Category: Best Practices

Best Practices for Safe WordPress Updates on Big Revenue-Critical Websites

WordPress Updates

In my WordPress developer career, I’ve been asked many times about the best practices for safely updating WordPress core, plugins, and themes, especially when it comes to a site that can’t afford to have any downtime.

There are several update strategies to consider.  I’ll go over them here.  It’s really all up to the client’s risk tolerance vs. their willingness to pay for extra maintenance work.

But, with my WordPress update strategies, you should be able to perform updates the safe way without too much extra effort.

Continue reading Best Practices for Safe WordPress Updates on Big Revenue-Critical Websites

How to Setup a Local WordPress Development Environment using DB and Media from Staging

Local Dev Setup

In order to make local WordPress development as seamless as possible with collaboration between multiple developers, I’ve devised a process where local versions of WordPress sites can dynamically use the database and media uploads from the staging server. Continue reading How to Setup a Local WordPress Development Environment using DB and Media from Staging

How to Remove & Forget Gitignored Files from a Git Repo

Forget Gitignored Files

If you have already been working in your git repository before you realized that you needed to add something to your .gitignore file, you may have found that it’s not as simple as updating your .gitignore file anymore.  The tracked files that you just decided to ignore won’t just magically stop tracking and disappear from git, oh no.

Luckily, it is actually very simple to accomplish this with just a couple commands. Continue reading How to Remove & Forget Gitignored Files from a Git Repo

Local Dev Setup With Wildcard Subdomain Vhost

Wildcard Subdomain Vhost

When setting up new local sites for development, skip the hassle with this game-changing setup that uses a single vhost with a wildcard subdomain so you never have to mess with vhosts ever again.

  • Don’t hassle with setting up a vhost every time
  • Don’t waste time adding more rows to your hosts file
  • Don’t mess with developing a site in a subdirectory where absolute links starting with “/” take you back to your localhost dashboard.

Continue reading Local Dev Setup With Wildcard Subdomain Vhost