Posts relating to
development

Have you ever needed to convert the string immediately before br tags, wrapping it in span tags? Me too, oddly. I’m sure there’s a regex way to do this but at the time of writing my brain wasn’t willing to entertain the idea, so here’s a very simple way to achieve it using simple string and array […]

We use VirtualBox for the local development of websites, this article walks through the process of updating it to at least 5.2.22. Why update VirtualBox? Simple: Older versions of VirtualBox will not be compatible with macOS Mojave. The simple fix Grab the latest version of VirtualBox, install it and you’re! Conclusion As we use VirutalBox […]

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 hand 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 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 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 […]

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 […]