Over my past few years at Automattic, I’ve worked on a bunch of different teams and projects – VideoPress, the WordPress iOS app, various Social projects, and most recently, o2. I even took a few months to work on WordPress core, helping build the auto-update functionality that we now see rolling out security updates within… Continue reading The Next Adventure
Category: WordPress
WordPress and UTF-8
Update: WordPress 4.2 has full UTF-8 support! There’s no need to upgrade manually any more. ? For many years, MySQL had only supported a small part of UTF-8, a section commonly referred to as plane 0, the “Basic Multilingual Plane”, or the BMP. The UTF-8 spec is divided into “planes“, and plane 0 contains the… Continue reading WordPress and UTF-8
Don’t Let Your Plugin Be Activated on Incompatible Sites
When you write a WordPress plugin, you can specify a minimum WordPress version that your code is compatible with, using the “Requires” option in your plugin header, but it isn’t enforced. Along with that, there’s no way to specify a minimum version of PHP or MySQL. This can cause your users to have bad experiences… Continue reading Don’t Let Your Plugin Be Activated on Incompatible Sites
Don’t Do Regular Expressions, Use The DOM
I’m as guilty of this as anyone – I have a lump of HTML that I need to extract information from. So, I write a quick regular expression, knowing full well that they’re not appropriate for the job. But I do it anyway. This time, I decided to try doing things a better way. Here’s… Continue reading Don’t Do Regular Expressions, Use The DOM
How To Backup Before Automatic Updates
When I originally wrote Automatic Updater, I had an action trigger just before the update, so site owners could easily take a backup snapshot, in case of a catastrophic failure. Now that we have Automatic Updates in WordPress Core, however, there’s no such action, and with good reason. Backups Are Slow We’re not talking 10-20… Continue reading How To Backup Before Automatic Updates