A plugin to clear recalcitrant caches from inside WP Engine

We’re using WP Engine to host various clients, notably the Rolling Stones site, and we’ve been very pleased with both the service and the performance of their hosting platform. There’s always something though, isn’t there? I don’t think I’d really be happy if there wasn’t. In this case it’s the fact the Varnish caching layer …

What happened at the WordPress Community Summit (presentation)

Here’s the presentation I gave to Manchester WordPress User Group last night on the first WordPress Community Summit in 2012. Here’s Jane Wells’ initial post explaining the thinking behind the summit. If you want to learn more about what’s going on, you can see the summaries posted on the day for the morning and the …

Setting HTTP Basic Authentication based on the host name

For many of our projects, the .htaccess file is under version control… but at the same time, I need to put HTTP Basic Authentiation on just the staging site. Unfortunately the host weren’t able to do this for me, but with a little .htaccess trickery I was able to detect the staging site URL and …

PHPNW12: Scale and Adapt / Responsive Redesign: How we’re building BBC News

John Cleveley (@jcleveley) from Auntie BBC talking about the responsive development of BBC News. Usual caveat applies, (a) these are my notes on my thoughts as well as his words, and (b) I may have misheard or misunderstood. Current site is static files and a lot of Apache includes! Responsive sites: cool… but hard! Moving …

PHPNW12: Effective code reviews

A really entertaining talk, with great slides, by Sebastian Marek at PHPNW12 on Code Reviews. As usual, the notes below are a mix my understanding of what Sebastian said and what I was thinking as he said it. If I’ve misunderstood or misheard, just let me know in the comments. Introducing the characters (cute little …

PHPNW12: Catching opportunities in Open Source

Christian Schaefer and Stefan Koopmanschap talking about Open Source and community. It’s nice every so often to sit in a talk which you’re in broad agreement with, and obviously as a keen proponent of a Open Source this talk was right slap bang in the middle of my interests. The notes below are a combination …

PHPNW12: Don’t reboot, debug!

Some notes from Joshua Thijssen’s talk, which focussed on the knowledge and methods needed to deal with problems in production in a measured way. I was at the back of the room, and some of this is outside my wheelhouse, but here’s the notes; just bear in mind I might have either misheard or misunderstood …

PHPNW12: Ade Oshineye on Dev Experience, API Design and Craft Skills

These are the notes I made not so much of what Ade was saying, although some of the following was said by Ade, but also of my thoughts as he spoke. Really great talk, thank you Ade. Apprenticeship patterns: acquisition, transmission, growth. We are all API designers, we all write functions we ourselves use later …