Darren PinderAt Vatu Ltd, we have 3 main goals: Create high-quality websites Give great customer service to our clients Create a happy, safe,...
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Vatu’s new Email Policy
At Vatu Ltd, we have 3 main goals: Create high-quality websites Give great customer service to our clients Create a happy, safe, and fulfilling work environment for our staff Today we’re launching a 3 month trial which aims to improve goals 2 and 3, and it simply involves not checking our email. To be more specific, it involves [...]
Darren Pinder
5 security tips for running a WordPress site
We love WordPress. There are so many reasons to use it, whether you’re an individual blogger or a large company looking for a stable content publishing platform. From it’s excellent editing capabilities, to the extensive library of over 37,000 free plugins in the WordPress directory (plus countless more hosted elsewhere), the many themes [...]
Darren Pinder
Constructr – when solving that one problem got out of control.
As always, us developers will have a task and a plethora of ways that we could go about solving it. But, being the way we are, some more NIH (Not Invented Here Syndrome) then others, we don’t want to just solve the problem, we don’t want to just hack something up to solve it, we want to solve it in the most awesome and [...]
OzzieP
Hosting Your Service on AWS Lambda
Abstract This article will go over hosting our RSS Feed Slack Bot we created earlier. If you have not followed along you can grab the code from Github. I chose to use AWS Lambda because it should cost less than a dedicated hosting solution, such as EC2. Also, I wanted to learn how to use AWS Lambda. Adding an AWS Lambda Hook Add this [...]
thewongguy
Create a Slack Bot for RSS Feeds
Abstract The goal of this project was to create a Slack Bot which would post blog updates into our Slack. This was born in part, due to laziness. I did not want to manually check for new posts and I had reached the RSS feed limit in my reader. I also wanted to learn AWS Lambda, S3, and the AWS SDK, boto3. I should note, this [...]
thewongguy
Simple way to get a single post’s taxonomy
So you've got a custom taxonomy, and you want to return the taxonomy's name(s) ("terms") on a single post template on the front-end.
Darren Pinder
Updating multiple WooCommerce variant product shipping classes at once with SQL
I came across a problem recently whereby I needed to update a few thousand WooCommerce product variations’ shipping classes. To explain, this store had hundreds of products, each with at least a dozen variations. These variations were typically split into 2 types, we’ll call them Type A and Type B. Type A variations were [...]
Darren Pinder
Why you should switch to SSL
If you haven’t been paying attention, some of the big players like Google and Mozilla are on a mission to make the web more secure. Google search has been using HTTPS as a ranking signal for a few years, but now there’s a browser penalty, too. Beginning in January 2017, browsers like Chrome and Firefox started displaying [...]
Sydney Alcala
Checking for a Plugin Dependency on Activation
Often, WordPress plugins that we create are meant to extend or build on other plugins that already exist. For example, if you search “WooCommerce”, you can find hundreds of other plugins that modify, extend, or otherwise change the capabilities of the base WooCommerce plugin. Whether these plugins are from the official [...]
Dan Dulaney
Adding SMS Notifications to Your Bash Scripts
Hello! Today, we’re going to add text message notifications to our bash scripts. To do so, we’re going to use the Amazon Web Service’s SNS SMS api, via AWS CLI. For this tutorial, you will need to have an Amazon Web Services account. Signing up for an AWS account is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Cost Note: The [...]
Dan Dulaney