Customizing WordPress
Everyone wants a unique web presence. WordPress makes this easy by allowing us to customize our website to our heart’s content.
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A New Talks Page
Recently, I’ve started volunteering to give more talks to local user groups and conferences. Normally, I have some kind of slide deck to go along with those as a resource. To keep all of these in one place, I’ve created a Talks page as a kind of repo for the talks I’ve given or talks in development.
Auto-Send Slack Invites
Recently, we wanted to create a Slack group for a meetup group in our city. We also wanted to auto-send Slack invites to folks so the admins didn’t have to.
Everyone (especially devs!) love Slack, and we’re on it all the time. One of the best ways we can keep in touch outside of the meetup (meetup.com doesn’t really have a good interface for chatting with group members in between meetups) is to make sure we’re able to communicate and ask questions here between meetups.
Talk: Getting Started with WP-CLI
Do you work with or maintain WordPress sites and wonder if there’s an easier way to keep things updated?
Are you looking for a way to automate a site setup, turning a five minute install into a 5 second install? (Well, at least less than 5 minutes)
Are you bogged down by repetitive tasks that you think, “Ugh, OMG!!!, I wish there was a friggin’ script I could run that would take care of this for me.”
How I Wrote My First Bash Script to Implement WP-CLI on Managed Sites
They say if you want to learn something, teach.
Or scratch your own itch.
Or just do it.
In any case, I had an itch that I have been wanting to find a fix for for a while.
If you are a developer like me, you began figuring this “WordPress thing” out through tutorials, trial and (mostly) error, and trying a lot of different things out.
Also, if you’re like me, you got into this for several reasons, one of which is the joy of helping people out and getting them a website setup and launched. I love the satisfaction of getting that project launched and the joy these folks have when they realize they can manage their own publishing.
And of course, if you’re a developer like me, you have a shared hosting account with at least a dozen different websites that are small personal projects or folks on the “friends and family plan” (read “free hosting” 🙂 ). This means I have a dozen or so sites I want to make sure I keep updated, but don’t want to spend a lot of time updating.
So, I decided to learn enough bash to write a script that would execute WP-CLI commands on my local environment as well as my shared hosting.
Here’s how I did it…
Tips for Small Business Owners Getting Started with WordPress
A couple months ago, I was asked to contribute to an article for business owners on getting started with WordPress. The article was just published and I made slot #4 (I don’t think there’s anything special about that, btw ). There was some great advice in the article, especially #1:
Don’t be afraid to get it wrong the first time…
So true!
However, since only a little bit of what I contributed was shared in the article, I wanted to post the rest here.
Just in case any business owners are wondering about getting started with WordPress, please know:
You’re not alone in this.
There’s a lot of help available.
Don’t be afraid to seek help if you don’t understand something.
It’s all going to be ok.
Here’s the rest of what I recommend when getting started with WordPress.