorous about the MVP scope. I’ve very happy with where the project is now, but I think I could have gotten more user feedback earlier if I had launched with a more focused set of features.

Right now, CookCloud is handling everything I originally wanted it to do. I can quickly search for recipes, save the ones I like. I can even import recipes I find outside the app, and most importantly, I have an intuitive interface for following those recipes which I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Get In Touch

You can check out CookCloud at cookcloud.me to see the kind of polished, feature-rich applications that are now achievable with modern development approaches. If you’re curious about what a custom solution might look like for your business, or if you want to discuss how AI-powered development could accelerate your next project, I’d be happy to have that conversation.

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My Epic 3D Printing Journey of Innovation and Upgrades

boats, toy boats, 3d printed

Getting Started: The Dream of a Wearable 3d Printed Iron Man Suit

I started 3D printing in 2016 with the dream of creating a wearable Iron Man suit. While that goal remains unfulfilled, I’ve created plenty of exciting projects along the way. 3D printing has helped me bridge my interests of electronics and programming and allowed me to work on robotics projects that I always dreamed of. My first printer was the Monoprice IIIP. Although it had a small print volume, it was affordable and perfect for a beginner.

Exploring New 3D Printers and Upgrades

Over the years, I’ve experimented with several printers, including models from Creality, like the CR-10S and various Ender iterations. One game-changing upgrade came with the Ender-3 E, which introduced me to automatic bed leveling.

Before this, leveling the bed was a tedious process that required adjusting knobs at each corner repeatedly to get the print head just right. Automatic bed leveling simplified this significantly—now, I only need to adjust the z-offset, a single setting on the printer interface.

Tackling Bed Adhesion Challenges

Another challenge I’ve faced is detaching prints from the bed. In the past, I relied on a putty knife to scrape prints off, risking damage to the print, the bed, or even my fingers. Modern printers have solved this issue with magnetic, bendable bed surfaces. These allow you to simply remove the bed, flex it, and pop the print off effortlessly.

Managing Overhangs with Supports

Intricate prints often require supports to handle overhangs or bridges. Supports provide a temporary foundation for unsupported areas during printing. However, removing them can be tricky—sometimes they come off easily, but other times, they leave behind material that needs cleaning up. This step can add extra work, especially for complex designs.

Entering the World of Multi-Material Printing

Recently, I upgraded to the Kobra 3 Combo for multi-material printing. While the obvious benefit is the ability to print in multiple colors, I was surprised by how it simplifies support removal. Using a different material for supports—like water-soluble filament or simply using different materials for the print and the supports, like PLA with PETG—makes the process much easier.

However, there are trade-offs. Multi-material printing (with a single extruder) increases waste and extends print times. Despite this, the Kobra 3 offsets longer prints with its impressive speed. It comfortably prints at 300mm/s, compared to the 80mm/s I used previously. For context, my first printer, the Monoprice IIIP, printed at just 30mm/s. While there are printers that use a separate extruder for each color, eliminating waste, those printers are much more expensive, well over $3,000.

Prioritizing Print Quality

Most of my prints are functional, so I usually don’t focus heavily on aesthetics. But when I achieve a silky smooth finish without post-processing, it’s incredibly satisfying. The Kobra 3 has exceeded my expectations in this area. With features like auto bed leveling, auto z-offset, and resonance compensation, it produces stunning results right out of the box. Resonance compensation reduces vibrations during accelerations and decelerations, ensuring fast and precise prints.

AI-Powered Spaghetti Detection

The Kobra 3 also offers advanced features like AI-driven spaghetti detection (with an optional camera). This technology uses computer vision to monitor prints and detect when something goes wrong, such as the dreaded tangled mess known as spaghetti. Although I haven’t tested this feature yet—the camera is still on its way—I’m excited to see how it works.

Update 2/8/2025

After more than 2 months and over 200 print hours, I’ve had a number of observations. First, the AI detection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While it hasn’t failed to detect a spaghetti mess, there actually haven’t been many to begin with. It has stopped a print for no reason more than once, so I’ve stopped using the feature. It is nice having an integrated camera, though, as I can take timelapse videos and even check on the status of my print when I’m away from home.

Additionally, it has sensors to detect when the filament isn’t moving as it should, and it will stop the print saying there’s a clog. There have been a few instances where there wasn’t actually a clog, but the filament was broken in the Bowden tube, so it was a problem that needed addressing.

The extruder assembly is modular, and comes off the printer with just 4 screws and is very easy to service. The hot end is also easily removable and replaceable. While I haven’t had to do a lot of maintenance yet, from what I’ve seen, this machine seems very well designed with ease of maintenance and repairs in mind. It is far easier to deal with than any other printer I’ve had.

Final Thoughts

3D printing has come a long way since I first started, and the journey has been incredibly rewarding. Each new printer and feature has brought more opportunities to create and experiment. With innovations like multi-material printing and AI monitoring, I can’t wait to see where the next chapter of 3D printing will take me.

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Smart Watches are a Brilliant Productivity Tool, Not Just for Nerds

Vintage 1900 fashion man with beard and glasses. Sitting in old wooden reading room. Looking at pocket watch.Watches have been out of vogue for a long time now, which to me is just absurd. It’s just unbelievable the number of people who I have encountered that thought it made more sense to pull a brick out of your pocket to check the time rather than glancing at your wrist. It’s as if for a decade or so, we went back to the age of pocket watches.

PMagneto Chibiersonally, I’ve never been one to follow the herd. I never really stopped wearing a watch until a couple years ago when I had three digital watches in a row fail on me within a couple months of ownership. They never even got wet aside from hand washing. Maybe I became one of those minor magneto people.

Anyway, about a year ago, I decided I wanted a smart watch – the one i had my eye on at the time was the Pebble. It had thepebble lowest price point, yet it was very responsive – much more so than the Meta watch, and it did the main thing most people want a smart watch for – it showed notifications – including caller ID. It also has an accelerometer, so you can use it as a pedometer or a sleep monitor. Probably the biggest selling point is the battery life – you could get a whole week out of it before having to charge it.

The downside, of course is that it’s completely monochrome with no touchscreen and a bunch of buttons – granted this is perhaps the main reason the battery life is so good. It’s just an extremely basic smart watch. The functionality is very limited, but it excels within that niche, nonetheless.

Samsung Gear 2On the other end of the spectrum is the Samsung Gear 2, with a 1.63-inch AMOLED touchscreen, a 720p camera for shooting wrist video, or just being a stealthy creeper, an IR-blaster for controlling your TV so you don’t have to get up and find the remote, and music control… oh, and did I mention you can make and receive calls directly from the watch? This, of course isn’t very practical in a crowded room – aside from the ability to expediently reject unwanted calls, but when you’re driving, it’s amazing. The call quality exceeds that of my Galaxy S4. Most people I talk to don’t even know they’re on speakerphone until I tell them (and I’ve been asking).

Personally, I have the Samsung Gear 2 Neo – the key difference with the Neo is the absence of the camera. Oh, and it costs about $100 less. It’s pretty much the same device otherwise. The problem with smart watches is that there’s no real standard, so there’s not a single smart watch marketplace – each line has its own, and the selection isn’t that great. This just means there’s a lot of room for growth, and a whole new avenue for developers to make their mark.

Another notable feature, which comes standard with the Gear 2, is a “find my phone” app. You launch the app on your watch, and your phone starts ringing. It’s a fantastic feature for anyone who regularly misplaces their phone or drops it between the seat and console in your car. Also, if you walk outside of the bluetooth range (about 30 feet), your watch will vibrate letting you know that bluetooth has been disconnected. This has prevented me from leaving my phone in my car a few times already.

The watch does have a heart-rate sensor, but it’s complete garbage. You have to go to the heartrate app, and you have to position the watch just perfectly for a full minute to get a reading, and 9 times out of ten, it will tell you that you did it wrong. It’s pretty much impossible to get a reliable heartrate monitor without a chest strap. You can get a bluetooth chest strap that can interface with a number of smartphone apps for about $50.

The Samsung Gear 2 accepts voice commands using S Voice, which is stellar for making calls, but not so great if you want navigation, though you can ask for random facts – in case you want to know what the fastest car in the world is without pulling your phone out. Smart watches equipped with Google Gear can use the full scope of Google Now, including navigation.

Moto 360The latest on the market is the Moto 360. It doesn’t quite have the hardware that the Samsung Gear has – there’s no camera or IR blaster, but it oozes with style. It looks like a standard watch, for the most part, and charges using a contact-less charger. I guess that’s convenient or something – I mean, you still have to take it off your wrist. Where it really shines, though is its full use of Google Now, meaning the voice command capabilities are pretty kickass.

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Why Your Demo Site Sucks, and What to Do About It

Over the past few months, I’ve been running into a problem with the WooCommerce UPS Toolbox. Because it’s such a specialized product, many prospective buyers naturally want to try it out for themselves to make sure it’s a good fit for their needs. While I’ve had a demo site up for all of that time, it’s a bit complicated.

Because it requires UPS account credentials, and I don’t really want to broadcast my own account info, and I definitely don’t want to expose a potential buyer’s account info, so that means I’ve been wiping the previous user’s account info and creating a new user each time someone asks for a demo.

Additionally, I’m sure it’s a bit of a pain to have to send someone a message requesting a demo, so that probably means for every person that contacts me asking for a demo, there are probably 5-10 others that want a demo, but don’t want to go through the trouble of sending a message.

The Spark

A few weeks back, it occurred to me that I needed to find a better way to set up a demo site.

For starters, the user needed to be automatically logged in after clicking the button/link to view the demo.

Next, I needed to be able to restrict access for the demo user so it had the access it needed, but no more. In addition to  preventing unwanted changes to the site, this would have the added benefit of removing distractions to anyone using the demo.

Third, I needed to be able to dynamically divert new users to different sites so multiple users wouldn’t get logged into the same site.

User Experience – Who is Doing it Right

These requirements are primarily just for the sake of managing the demo site(s) and doesn’t take much into account the actual user experience (as well as the goal of funneling demos into sales). One good example of who is doing this part right is Envato – both ThemeForest and CodeCanyon have a “Live Preview button for every product, which opens a new window and contains the actual demo site within an iframe and contains a “Buy Item” button which returns you to the product page.

While I think that adding the item to the cart would be a better option here, unless you’re selling a simple item (with no variations) this could overcomplicate the UI a bit.

Demo Bar

The Solution

I had been considering building a solution that handles all this, but frankly, this would be a huge undertaking. There are lots of moving pieces, and a lot of things to consider when building something like this – especially if you intend to share it with the world. I was glad when I stumbled across NinjaDemo a week ago.

NinjaDemo is a fairly new product, so it doesn’t open the demo in a new window or display a “buy item” button in the header(yet), but what it does do is very elegantly allow you to set up demo sites for any number of products, and have each of those be replicated numerous times without needing to clean anything up. After a preset amount of time, each replicated demo site is simply deleted, and new ones are always copied from your the original (which can only be altered by you).

You also have a fairly finely grained control of access for the users that will be accessing this site, so besides choosing what user will be used to login (so you can create a user with a basic role) you can also restrict all the admin menus that they will have access to.

Setup Challenges

As with any amazing product, there are some difficulties with setting it up. The main requirement is that your main site – the one you’re linking the demos from needs to be multisite enabled – and not just any kind, but it absolutely has to be a subdirectory multisite.

The problem with that is that if your site is more than a month or so old, WordPress won’t let you choose subdirectory

“You cannot choose Sub-directory Install (for a path-based network) if your existing WordPress installation has been set up for more than a month, due to issues with existing permalinks. (This problem will be fixed in a future version.)” codex link

There is a workaround for this, though. There’s a code snippet that needs to go somewhere. I’ve heard people say to put it in your active theme’s functions.php, but that just seems like a bad idea for a number of reasons. I think a better solution is to put it in your mu-plugins directory.

mu-plugins are very different from your typical plugins. They don’t require the standard plugin header that normal plugins have and they don’t need to be enabled, as the “mu” part stands for “must use” as in “always on”. So, basically, all you need to do is add a php file to the /wp-content/mu-plugins folder (create the folder if it doesn’t exist) and add this to the file:

[code]

<?php add_filter( ‘allow_subdirectory_install’,
create_function( ”, ‘return true;’ )
); ?>

[/code]

From there, you’ll be able to enable subdirectory multisite, and it’s pretty much cake from there on out. Set up a new subsite for each demo you want to be available, set the options for each, and then use the shortcode where you want the buttons to be (make sure to set the site_id for the respective demo site).

CREATE A DEMO SITE NOW

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Experiments in Conversion Rate Optimization

People talk a lot about SEO, and a lot of people think the goal is to make sure their website shows up on the first page in Google for some general keyword as though somehow, that’s going to result in a flood of sales, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Don’t get me wrong, search engine ranking is great, and if you can rank well for specific keywords, that’s going to be a feather in your cap; however, that’s just the start of a long journey towards the sale. You have to be sure to craft your listing so that the title is descriptive and the snippet description is compelling. Once they’re on your site, it’s a matter of engaging them – giving them enough options to keep them interested without them getting lost in the forest.

There’s plenty of other on-page SEO tips that go a long way towards conversion optimization, but the biggest items are removing barriers to complete the sale and suggesting additional last-minute purchases just before checkout.

In my case, I had been requiring registration to checkout as well as requiring a shipping address, even though I only sell digital products. While it’s cool to see my stuff being purchased by people from various other countries, I really don’t need to know where my customers live – I just want them to be able to make a purchase as swiftly and conveniently as possible.

After seeing some suggestions regarding the shipping address, I created the WooCommerce Disable Shipping for Virtual Products plugin. It’s not a very clever name, I know, but it does what it says. If there are people out there that sell both physical and digital products and want to be able to not require a shipping address for customers only purchasing the digital products, then this plugin will do just that. If any non-virtual products are in the cart, the billing and/or shipping fields will be required as normal, otherwise, only an email address is required (gotta have something to use to send the goods, eh?)

I just installed the plugin on my site to test it out a couple days ago, and my sales have increased by more than 10 times! Granted, that’s just over the course of a couple days, so it’s not really a large enough sample size to draw any conclusions on the level of effectiveness just yet, but I’m certain the plugin was a significant factor.

If you sell virtual products – either services or digital products, I urge you you give this plugin a try!

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How to Choose the best Web Hosting Company

If you’re looking to get a website for your company, once you’ve decided on the domain name, the first decision you need to make is the where to host it. Your hosting can make or break your site. Your website is your representation on the web. If it’s buggy or slow, people won’t be interested in browsing it and learning about your company. There are a number of factors to make sure you make the right choice, and there’s no one answer for which company is the best for web hosting.

Unlimited Everything

There are a lot of companies out there that advertise unlimited everything. Don’t be fooled by this. There’s no such thing as unlimited everything. Server resources are always limited – this just means that you’re not protected from overuse by other customers. The problem with unlimited everything setups is that under most circumstances, your site is on the same server as dozens of other accounts, each of which might even be hosting a few sites. If enough of them spike in traffic or server load (because none of them are capped) all the sites on that server will suffer from poor performance.

That doesn’t necessarily mean all web hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth and/or space are bad, but just don’t think they’re automatically a better value than another company that limits bandwidth or space.

It can be frustrating when you look at some web hosting companies and see how constrained some of their limitations are, but understand that you get what you pay for. The key is to make sure you’re not paying for more than you get or more than you need.

Traffic

If you currently have no web presence, this might not be as big of a concern, since you might not have a huge amount of traffic out of the gate, unless you already have a big enough market and demand. If you have or anticipate thousands or tens of thousands of hits per day, then that will narrow your choices a bit. Depending on just how much traffic you get, you may need to go with a VPS (virtual private server) or even a Dedicated Server. The difference between the two is with a dedicated server, you literally have full control of a physical server. With a virtual private server, this is one of multiple virtualized servers running on a single physical server. Both of these options typically give you access to a much greater level of server resources, reducing the likelihood that a surge in site traffic will result in your site loading slowly. The downside to both of these options is that they don’t always come fully managed by the hosting company, so there can sometimes be security issues that would normally be addressed with a shared hosting plan. So, if you can, your best bet is usually going to be with a higher-end shared hosting plan rather than a virtual or dedicated server – unless you just have a lot of technical knowledge on how to secure and optimize your server. Regardless, it’s always a good idea to look at a hosting company that has bigger plans in case you need to scale up down the road.

Storage / Bandwidth

This isn’t an issue for most sites, but if you’re a photographer or someone else who needs to display high-res images on your site, the amount of storage space you require is going to be a limiting factor. There are ways to offset this in many cases. Primarily, the solution I often recommend is leveraging a CDN (content delivery network) for your images. What’s a CDN, you ask? A CDN typically has thousands of high-performance, high-bandwidth servers scattered around the globe whose sole purpose is to serve up files. When you upload your files to the service, they get distributed to all the servers, and when customers visit your site, the files load off the server closest to them, ensuring that your site always loads quickly.

If you dont have 20-30GB of images, but you still do have an image-heavy site, you’ll probably still benefit from the use of a CDN. In either case, you usually don’t need to upload the files to the CDN service – you can simply have the CDN pull them off your server – if you have more than your hosting account will handle, then that may be an exception to this.

Support

There are some web hosting companies out there that offer good technical specs, but have absolutely horrid support. Make sure you go with a company that has stellar support

So, what are the best options?

If your traffic is less than 1k hits per day, and your site isn’t incredibly large (in terms of number of pages) then a good, cost-effective yet high-performance option is inmotion hosting. Their servers and network infrastructure are tightly managed to ensure high availability and performance of your website.

If you have a medium level of traffic ranging in a few thousands of hits per day, a better option would be to go with a small orange. Their pricing does start a bit lower than inmotion, but their business hosting is a bit higher, and they also offer more high-end solutions than that of inmotion.  They offer 24×7 technical support, and ultra-fast servers to make sure your site loads blazingly fast.

If you want full-service hosting that will take anything you throw at it and never have to worry about optimizing your site’s performance, go with WPEngine. They have amazing customer support, automated daily backups of your site, and they even handle all your WordPress updates without you having to lift a finger.

WP Engine

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AJAX Made Simple with the WordPress JSON API Plugin

Implementing AJAX in WordPress can provide a lot of flexibility. In addition to the obvious benefits of AJAX form submissions, you can load specific details based on a user’s interaction with the site, making you site more… wait for it… interactive. If nothing else, you can load a lot less data on the initial page load by loading certain pieces asynchronously, helping you to significantly decrease your initial load time.

Implementing AJAX in WordPress through the stock methods is not particularly difficult, but it can be rather tedious. First, you need to create a php function that will return the results you want to load, then you have to hook it into the wp_ajax_no_priv_(action). Then, you have to create a javascript file, enqueue it, and be sure to use wp_localize_script to pass it the location of admin_ajax.php, and be sure to formulate your ajax call to use the appropriate action name.  After that, you need to go back to your javascript and be sure to use the ajax response appropriately.

When you need to save something in the database, this is probably the best way to handle things. The admin_ajax.php file has safeguards to ensure that someone else doesn’t hijack it and use it to insert malicious or spammy data in your database. If you only need to display content excerpts, for example, you can leverage the JSON API and do everything in jQuery. The JSON API is a REST web service, so any parameters can be passed entirely through the url structure, and, as the name implies, the results are returned in JSON format, which, as you may have guessed, is very easy to work with in Javascript.

For starters, we need to download and install the JSON API plugin. Now, let’s take a look at the settings – as you can see, there are a few controllers that can be enabled or disabled as needed. By default, the core controller is enabled, which provides read-access for posts, pages, categories, and tags.

JSON Controllers

So, let’s start with the get_posts method – /api/get_posts/ returns the following:

JSON Results

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of useful data here – beyond the title, content and excerpt, we also have the categories, the tags, and the associated images listed – in every size.

There’s not much here in the way of filtering, and there’s nothing out of the box for listing custom post types or taxonomies; however, you can specify an individual post type by post id or by slug. What’s even better is that it’s completely extensible. You can create custom controllers to do just about anything you want with super complex queries if your heart so desires. This is, perhaps, the best documented plugin in the WordPress plugin repository. The “Other Notes” section alone is 18 pages long.

With get_posts, we can pass count (posts per page), the page number, and the post_type as parameters. With get_post, we can pass the post_id or post_slug and (optionally) the post_type. This makes it ideal for displaying data related to WooCommerce products, for example. Now, let’s try accessing the api via jQuery. In this instance, I’m looking at the Purchase Order Payment Gateway product using:

[code]jQuery.getJSON(‘/api/get_post/?post_type=product&post_slug=woocommerce-purchase-order-payment-gateway’)[/code]

JSON response object

 

As you can see, there’s quite a bit to work with here – all nice and organized for us. If I want to get the excerpt, I can just use resp.excerpt. For the main thumbnail image, I can use resp.thumbnail. We can traverse the object by expanding the different elements. So, if you wanted to check out the thumbnail image sizes, you’d expand thumbnail_images

JSON Thumbnails

 

 

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Caching Dynamic CSS in WordPress with URL Rewriting

Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on improving website performance – getting sites to load as quickly as possible – sometimes in less than a second. W3 Total Cache handles just about every aspect of website performance. Page caching alone is a huge benefit to website load time on the first visit, and when you optimize browser caching for static resources, that makes navigating to other pages even faster. Add a CDN, and your static resources such as images, css files, and js files get downloaded at blazing speeds and take the load off your web server. Minification and file combining can help, but this can be tedious if you need to do it manually.

The Problem

One problem I have come across, though is some plugins and even themes that use dynamic css referenced as a separate file using a query string. A few culprits that use this method are the jQuery Accordion Menu Widget, the jQuery Mega Menu Widget, and even the latest version of PageLines.

Dynamic CSS?

Dynamic CSS does have some advantages – for one, it allows for a more user-friendly interface to configure various styling options without having to include lots of different css files for each option and as a result, can be a lot easier to maintain. The problem is that since the stylesheet doesn’t actually exist (it’s just the output of a php file based on a template css file), it never gets cached, so every time someone visits your site, it has to be generated and downloaded again. This means your visitors are going to be waiting longer for your pages to load. Not to mention, if you’re using a CDN, it won’t get processed properly.

So, how do we fix this?

One option is to just view the source and copy the stylesheet path including the variables into your address bar, copy the generated css, paste it into your theme’s stylesheet (or a separate one, if you like), and either set the widget to not use a skin (you’ll also have to copy the image resources into the proper location on your theme) or comment out the section where the dynamic php is referenced in the plugin/theme. I haven’t looked at how this is handled in Pagelines, but in the jQuery Mega Menu plugin, the stylesheet is simply echoed, so you can’t just dequeue and re-enqueue outside of the plugin, unfortunately.

URL Rewriting

We can handle this with a bit of URL rewriting. The first step is to get Apache to point our fancy url to the actual URL. The method used is one I found in an article  on Terminally Incherent. Of course, I had to modify it a tad to get it to work for my purposes, but this is was the end result:

[code]

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /wp-content/plugins/jquery-mega-menu

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)-([^/]+)\.css$ skin.php?widget_id=$1&skin=$2 [NC]
</ifmodule>

[/code]

This will actually work for both jQuery Accordion Menu Widget and jQuery Mega Menu Widget, as they both use the same filename and query string (of course, you’ll need to change the rewrite base accordingly). This file goes inside the specific plugin folder, not the root or your site.

This will let us reference the dynamic stylesheet with a url that looks like an actual file. For example, if I’m using widget_id 2 with the “white” skin, the original url would have been:

http://somesite.com/wp-content/plugins/jquery-mega-menu/skin.php?widget_id=2&skin=white

but now, we can use:

http://somesite.com/wp-content/plugins/jquery-mega-menu/2-white.css

The second half is actually making the plugin reference the stylesheet using the fancy url, and we’ll need to modify the plugin to make this happen.

This file doesn’t actually exist, but since it looks like a file and doesn’t have any query strings, it can be cached, and it can also be mirrored by your CDN.

[code language=”php”]

change

.”/skin.php?widget_id=”.$key.”&amp;skin=”.strtolower($skin).”\”

to

.”/”.$key.”-“.strtolower($skin).”.css\”

[/code]

And that’s it! your css will now be cached and/or mirrored by your CDN, which should cut at least 200ms off your load time.

The Proof

Before:

 

 

 

 

After:

 

 

 

 

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Reverting WordPress Plugin Updates

Sometimes, while an update for a particular plugin might be rock solid, it might hinder the functionality of another plugin, so you end up having to roll that plugin back till you can fix the problem.

That means you have to either download the previous version of that plugin, extract it, and then upload it via ftp, which could take a really long time.

You could also upload the zip, and then use the web-based file manager to extract the file to overwrite the plugin update if your web host has that functionality, which would save some time, but it’s a bit more work.

What if, prior to any update, a snapshot of your db was taken (optional) and a copy of the current version of whatever you were updating was backed up on the server – all automatically. That way if the update created a problem, you could just “rollback” or “un-update”, and the update would be quickly reversed.

Maybe this is just me wanting to be lazy, but I think this would be a huge benefit to a lot of people, and I haven’t been able to find anything that does that. I’m pretty sure all the individual steps are doable, and I’ve seen several posts for at least the last 3 years, and the answer is always “no, you have to do it manually”

Now, it may not be feasible to automate restoring from a database backup, but in most cases, you only need to replace the plugin files to restore the functionality of the previous version.

There may be a solution for this that I haven’t come across, and there may be a reason this shouldn’t be done, but I think I’m going to try creating this solution. Any feedback is welcome.