Uncategorized

When working with PHPUnit I love to have a separate database to run tests in isolation. For best results, this also involves trying really hard to make sure my DB seeding is up to date and as robust as possible. When a project is seeded, it should provide all the…...

Uncategorized

On a recent project, I kept getting an IntegrationError when trying to integrate Stripe. Specifically when running stripe.createToken(card). "IntegrationError: We could not retrieve data from the specified Element. Please make sure the Element you are attempting to use is still mounted. To fix this there are two things you need…...

Servers, WordPress

WP Engine is a very popular WordPress hosting platform, it has a lot of great features like super simple backups and auto staging site creation and replication. Sadly the methods available for deployment aren’t great. Out of the box you…...

Talks, WordCamp, WordPress

It was a great privilege to be able to speak at WordCamp Brighton this month. The talk was about the changes that Atomic Smash has had to go through to start using Gutenberg. I also spoke about what we as a team to prepare for the change before the…...

NGINX, Servers

We recently had to sort an SSL issue with a site that had been purely setup for handling redirections. For example, doing a global redirection from https://domainA.com to https://domainB.com during a company rebrand. This step is simple enough, the issue arises when Let’s Encrypt needs to re-validate and issue a…...

Docker, Optimisation

While Docker can be very efficient for production environments, it may not as speedy in development setups. There is an infamous Github issue called "Issue 77" about this topic, specifically Docker Desktop for Mac OSX. Since it was opened there have been over 200 comments on the post. There is a workaround to help speed increases, yet it's frustratingly hard to find in the thread. The main issue revolves around volumes and mounting, so caching can help reduce this latency....

Talks, WordCamp, WordPress

UPDATE 19/06/19: The footage from the talk has been uploaded to WordPress.tv. It can be viewed here: https://wordpress.tv/2019/06/19/david-darke-gutenberg-how-a-wordpress-studio-adapted/ The talk I recently spoke at WordCamp Bristol 2019. Even though I have spoken at a number of local WordPress meetups, this was the first at the scale of a WordCamp....

Servers

Some of our clients that use Semrush for website health auditing, have reported that HSTS is now a requirement for a site to be rated as 100% HTTPS verified: What is HSTS?...

Optimisation

Producing "above the fold" CSS for CMS driven sites (like WordPress) can be difficult. Using something like purgecss may be possible with task-driven workflows, yet what about sites that don't (or even can't) use this approach? The process takes your loaded webpage and works out what CSS is actually being used. Then with a small bit of manual editing, you can craft an appropriate critical CSS file....

WordPress

After almost 8 years of not having a personal website, I’ve finally decided to get one spun up. Pretty mad for a web developer to not have a website right? So here is a little landmark, the first post on the day the site went live……...