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I’m a big fan of doing my WordPress development live and using Xdebug for tracing WordPress’ execution. But, sometimes you need real-time data of what is going on with certain hooks or functions on your site. I recently discovered the app Papertrail which does just that. Though there are several, similar web apps out there, I chose Papertrail for two reasons: The first is because it has a free option. The second reason is because Scott Kingsley Clark wrote an easy-to-use API client for Papertrail as a WordPress plugin. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use Papertrail to […]

As WordPress matures towards becoming a fully-fledged application framework, the tooling surrounding the platform continues to come on in leaps and bounds. Over the last three years in particular, developers have moved quickly to embrace best practices which have long since been standard in other platforms. A big part of that overall push has involved fine-tuning approaches to local development environments. We’ve covered classic approaches such as local LAMP installations and experimenting with Vagrant here on the blog before, but one solution, in particular, is gaining an increasing amount of ground – Docker. In this piece, we’ll introduce Docker as a technology, […]

The UX (User Experience) of a WordPress product plays a decisive role in making it a super hit or providing it with a deathblow. A well-defined UX helps users interact with the product, makes your product easy to use, and helps users engage with your product. Gaining momentum among users and making their lives easier should be the ultimate goal of a WordPress product. People are used to doing stuff their way. Certain conventions can hard to break. When you design or develop something that people don’t want to you use, the product fails miserably. Here’s a common user experience […]

As the REST API begins opening WordPress up to a wider programmatic world, now is a great time to start getting familiar with best-in-breed examples of third-party APIs across the web. Kicking the tires of these APIs will kill two birds with one stone – you’ll get familiar with standard best practices and also widen your horizons in terms of what you can integrate WordPress with on your next project. Though there’s considerable debate about exactly what constitutes a truly great API, the examples we’ve highlighted in this piece are widely agreed to be among the best in the business. […]

We’ve all been stuck in a user experience situation when there are too many options and it feels impossible to make a decision. But what if you had someone to guide you through that decision? This kind of help and guidance is especially necessary for WordPress beginners. Despite the fact that WordPress has one of the biggest online communities, there exists a big gap between a core developer and an end user. We need to realize that this disconnect can pose an imminent threat to the WordPress userbase. Trying a new framework, or a plugin or even a theme without […]