I recently released Advanced Post Excerpt, a free plugin that replaces the standard WordPress “Post Excerpt” meta box (a plain textarea) with a stripped down TinyMCE editor instance. Finally, there’s no need for your authors to write HTML (or copy it out of the “Text” tab of the main editor); instead, they’re given the essentials for WYSIWYG text editing (bold, italic, link, etc.) and nothing more.
Category: Career
I’ve been behind on announcing new projects, but I wanted to make sure I shared this one:WP404 is a framework for capturing additional information and details about WordPress 404 errors, packaged as a WordPress plugin.
The plugin was born out of a need to capture tricky, time-based 404s on a client site. I figured I could either throw something together quickly on the client’s dime or spend my lunchtime and evening building something the community could use. Guess who didn’t want a half-assed tool? ?
Anyone who’s had to do code reviews on a team before can tell you that inconsistent coding standards add a lot of unnecessary noise to the review process. Even minor things like trailing whitespace, spaces v. tabs, code indentation, and whitespace (or lack thereof) around function declarations can cause merge conflicts and increase the time it takes to do a good code review.
Fortunately, coding standards are pretty easy to check, and there are great tools like PHP_CodeSniffer that can scan your codebase for issues with coding standards. WordPress has a well-defined set of coding standards, and there’s even a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer standards for WordPress. With Composer and a little bit of configuration we can check our coding standards, catch common security issues (missing input sanitization, output escaping, etc.), and even validate that everything’s well-documented.
We have the tools to write standards-compliant code, so now we just have to configure them and make them run automatically. That’s where my latest project comes in: I’m happy to announce WP Enforcer is available for your projects!
I received an email from a technical recruiter a few weeks ago asking not if I was interested in a position, but how she could better communicate with senior-level talent. The email spoke to me, so in the interest of helping good, well-meaning recruiters, I’ve decided to answer the email by way of a public blog post, in the hopes that my answers to this particular recruiter will help others (both on the talent management and development sides) build stronger relationships and find better placements.
As of today I’ve removed my portfolio from this site. The portfolio has always been the section most lacking in substance, and I feel I’ve reached a point in my career where my accomplishments are publicized well enough through my Twitter account, my GitHub profile, and through the efforts of my teammates at 10up that a dedicated “Portfolio” section on my site feels out of place.
I’m proud to announce my latest WordPress plugin: Revision Strike.
Unless post revisions are explicitly limited, WordPress will build up a hefty sum of revisions over time. While it’s great to have revision history for some recent content, the chances that old revisions will be necessary diminish the longer a post has been published. Revision Strike is designed to automatically remove these unneeded revisions on older, published posts.
Tonight, I was the guest on WPRoundTable #41, where we talked 10up, WordPress, Son of Clippy, version control, and more. Rich Robinkoff and I also teased (well, basically announced) the impostor syndrome panel we’re working on with Angela Bergmann and WP Tavern’s Jeff Chandler.
Since starting at 10up, I’ve been spending more and more time writing on this personal blog. It could be that I don’t have any real obligation to write for a company blog (Buckeye was small enough that I felt a sense of “well, if I don’t write for the blog, Tori will be the only one!), or the increased visibility through my new network of friends and colleagues.
More likely, the daily exposure to Eric Mann, who is an advocate for regular blogging and had a streak of 365 consecutive days of blog posts in 2014 is to blame (if in doubt, blame Eric). I’ve also been reading Chris Lema’s excellent blog, which just makes me feel like a slacker by comparison.
![The December 2014 cover of php[architect] magazine](https://stevegrunwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cover-900x1165.png)
In case you missed it yesterday, my article, Advanced Sites Deserve Advanced Custom Fields, has been published in the December issue of php[architect]. This marks my first feature-length magazine article!
Today marks one month since I joined #Team10up as a Senior Web Engineer. Before starting the position I was hesitant to switch to 100% remote working, so I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned and experiences I’ve had over the last 30 days in the hopes that they might help put would-be remote employees’ apprehensions to rest.
