Gary Pendergast

Category: WordPress

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Automatic Updates

    There are few people more excited than I about the recent WordPress 3.7 release – it’s amazing to see Automatic Updates land in WordPress Core, thanks to the hard work of Dion, Nacin, and the excellent testing and input of thousands of developers, we’ve shipped a great feature. With 3.7.1 being automatically rolled out as…

  • A WordPress Adventure

    I like to think of working at Automattic as a Choose Your Own Adventure career. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on a wide range of projects, from VideoPress, to the WordPress iOS App, through to Jetpack Likes, Two Step Authentication and most recently o2, the upcoming successor to P2. If I (or…

  • Commercial Plugin Updates Done Right

    Since I created the Automatic Updater plugin, one of the most frequent support requests I get is for commercial plugins and themes. Over the years, the various commercial development studios have created their own update systems, but none of them seem to play nicely with the WordPress core way of doing things. The good news…