wordpress

  • An autoloaded option audit that found nothing

    A monthly check that has failed twice in two years, reporting clean for the fourteenth consecutive month. A check that has stopped failing is either a solved problem…

  • A plugin that took over what the theme used to do

    A theme reduced to templates and styles, and functionality that moved into a plugin — which is where it belonged. The rule that fell out is that anything…

  • A plugin whose configuration is a filter

    Configuration as code, for a plugin that will never be distributed, and the test that covers it. Testing a filter is testing the contract rather than the implementation,…

  • A plugin with no admin screen

    A plugin whose entire configuration is a constant and a filter, on a site whose deployment is a pipeline.

  • The settings screen I did not build

    A plugin with three configuration values, deployed by a pipeline, and a settings screen that would have had one user. A settings screen exists so somebody without deployment…

  • A transient stampede on a cold cache

    A transient holding an expensive query result, expiring at a fixed time, and four hundred requests recomputing it simultaneously. The stale copy with a longer lifetime is what…

  • A plugin downgrade that was a version constraint

    A plugin update that broke a checkout flow, reverted by editing one line and running one command. A downgrade that is a version constraint and a redeploy is…

  • Core as a Composer package, and where wp-content goes

    WordPress installed as a dependency, which requires the content directory to move out of the core directory. The constants must be defined before core loads, which means wp-config.php…

  • Disabling the admin updater on purpose

    A Composer-managed install where an update through the admin would be silently reverted on the next deploy. Disabling it is correct and the confusion it causes is a…

  • A premium plugin with no repository, handled honestly

    Composer-managed WordPress, and four commercial plugins that ship as a zip behind a licence key. An inline package definition with a version that has to be bumped by…