Making a Django Custom Model Field, Form Field, and Widget

2 minute readFor a recent Django task, I wanted to create a custom field that used a new widget by default to display the input differently. The basic steps to do this are: Create a custom Widget (child class of django.contrib.admin.widgets.Input) Create a custom Form Field (child class of django.forms.Field) that uses your custom widget Create a […]

How to Make Horrible Software Comparisons

3 minute readSoftware comparison articles can be helpful, but most are horrible. They should educate, compare, and recommend. But usually, they’re just filler words that convey no actual meaning. Here are some common mistakes of horrible software comparisons… Universally Picking a Winner It’s ridiculous to pick a universal winner. Eg, if you’re comparing Event Espresso to EventBrite, […]

WordCamp Vancouver 2018 Memory Dump

9 minute readAbsolutely everything I can remember from my WordCamp experience this year. Feel free to just skip to the sections that interest you… (And thanks Esther for the photo of Scott, myself, and Jason on the ferry!) Preparation I sent a message out to my WordPress meetup and “WordPress professionals” group asking if anyone wanted to […]

PHP's array_shift Performance

< 1 minute readPHP’s array_shift is a relatively slow way to fetch the first item from an array; it’s much better to use reset. For example, array_shift() modifies the original array and can be pretty slow because it needs to completely reindex the array (remove first element then shuffle everything else forward by one “slot”), so unless you […]

Getting Started Contributing Code to WordPress Gutenberg in Laragon

7 minute readThis post documents how I setup WordPress Gutenberg for local development on Windows 7, using Laragon instead of Docker, and made my first pull request to the project. Most folks wanting to test and modify WordPress’ Gutenberg use Docker to manage their environment. That’s great because it’s especially consistent. But I’ve been happy using Laragon […]

How to Print Your WordPress Blog

3 minute readUpdate (April 13, 2019): If you’re looking to print your entire WordPress site, try my plugin Print My Blog. The ideas from this post led to its creation. I previously wrote about the conundrum of preserving your WordPress blog for a hundred years or so. The main solution I suggested was putting your blog’s content […]

6 Essential Steps To Keep WordPress From Getting Hacked

4 minute readThese 6 steps will prevent 99% of hacking attempts on your WordPress website, and most of them only require a click or two, and aren’t very technical. Of course, we all want to keep our website secure and not get hacked. It’s not fun when a hacker takes control of your website… But we also […]

Introduction to the WordPress World

3 minute readThis is an email I sent a friend who’s shopping around for a new career path, and I wanted to describe the “WordPress World” I work in. Hi I really have no idea if the type of work I do would be of interest to you, but I’m happy to try to share about it […]

The Wise Man and the Foolish Man

< 1 minute readHere’s a little visual I used today in Sunday school for the 5 year olds. This helped them to visualize what Jesus meant when he said; “…a foolish man built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: […]

“Truth Fairy” Primary Lesson

3 minute readToday at Church, we had a pretty fun Sunday School lesson for the 4 year olds. The topic was “Always Tell the Truth“. Here’s more-or-less how it went down: “Have you kids ever heard of ‘the Truth Fairy’? Not the Tooth Fairy (ask your parents about that), the ‘Truth Fairy’. No? Well, today we’re going […]