Use stable keys, not strings, for WordPress translations
Editing one English button label broke the German, French, and Spanish translations. Using stable keys as placeholders, plus an en_US fallback, keeps that from happening.
Category: Bug Fixing
Why your WordPress fixes keep breaking other things
A one-line shipping tweak would have broken inventory reporting and a homepage shortcode. Tight coupling and low cohesion are why, and here’s how to structure the code instead.
Using the Static Factory Method Pattern in WordPress
I was working on a WooCommerce plugin for a client to sync their product inventory with a third-party API. Total classic scenario. The problem was,…
Stop Nesting ‘if’ Statements: A Saner Way to Code
I got a call from a client running a pretty complex WooCommerce store. Their shipping logic was a mess. They had all these rules for…
Building WordPress Admin Pages That Don’t Break Later
Got a call from a client last week. They’ve got a WooCommerce extension that’s starting to get popular, but its settings page was buried under…
A Practical Guide to WordPress Regex That Won’t Break Your Site
Got a call from a client last week. They’d just moved their big WooCommerce site to SSL, did the whole search-and-replace for the new URL,…
That WooCommerce decimal change that’s silently breaking stores.
Got a call from a long-time client last week. Absolute panic. They’d just run a routine batch of plugin updates, and suddenly their shipping calculator…
Why Your WordPress Query is a Mess (And How to Fix It)
I got a call from a client running a decent-sized WooCommerce shop. They were in a panic. Their main shop page, which should have been…
How to Start Unit Testing Your Existing WordPress Code
Had a client call last week. They’ve got this huge, old WooCommerce plugin that’s been passed through three different dev teams. A new junior dev…
Finding the real WordPress performance bottleneck
A client’s site was crawling at 5-7 seconds a page. The cause wasn’t a slow query but an uncached external API call from a plugin, which I tracked down with Query Monitor and fixed with a transient.