Let AI do the grunt work: a dev’s take on MCP
I had a client with about a dozen small WordPress sites, nothing major, mostly local businesses. Every month, they wanted a simple health check report….
Category: Development
Using the PHP Reflection API to tame legacy code
I got a call from a client running a membership site on a pretty old, third-party plugin. Their problem? They needed to sync a user’s…
Stop deploying WordPress plugins by hand and use CircleCI instead
I was working on a small security plugin a while back and decided to get it onto the official WordPress directory. But then I remembered…
Build a reusable WordPress meta box class
A client’s Resources section had meta box code scattered across functions.php and two include files, so every small change broke something. One reusable meta box class moved the registration logic into a constructor and the form HTML into a template.
A slow WooCommerce admin is usually a code problem
A client’s high-volume WooCommerce store kept timing out in the admin. More server power didn’t help. The real cause was an N+1 query from a shipping plugin, and the fix was better code, not bigger hosting.
How to add custom social icons in WordPress 6.9
A client needed niche social icons like Ko-fi and Letterboxd, which the default block doesn’t cover. WordPress 6.9 finally lets you register custom social icons cleanly with a JavaScript variation and a PHP filter, no bloated plugin required.
WordPress OOP is more than wrapping functions in a class
A plugin sold as object-oriented turned out to be one giant class full of static methods. That is not OOP, it is namespacing. Here is how to model real objects in WordPress, with state and behavior, using a Report class as the example.
WordPress type safety: when ‘safe’ code fails silently
A junior dev passed a post object where my function wanted an integer, and it failed silently with no error. That is the trap of overly defensive WordPress code, and when you control the environment, failing loudly beats bailing quietly.
Why WordPress developers shouldn’t fear the command line
A sharp junior dev was stuck on a bug that only showed up on staging, because he was lost without a GUI. The command line is the most direct way to see what a server is doing, and a couple of basic commands found the error in minutes.
Custom post types are a persistence layer, not a data dump
Using custom post types as plain data storage scatters your business rules everywhere. Model that logic as PHP entity classes and map the entities onto CPTs instead, so the rules stay in one testable place.