The Caveena Solutions Blog
This article was updated on 26th September 2022.
When you’re still developing your WordPress website you usually want to keep things under wraps. Here is a list of WordPress plugins that will help support your websites while they are still in development.
Prevent development websites from updating WordPress: Advanced Automatic Updates
Advanced Automatic Updates gives you the option of preventing your WordPress core from updating in your development website. This will help minimize the risk of functionality breaking when things update. You have the option of completely disabling all updates, enabling major version updates or enabling security updates.
(Update 26th September 2022) Automatic Updates are a bit more complex than they used to be but not by much. To disable all Automatic Updates (core, plugins & themes) add the following line to your wp-config.php file:
define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );Check out Configuring Automatic Background Updates to learn how you can customize the automatic update behaviour.
Protect development websites from being seen: WP Maintenance Mode
There are a lot of “Under Construction” plugins available but I keep going back to WP Maintenance Mode. This plugin will display a customizable “Under Maintenance” message to all non-Admin users who have are not logged in. You can also select which WordPress users you want to grant access to.
An additional benefit of the plugin is that it keeps search engine crawl bots at bay too. You can allow them to crawl the development website or block them with a 503 HTTP response.
Fun fact: This is the plugin I use when doing routine website maintenance.
Get (some) Jetpack functionality without connecting to WordPress.com: Unplug Jetpack
Without getting into an argument about Jetpack’s bloat-factor, Unplug Jetpack gives you access to some Jetpack functionality without connecting to WordPress.com. Just install the plugin, activate it and… that’s all really.
(Update 26th September 2022) Unplug Jetpack hasn’t been updated in 3 years. While it still works (as of writing) it uses deprecated code which may one day cease to function. Fortunately Jetpack has an Offline Mode which you can enable by adding the following line to your wp-config.php:
define( 'JETPACK_DEV_DEBUG', true );When enabled there will be a notification on the Jetpack Dashboard.
There’s also a filter hook if you prefer using that. Check out the previous link to Jetpack’s Offline Mode to learn more.
Stop emails from sending: Stop Emails
I’ve only recently discovered Stop Emails and haven’t put it through it’s paces yet but this plugin will (you guessed it) stop emails from sending. Note that the plugin only stops emails sent using WordPress’s wp_mail() function. Any emails sent through PHP’s mail() function will still go through.
True story: I was once testing a custom function which just so happened to send emails to a couple accounts I have with Yahoo! Mail and Mail.com. I must have sent well over 3 dozen emails within the span of an hour to test things out causing Yahoo! to think I was trying to spam the account. To this day all, emails sent from that development website domain is blocked by Yahoo.
I’ve been playing with the Amazon S3 PHP Class and noticed the stored files were corrupted every time I used the putObject() function. The answer was deceptively simple: run the file through the inputFile() function and it’ll all be good.
You’re not a real website designer or developer until you learn to hate GoDaddy. I joke but GoDaddy doesn’t have the rosiest of reputations among seasoned designers & developers. Recent news of GoDaddy acquiring ManageWP (a popular service to manage multiple WordPress websites) has kicked up #WPdrama dust and once again stirred the GoDaddy hate.
Local Small-and-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) now have an affordable Brunei Online Payment Solution courtesy of Baiduri Bank. This means Brunei SMEs can now accept Credit Card payments (Visa, Master Card & American Express) online! Hooray! Read more »
In this tutorial I will show you how to use DreamHosts Let’s Encrypt with CloudFlare on your website. This will encrypt the connection between CloudFlare and your website visitors as well as the connection between CloudFlare and Dreamhost. CloudFlare calls this Full SSL (Strict) and is available under their free plan. We will also set up a CloudFlare Page Rule to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS.
If you’re a DreamHost user you probably know that you now have access to a free SSL certificate courtesy of Let’s Encrypt. This allows you to serve your website over HTTPS (as opposed to plain old HTTP) encrypting the connection and boosting your Google page rank.
You probably also know about CloudFlare and their free plan which provides caching, optimization and security boosts. So why not use both, eh?
Now this was a head-scratcher: the BackupBuddy settings on 5 of my client websites simply reset for no apparent reason. And that means the websites were not being automatically backed up. Not good.
After chatting with iThemes Support (the people who make BackupBuddy), I learned that connectivity issues between the website and database can fool BackupBuddy into thinking there are no settings causing the plugin to revert to defaults. Connectivity issues could be due to DDoS attacks or a problem with the hardware. iThemes said they are aware of this issue and have built in more checks but as is life they can’t account for every single scenario.
Fortunately I caught the problem during a routine maintenance check on a client’s website. BackupBuddy now comes with a way to export the plugin settings so it’s a good idea to save a copy just in case.
File this one under “Silly Workarounds that work”. This is an ever-so-slight variation of CSS-Trick’s method.
There was some text that needed to be placed over an image. The problem was that while the text-color was fixed, the image colour wasn’t so there was a chance that you could have poor contrast between the text and the image.
The quick CSS workaround I used was to use text-shadow to add an outline (or stroke) like so:
.text-to-outline {
text-shadow: 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000, 0 0 2px #000;
}
Hey, don’t judge me because it works. Play around with the value of the blur radius (set to 2px in the example) and the number of text-shadows applied.
Chrome’s Network tab alerted that a client’s website was downloading Roboto from Google Fonts. The problem was that we weren’t using Roboto for this project. After some troubleshooting we discovered Roboto was being downloaded on pages displaying an embedded Google Map. Why, Google?
Thankfully, Stack Overflow has a pretty simple solution.
It took me a while to really grasp the power of WordPress’ Actions and Filters. Now I love using them and have recently discovered how they can be used to generate the correct Schema data depending on what the WordPress Loop is generating.
Read more »The Dreamweaver blog takes a brief look at the evolution of buttons on the Internet.
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