How to Relabel WordPress’ “Publish” Button for Custom Post Types

3 minute read For my WordPress plugin Print My Blog, I wanted to change WordPress’ “Publish” button to instead say “Save”, and it was complicated enough to merit sharing a blog post. My Situation The plugin registered a custom post type called “Print Material”, which isn’t publicly visible on the website. So the button “Publish” was misleading because […]

The 5 Promises of User-Led Software Development

5 minute read It’s easy for WordPress plugin developers to be endlessly chasing “modern best practices” and building features they love, but actual users don’t care about. Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a development methodology that avoids waste and stays focused on users’ priorities. I call it “Lazy Software Development,” and this is how it works…

Handling Polluted JSON in AJAX

5 minute read The bane of all Javascript code using jQuery.ajax() is polluted JSON responses: when some HTML or other junk gets into your JSON response, making it unparsable and bringing the whole system to a screeching halt. In this post, I’ll show what you can do with polluted JSON to keep everything working. How It’s Supposed to […]

Are WordPress’ "Small d" Developers Getting Left Behind by “Modern Best Practices”?

5 minute read WordPress is experiencing a cultural change in order to adopt “modern best practices.” But are these changes leaving “small d” developers behind?

Getting Started Contributing Code to WordPress Gutenberg in Laragon

7 minute read This 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 […]

Introduction to the WordPress World

3 minute read This 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 […]

My Takeaways from "Gutenberg for Plugin Owners" Crowdcast

2 minute read Today I watched “Gutenberg for Plugin Owners“, an online discussion between Brian Hogg, Kyle Maurer, and Daniel Bachhuber, where they discussed and answered questions about how WordPress plugin owners can better prepare for the new editor, Gutenberg. You can watch the replay, but here’s my notes. I was admittedly doing some somewhat noisy house-chores while […]