Just like Ross I’ve had to dance around the current state of WordPress themes and find the docs to be bad with lots of edge cases once you start looking through Github issues and Stack Exchange posts…and god knows what else.
When I look at the current state of building WordPress themes I don’t think I ever would have started with WordPress if this is where I had to start. It’s so much more difficult now and did I mention the docs suck.
As I’m looking to save us some money with our Google Cloud Storage bill I did some research and built out some scripts to optimize png, jpg, and pdf files.
You can find the repository here. I cut a 5.5GB folder down to 4.1GB.
The big disclaimer is that I ran this on my dozen test folders from client sites all weekend just for the images. Starting at 0900 Friday morning it was finally done at some point around noon on Sunday. Then I figured out the pdf script and ran that on my single client folder of 5.5GB. We’re currently running it on the other folders which I expect to take a long time based on the current progress.
I run a Framework 13 with AMD 7840U so extrapolate your own timeframes.
Over the last week we had a form get noticed by spam bots and get over 100,000 entries without us noticing. While we added Gravity Forms CAPTCHA to stop the spam I still have all those entries in the database to remove. I was only able to do around 1000 via the UI before the server timed out and the process was stopped, but Gravity Forms has a CLI plugin which gives me wp gf as a command I can run against the site.
I started with small batches (the default page_size is 20) and once --page_size=10000 worked I looked up the number of entries and matched it to --page_size which deleted all the spam entries on the form.
wp gf entry delete $(wp gf entry list <form_id> --format=ids --page_size=10000) --force
The command takes the output of wp gf entrie list <form_id> and sends it to the wp gf entry delete <entry_id> --force command. Thus listing all the entries based on the --page_size value and deleting them.
It took about 40 minutes for the command to finish running on around 100,000 entries.
You can find the Gravity Forms CLI docs for entries here.
It took me a bit to find this answer so hopefully I’m saving you time. As described in the Laravel Authentication docs go to bootstrap/app.php and add the following to your Middleware.
$middleware->redirectGuestsTo('/login');
Which should leave app.php looking like this in a brand new install.
<?php
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Configuration\Exceptions;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Configuration\Middleware;
return Application::configure(basePath: dirname(__DIR__))
->withRouting(
web: __DIR__.'/../routes/web.php',
commands: __DIR__.'/../routes/console.php',
health: '/up',
)
->withMiddleware(function (Middleware $middleware) {
// redirect users that are NOT logged in to this URL
$middleware->redirectGuestsTo('/login');
})
->withExceptions(function (Exceptions $exceptions) {
//
})->create();
Change /login to whatever URL you want to send guests to.
I assume you have nix installed as a package manager at least if not the whole NixOS thing and a working home manager setup.
Most of the setup below was obvious, but the password stored externally to your configuration wasn’t quite defined in the section on setting up external sync services. Using feedbin-passwordfile you can set the location of the file you store the password in. Then that file only contains the password on the first line as described in the Newsboat password API docs.
Unlike some other applications, Newsboat will not work if you use single quotes around the extraConfig options so you have to escape " to stop the parsing error.
programs.newsboat = {
enable = true;
autoReload = true;
reloadTime = 10;
extraConfig = "
urls-source \"feedbin\"
feedbin-login \"curtis@curtismchale.ca\"
feedbin-passwordfile \"~/.newsboat/feedbin-password\"
";
};
As I set up a new Laravel project with SQLite I’ve found many references to enabling Write Ahead Logging being a large performance boost. All of the blog posts I’ve seen say to use the after parameter in your database connection like this.
'sqlite' => [
'driver' => 'sqlite',
'url' => env('DATABASE_URL'),
'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', database_path('database.sqlite')),
'prefix' => '',
'foreign_key_constraints' => env('DB_FOREIGN_KEYS', true),
'after' => function ($connection) {
$connection->statement('PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;');
},
],
But when you look at a modern Laravel database connection you’ll see that there is a defined parameter for journal_mode but no documentation on how to set WAL using this parameter. Thanks to wew for pointing me to the proper Issue showing me how to add WAL using the journal_mode parameter. Now my database connection looks like this.
'sqlite' => [
'driver' => 'sqlite',
'url' => env('DB_URL'),
'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', database_path('database.sqlite')),
'prefix' => '',
'foreign_key_constraints' => env('DB_FOREIGN_KEYS', true),
'busy_timeout' => 5000,
'journal_mode' => 'WAL',
'synchronous' => 'NORMAL',
],
I’m new to Laravel and while I had a working project via docker compose on my laptop 2 weeks ago, I’m on a new machine and needed to reinstall the project I had already been working on.
So far I’ve only built out the templates. I’m not interacting with the database outside whatever the default setup is. I expected to clone the project, setup .env files and run docker compose up to get my project going.
What actually happened was a big error screen about not being able to access storage/framework/views/<longstring>.php. Searching online I got lots of information saying that I had a file permission issue with Docker that doesn’t exist on macOS or Windows because of how they do virtualisation which sent me down a path of messing with chmod and groups on my Fedora 40 machine.
The real fix was php artisan migrate which initialised the sqlite database. Then my Laravel project ran on via docker compose without issue.
I just read this article on HTMX being a big deal for WordPress and I just don’t see it. To vastly simplify the article, give the code below and using the HTMX JavaScript library:
<a href="https://mysite.com/books" hx-target="#books">
View Books
</a>
<div id="books"></div>
This tells HTMX to fetch the content at the /books location and populate it in the #books ID. Somehow this is better than making an AJAX call to do the exact same thing.
I just don’t see it. The author goes on to call WordPress a “monolithic PHP server” as if it’s a bad thing. To me it seems like people like hating on PHP and HTMX is simply a way to “make it modern” instead of using a traditional AJAX call.
I can’t say I see any benefit to HTMX at all. The good part is I don’t need to invest time into learning it then.
Bold or italics in text is often used by sighted users as described in style guides to represent book titles or other citations. How does this impact users with disabilities and users that access your site with a screen reader?
Both <b> and <i> tags are considered WCAG compliance errors. Don’t use them.
Using a style element style="font-weight:bold" is not accessible. It only changes the appearance of the text and does nothing to convey meaning to any screen reader user. If this is a purely visual decoration this should be in your stylesheet not inline in your content.
Headings are often bold, but they should not be use simply to bold text. They are used by many users to navigate the content of a page and provide structure to your content.
While a sighted user can see text marked with <em> or <strong> tags most non-sighted screen reader users won’t have the same notation available since screen readers don’t acknowledge <em> or <strong> unless they use a specific one and turn on the setting. Most users don’t change the defaults on anything though so this is unlikely to be a use case that could be viably considered.
Gov.uk has a great look at this with their Warning text. If you click through to the HTML version you’ll see a visually hidden piece of text that says Warning.
<div class="govuk-warning-text">
<span class="govuk-warning-text__icon" aria-hidden="true">!</span>
<strong class="govuk-warning-text__text">
<span class="govuk-visually-hidden">Warning</span>
You can be fined up to £5,000 if you do not register.
</strong>
</div>
Using this Warning text means that users of screen readers get the semantic meaning of the text while visual users do not see the extra warning and instead see the styled text with a graphical element denoting that the piece of text is something to take extra note of. This is the same type of notation that is recommended by Deque University
In general text your text-level semantics should be treated as a progressive enhancement instead of required to make what you’re writing understandable. If you need a bold element to make your content have the emphasis you feel it needs that’s likely a sign of bad writing. Your text should put the emphasis on the right point without the need for any extra bold markup
Is the <em> or <strong> tag the best element to describe what you’re trying to emphasize?
<cite> is intended for short citations such as book titles.
<var> is designated to represent variables or computer code and mathematical equations.
<code> is for longer blocks of code or for the code references you note here
<kbd> is designated to specify key presses to be typed be a user.
nix-shell is an excellent package manager for any macOS in large part because it doesn’t install things globally so you don’t end up with version conflicts. While you can always go to the web to search for nix packages, you can also do this from the command line if you enable the experimental features of nix.
To do this on macOS open /etc/nix/nix.conf in your editor. I use NeoVim so my command is sudo nvim /etc/nix/nix.conf. Then add the following line and save.
experimental-features = nix-commad flakes
Now you can use nix search nixpkgs nodejs to search for all the available nodejs packages in the nix repository.