The Blog

10 Lessons Learned While Creating an Online Course

I love teaching. There, I said it. Over the years, I've provided one-on-one training in person and via Zoom. I've organized a local meetup, I've spoken at conferences across the country, and I've even created webinars. But the one method that I hadn't done was to create an online course. It's something that I've wanted…

How I stopped Gravity Forms from performing 1,500 queries per page

For the past two years, I've been working with tpn.health to build an online platform where clinicians earn continuing education credits through live and on-demand classes. When we started out, we used many off-the-shelf plugins, and over time we've written and rewritten tons of custom functionality. One plugin that has been a staple the entire…

Sending emails with SendGrid from your WordPress website

Depending on where you host your website, you may not have ever needed to consider how your site sends email. Most shared-hosting services handle outgoing emails automatically. But, if you are setting up your site on a Digitial Ocean or AWS server, that may not be the case. If that's the case, you will need…

How to crop and resize images for your website

When adding images to your website, it is important to upload a properly sized image to fit the need. It's not just about the visual display (although, that can be an issue, too), but improperly sized images can have an adverse effect on your site's page speed. That, in turn, can hurt your search engine…

Do You Hide Features to Stop Clients from Breaking Their WordPress Sites?

This week, while answering questions in a WordPress forum on Facebook, somebody asked: What is the best way to give my client access to update content but not give them full control of the WordPress Dashboard? I've been asked this question many times in the past, and here is how I typically answer it: Rather…

How to Set Up a Local Copy of Your WordPress Site

As the organizer of the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup, I'm constantly telling people that they should test new releases of WordPress using a staging site or on a local development site prior to running the update on their live site. Never has this been truer than with the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0 that includes…

WordPress Webinar Series

If you ask any WordPress enthusiast why they like WordPress, you're likely to hear “because it's so easy.” It's a response I've given many times myself. Aside from being easy to use, WordPress is powerful, flexible, and people use it in a myriad of ways. So if we're being totally honest, WordPress is one complicated…

Git + MAMP + SiteGround

For too long now I have put off the chore of getting my local development environment set up in a way that would allow me to use Git to push my code directly to SiteGround. I had tried in the past but always ended up hitting a stumbling block somewhere along the way. There is…

Single use apps

Last month at work, I took on a new project; AppPresser. If you haven't heard of it, AppPresser is a suite of plugins for WordPress that make it easy for site owners to turn their site into a native iOS or Android app. Making apps is something that I've wanted to do for several years, so…