A neat feature of included files is the fact that they can return data. You can simply assign the output of an include or require statement to a variable and get to work on whatever is returned from that file. Personally, I use this for configuration data where I have arrays full of options. I […]

Debugging can be a lot simpler with a nice set of tools. Ideally, breakpoints and stepping through code is the way to go but sometimes it is nice and easy just to dump stuff somewhere. Dumping to the DOM is usually fine but can obviously cause problems on the page render and it can be […]

One neat trick I use a fair bit is hitting URLs on the command line using curl. The most common use case I have for it is checking redirects but if you start using the command you’ll see there’s actually a fair bit of information handed back to you when you type the following in […]

Updating WordPress can really start to grind on me. Everyone is constantly releasing updates for their plugins and the core team are pushing to release more and more core updates all the time. Seeing the update notification can be a real bummer. So, to keep it easy, I just bang through all updates using a […]

If you get down to business with performance optimisation, you could find yourself looking at ways to defer your scripts or even load them asynchronously. As far as I’m aware, WordPress’ built-in functions wp_register_script() and wp_enqueue_script() don’t currently take arguments for defining these attributes. But, with WordPress being WordPress, there is usually a way and […]

This is one of those techniques that you don’t really think you need until you find yourself in a situation where you do. This definitely isn’t a hammer and more often than not, you can select what you need in a single selector via jQuery or through the use of the built-in .filter() method but […]

Building on yesterday’s tip, I’m putting this up to show how easy it is to register a custom colour palette for WordPress’ block editor; AKA Gutenberg. It’s actually something we can register as a theme feature so it’s all doable on the PHP side and is very straight-forward. Here’s the code you need;

Ever found yourself wishing you could define an exact colour palette for ACF’s colour picker field? Good news! You totally can. Using the JavaScript API built right into Advanced Custom Fields we can use a very small snippet of code to specify exactly which colours appear in the palette of suggested colours. Now, in this […]

Having worked in collaborative and team contexts, I’ve had my fair share of situations where I’m working in amongst someone else’s code. There are plenty of things I could gab on about but one issue I commonly see is duplicate jQuery selectors. Now, for really small scripts, duplicate selectors won’t cause you much heartache. However, […]

The ability to control exactly what buttons are available in a WYSIWYG field is a really neat point of customisation available in Advanced Custom Fields. The WYSIWYG field is definitely convenient but I often find myself needing to use it for no other reason than the most basic of formatting. Leaving too many options in […]