DEV Community: Dave Kellam

Five For the Future at Plank

Dave Kellam — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:49:45 +0000

Plank is one of over 150 organizations that have pledged to contribute to Five For the Future.

Launched in 2014, Five for the Future encourages organizations to contribute 5% of their resources to WordPress development. This benchmark was proposed by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg to maintain a "golden ratio" of contributors to users. Participation in the community has more than quadrupled since launch.

At Plank, we believe in open-source software. We use it to power all of our projects. So many others have contributed to making our lives easier and more productive, it's important that we do the same!

We’ve begun our Five For the Future journey by contributing to the documentation and polyglots teams. The polyglots team is a natural fit for us, as our team members speak various languages, including English, French, Spanish and Arabic. We’ll be looking to expand our involvement in the near future by attending contributor day at WordCamp US 2023.

Visit our pledge to see our contributions to the project so far!

Photo from contributor day at WordCamp Europe 2023.

WordPress Playground

Dave Kellam — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 19:14:08 +0000

One of the most exciting things at WordCamp Europe 2023 for me was discovering how far along the WordPress Playground project is. If you haven’t heard of the playground before, it’s a full version of WordPress, running directly in your browser!

History

The project began late last summer, with version 0.1 being released in April. The readme indicates that it was inspired by the initial PHP WASM implementation, a Drupal in the browser example, and a WASM Labs WordPress demo. The WordPress Playground was introduced to the larger WordPress community during the 2022 State of the Word presentation.

The Playground was actively promoted during WCEU this year — used to quickly spin up sites for the documentation team, and others, on contributor day, featured in a connect track session, and a demo during the keynote.

How it works

The technology behind the Playground is called WASM, short for Web Assembly.

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.

There are versions of PHP compiled into WASM binaries that allow you to run PHP code directly in the browser. The Playground then uses those binaries to run the WordPress PHP application, as well as a plugin that allows MySQL calls to be intercepted and interpreted to SQLite

Demos

WordPress Playground with Frost theme installed

Unfortunately, you can’t embed playground iframes in dev.to, but we can link directly to a few examples of it in action. The Playground default uses the latest version of WordPress with the default theme and PHP 8.0.

You can use query parameters, like theme and plugins to install a particular theme or plugin in the Playground. In this example, we install the Frost theme and CoBlocks plugin. You can also pass wp and php to install different versions of WordPress and PHP.

If you’re embedding an iframe, the experience is also totally scriptable. One example of the iframes in action is the tutorial for using the new tag processor function.

The future

The Playground opens up a lot of possibilities since it makes WordPress embeddable in so many areas:

We can easily test different versions of WordPress and PHP
We can embed live examples in tutorials and lessons
A VS Code extension allows you to open a theme or plugin up in a usable test environment
It can be embedded directly in mobile apps
We can include live demos in pull requests
It can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline

The vision and philosophy and roadmap are both available on GitHub, so you can see where things are headed. It’s still early on, version 0.2 was just released a few days ago on June 24th. We’re likely to see breaking changes at times until an official 1.0 release happens.

Now it’s time to go play.

Change WordPress 404 redirect behaviour

Dave Kellam — Tue, 16 May 2023 14:29:53 +0000

When you visit a WordPress site url that doesn't exist, the default behaviour is to "guess" what you were trying to find. So, instead of landing on a 404 page, you'll possibly end up on a page that may or may not be what you were looking for.

This behaviour makes sense if the permalink structure (routes) have changed, and the post is still named the same. However, it can be a jarring experience for a user to end up on an unrelated page that happens to contain one of the words in the slug.

Two ways to modify the 404 behaviour

Turn off 404 guessing altogether:

add_filter( 'do_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_false' );

Use a strict redirect match (i.e. it will only redirect if it finds a post with the exact same slug):

add_filter( 'strict_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_true' );

WPCS: Use short array syntax

Dave Kellam — Tue, 02 May 2023 15:14:28 +0000

At Plank, we use the WordPress Coding Standards in our development process. It helps ensure that everyone is writing code in a similar style, and that we follow best practices (like escaping and sanitizing data).

That said, we don't necessarily agree with all of the rules. In particular, we prefer using the short array syntax for php arrays. We find it easier to find when an array closes, rather than searching through a sea of closing parentheses ();););).

If you're using your own custom ruleset to extend the default standards, you do something like this to allow the short array syntax. If you really don't like the long array syntax, you can disallow it, and phpcbf should convert to short arrays with the second pattern.

<!-- Allow short syntax arrays. -->
<rule ref="Generic.Arrays.DisallowLongArraySyntax"/>

<!-- Disallow long array syntax -->
<rule ref="Generic.Arrays.DisallowShortArraySyntax.Found">
    <exclude-pattern>*</exclude-pattern>
</rule>

Find all PDFs in a folder

Dave Kellam — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 17:05:44 +0000

A quick way to find all PDFs in a folder and dump the list into a text file on the desktop:

find . -type f -iname "*.pdf" > ~/Desktop/pdf-list.txt

This should work to find any files of a specific type.