Over the years at Metal Toad we've done a lot of WordPress development (along with other CMS). This is a catalog of all of our WordPress development tips you may find useful. Enjoy!
-
WordPress Deployments: Example of Database Changes in Code
How do you update the database of a WordPress site that's already in production without a lengthy content freeze or losing your client's data?
-
Drupal vs. WordPress? Who Cares?! They Are Both Open Source.
Every week I hear about someone choosing WordPress over Drupal (or vice versus). While there are certainly differences between the two platforms, they are more alike than people typically care to admit:
-
Why More People Select WordPress than Drupal to Build Websites
First off, Drupal has had a great year and a great quarter. According to builtwith.com Drupal is second among all Content Management Systems at 13.75% of the top 10K websites and has added ~250K new website this quarter.
-
How (and Why) Google Needs to Invest in Open Source
As more and more people start using the internet, and as websites get increasingly full featured Google continues to see growth in its userbase. Open Source CMS platforms (Drupal, WordPress, etc.) are increasingly the go-to technology for many companies with over 800,000 sites using Drupal or almost 60 million on WordPress. As big as these numbers are, they are a drop in a bucket compared to the 4+ million Google searches that occur each day. So why should Google care?
-
Quick & Dirty WordPress Plugin Benchmarking in Debug Bar
At tonight's PDX WordPress Dev meetup (thanks for the pizza Digital Trends) Daniel Bachhuber had some questions about benchmarking a plugin. Benchmarking WordPress itself is easy, but it's harder to isolate a specific plugin, much less a few calls to preg_match_all() within it. The questioned SEO Auto Linker plugin does this on every page load, so any running time adds latency on every page. Speculation from the meetup is that a PHP regex operating on post content, a blob, and looping through hundreds of links could be pretty slow. Too much caffeine today meant I had to give it a try.
-
New Competition: Will WordPress and Drupal Learn to Share?
After years of building and publishing on them, I'd love to say I knew CMS frameworks like Drupal and WordPress would be this huge. In truth they got this popular because of their great open-source communities; both of which I'm trying to participate and contribute to more. Why? Because closed platforms like SquareSpace and Adobe's content platform are rushing ahead without having to worry about backward compatibility like WordPress and Drupal does. These newer, closed systems insulate users from the backend and abstract away many of the same complexities WordPress.org and WordPress.com solved. They can push forward faster with newer, cleaner, “from-scratch” user-experiences because they don't need to maintain compatibility like "the big PHP" CMS's.
-
ToadCast 005 - We'll Do It Live
ToadCast #5, our first live podcast and I was joined by Adam Edgerton and Mike Bijon.
-
How Drupal is more welcoming than WordPress
I think we've all heard a few things about how Drupal and WordPress compare to each other. One thing I haven't heard much about is the "please contribute, here's how" factor to Drupal and its modules and the lack of it in the WordPress community.
-
Simplify your WordPress Deployments
Deploying code to WordPress installations has always been a bit of a struggle. Although there are a few WordPress plugins that help in deployments, there hasn't really been a simple WordPress deployment process. It's about time that process became a lot easier.
-
Learning Better Dev Skills by Programming in Public
Learning to develop professionally involves a lot more than just writing code. Major required skills include keeping code stable long-term, sharing tasks within a team, and building understandable interfaces so your code can be connected to and run from other programs.
-
How to Become a Web Developer
So you want to become a web developer? Smart move. The web is a growth industry and I don't know of any university curriculum that adequately prepares people for this career. A good web developer can pull in well more than the median annual wage and job benefits and promotion opportunity are great. So what do you need to know? So what do you need to know?
-
WordPress Tutorial : A unique dynamic sidebar for each page - or not!
The last few websites I've built have had sidebars that the client *may* or *may not* need to customize on every page. Some pages don't require a unique sidebar, some do. The client should have the option of a cascading sidebar.
-
Adding WordPress to the Arsenal
With the recent acquisition of Etch Software, Metal Toad Media has added a new Director of Digital Strategy, Mike Bijon, and diversified our service offering to include WordPress.
-
Top 5 reasons why web designers should love Drupal
If you are a web designer and you haven't worked with Drupal before, you should really give it a try. Here are the top 5 reasons why...
-
How to Decide Between WordPress & Drupal
WordPress is great - and so is Drupal. They are different platforms and should be selected for different projects depending on the needs. So how do you make the choice? Here are a few questions you should ask yourself: