PHP @ Silicon Dales

WordPress 5.1 Update – “Betty”

There’s a new WordPress update just been released on 21st February 2019. Called “Betty”, the WordPress 5.1 release builds upon the new editor experience with some enhancements to the block editor, a few log issues and most noticeably for most of our clients, there will be prompts for sites running outdated PHP versions. View the …

Received a WooCommerce help SOS through our contact form, so here is the simple answer to a question we’ve been asked more than once! Declaring WooCommerce theme support is really important after WooCommerce 3.3.0 – if your theme does not contain this in functions.php, then there’s a good chance any woocommerce templates you add to …

Are you running Plesk on your dedicated server or VPS? Do you want or need to know what version of MySQL, PHP, Apache – or anything else – your box is running, to relate to a client or stakeholder? If you would like to find your Apache version and you do not have Plesk, click …

Every so often, on the WordPress.org forum, or some blog comments thread, or on Twitter, or some other place, we see helpful open source practitioners posting snippets to be added to “the end” your theme’s (child theme, child theme, please use a child theme) functions.php file. Then we hear of someone who has done exactly …

Another day, another little WordPress tutorial for you guys. This time, I’m posting a how to for those of you who have rolled back the old sleeves, and are actually digging into some PHP to make or edit your WordPress template. Now it should go without saying that if you are making modifications to your …

If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …

Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …

If you, like us, were thinking Christmas comes round faster and faster each year, then you’ll no doubt think it was only yesterday that the awesome improvements PHP 7.0 brought along with it hit our servers and started powering up our WordPress sites way better than PHP 5.6, which was itself cool for its era.

Got a plugin that does something really nifty, and turns out really good results in your WordPress posts and pages? Want to use that shortcode in your theme files, somewhere, outside the loop, and not sure how to do that? This WordPress tutorial will tell you how to get this done. Thankfully, as with so …

PHP

WordPress 5.1 Update – “Betty”

How to declare WooCommerce support in your theme

Find out Apache, MySQL, PHP (etc) versions via Plesk

Where to put Snippets in your WordPress Functions.php File

Code to hide content on the front page of WordPress

How to Make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails Work

Installing APC on Amazon EC2 Instance

PHP 7.0 Reaches End of Life on 3 December 2018 😱

How to Use Shortcodes in your WordPress Theme Files