Blog
Actionable tips and updates to help you ship plugins, themes, and client sites faster
6 min readWordPress recovery mode: what it actually does, and why the email never arrived
Recovery mode pauses a fatal plugin for you alone, not for your visitors, and core refuses to send the email in five specific cases. Here is what the source does, and how to test it before you need it.
6 min readWordPress update failed: what actually happened, and what your site looks like now
A failed plugin or theme update usually leaves your old version running, because core moves it aside first and puts it back on shutdown. Here is which failures self-heal, which ones do not, and how to read the error.
5 min readWordPress "another update is currently in progress": read the lock before you delete it
The core update lock expires by itself after 15 minutes. If the message is still there after that, deleting the row is treating the symptom. Here is how to read it first.
6 min readWordPress stuck in maintenance mode: why it is rarely the .maintenance file
WordPress core ignores its own .maintenance file after ten minutes. If your site is still showing the maintenance message an hour later, something else is holding it there.
5 min readHow to reset a WordPress site, and what a reset leaves behind
Reset plugins clear the database and touch no files. That means mu-plugins, drop-ins and wp-config constants survive the reset, and they are exactly the things that were breaking your site.
6 min readWordPress multisite subdomain vs subdirectory: what the choice actually changes
Subdomains need wildcard DNS and a wildcard certificate. Subdirectories need something nobody writes about: ten reserved slugs, a collision check against your existing pages, and a different cookie scope.
5 min readInstall WP-CLI: which method you pick decides what breaks later
The Phar download, Composer, apt and Homebrew all give you a working wp command. Only one of them can self-update, only one PHP extension makes plugin installs work, and the root check silently disappears on some hosts.
5 min readThe WP-CLI commands that matter once a script is running them
Every WP-CLI guide is a catalogue of commands for a human at a prompt. The ones that matter in a script are different: is-installed, has-command, --format=count, --skip-plugins, and the exit codes nobody documents.
6 min readInstall WordPress with WP-CLI, and the four things wp core install leaves for you
Four commands install WordPress from the shell. The command also indexes your site, prints the admin password to stdout, and can report a version it did not download.