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We recently encountered a scenario where the client wanted to trim the news items titles to a maximum number of characters, whilst respecting words. Our research revealed that this seemingly obvious requirement wasn’t elegantly solved. As most of you will know, there are solutions for trimming by characters or trimming by words, but neither of […]

A number of times over my years developing in WordPress I’ve needed to extract the post IDs of the posts in an array. And every time I need to do this I use the wp_list_pluck() function, from WP_List_Util, the WordPress list utility class. And every time I use this really handy helper I mean to […]

When comparing a variable with multiple values consider using in_array(), instead of complex if expressions. I love clean, easy-to-read code, which is why I am not a fan of if statements with complex expressions. For example, consider the following snippet, which is checking a variable against several values: if ($test_variable === 'value1' || $test_variable === […]

This post is a somewhat off-topic, but for all those of you that are working on Macs, here’s a little tip to reset Spotlight when starts closing after just a few characters. You could try going into System Preferences and adding a drive in the Privacy tab, then removing it, but it didn’t work for […]

This article walks through the simple steps for setting up composer. Initially at project level, then, optionally, at the global level. Note: This article is for Mac(Unix)/Linux users, please refer the official docs for Windows. What is Composer? Composer is the dependency manager for PHP packets. In my opinion it should be in every web […]

This article provides a simple fix for the ansible error, “sorry, tersmitten.swapfile was not found”, by updating 1 (maybe 2?) .yml config file. If you have encountered the above error, or “ERROR! the role ‘swapfile’ was not found”, then chances are you are using a dependency that is no longer supported (or more precisely, it […]

This simple post should fix the “usr/local is not writable” issue with homebrew. Whilst on holiday I needed to use an old MacBook to crack on with some work. In order to do so I had to install the latest version of ansible, but encountered the permissions error “usr/local is not writable”. I found uninstalling […]

On a few occasions Yoast has inexplicably injected a noindex meta tag in the head of pages that I want search engines to index. I’ll get to the bottom of this when I have a free block of time. But, but for now, a really simple way to keep the meta tag away, is to […]

Sometimes it’s nice to have all the goodies wrapped up in a nice little function, such as wp_get_attachment_image(). This is a great function that generates the entire html for an image tag, including srcset and sizes. However, wouldn’t it be great if sometimes we could get all the goodness from this wonderful function, but just […]

It’s not uncommon to only want to show specific sidebar widgets or footer widgets in certain views. In the case below we didn’t want to show a client’s teaser widget of their recent installations when the visitor was already viewing any of their portfolio pages. So here’s a simple filter that does just that: /** […]