Articles

A common design pattern for WordPress plugins is to have one “main class” that implements the singleton pattern. This pattern is called the “God Class” and it loads all of the other classes the plugin needs as well as instances of those classes in properties of that class. I’ve utilized this anti-pattern, because it accomplishes a job and often is the best option for codebases that support PHP 5.2. But it’s not nearly as efficient as dependency injection to achieve a similar outcome. The advantage of an implementation of the “God Class” anti-pattern is that you only need one singleton. […]

Many elements make a successful website: Design, content, SEO, mobile-friendliness — to name just a few. Yet, something that has become more and more important over time is website speed. Consumers are impatient. If a website takes too long to load, they move on to something else. How long before they get itchy feet? Two seconds, that’s it. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that visitors are mostly using mobile devices that often have a slower data connection than desktop and laptop computers. As a consequence, WordPress users are hard pressed to make their sites as fast as possible. […]

When it comes to WordPress plugins, some big names get all the glory (we’re looking at you, Yoast SEO), while others languish in semi-obscurity. Considering there are thousands of plugins available for the platform, you could be missing out on some amazing tools by limiting yourself to the most popular options. The key to identifying a great WordPress plugin goes beyond looking at how many times it has been installed. You need to take into consideration reviews and update history, and ask yourself, Can this tool help me improve my site? In this article, we round up ten outstanding plugins (in no […]