Peter Wilson

Blog

  • 13 years of contributing to WordPress

    Billiards balls on a billiards table. In the foreground is a while ball showing the number 13.
    “13” by Alexander Makarov is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    Inspired by Jonathan’s contribution anniversary post of a few days ago, I decided to look up when I received my first props in WordPress.

    Coincidentally, I’m also a July props baby and received my first WordPress props thirteen years ago today, on July 11, 2011 (Australian time). It was for the second ticket I’d filed, #18018, and Andrew Nacin committed the patch I’d provided a few days later.

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  • Type declarations with WordPress filters

    In a December blog post Juliette Reinders Folmer described the upgrade path to allow projects for supporting PHP 8 alongside older versions of PHP as a nightmare.

    Seeing it come up in my timeline again recently, I started thinking about the affects of type declarations on projects, especially those with a plugin architecture.

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  • WordPress 5.6 released

    WordPress 5.6 “Simone” has now been released and is available for download.

    Nina Simone album cover: Silk and Soul

    For the first time, the release squad was made up entirely of people identifying as women or non-binary. In some corners of the internet this proved to be controversial.

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  • A new (WP) Beginning

    Since July last year, I’ve been lucky enough to work on the most interesting WordPress project in Australia: the WordPress foundation used for article editing on The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review, one of the country’s most read and influential news networks.

    This product can in no way can be considered a typical WordPress instance as it is a highly customised edit screen used for creating articles. This was my second go round on the project; the first time I was a senior engineer at Human Made, working on it as a greenfield project. This time, I was an employee of Nine Publishing working on it as a mature project.

    Yesterday was my last day at Nine Publishing, and after a lovely farewell get together with the team I signed out of G-Suite, Slack and I deleted my local Git repositories. Working on such a project once is privilege enough, to have the chance to work on it twice was an immense pleasure.

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  • This week I’m sick of it

    Swings and roundabouts but this week I am sick of it.

    • I’m sick of sanitising when I open the gate to our block of flats
    • I’m sick of sanitising as I grab a take-away coffee
    • I’m sick of sanitising as I enter the supermarket
    • I’m sick of going shopping at 7am to avoid people
    • I’m sick of doing the covid-shuffle as I pass strangers on the street
    • I’m sick of walking on grass or rocks to maintain my distance when walking along the shared path
    • I’m sick of Zoom
    • I’m sick of being excited to get on a Zoom
    • I’m sick of catching up with friends over Zoom instead of spending three hours talking shit in a restaurant
    • I’m sick of movies going straight to streaming because people need it right now
    • I’m sick of this fucking home office
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  • Nick Cave’s stream is not the problem

    I don’t think the stream, per se, was the problem with the Nick Cave concert last night. It’s was a Vimeo embed, they know how to stream and devices optimise for video. It’s the page around it that @dicefm needs to fix.

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  • Accessible photo tinting

    A very common pattern on the web is to overlay text on a photo. It’s a lovely effect but one that requires care to get right.

    The difficulty arrises for the web developer wishing to produce an accessible site because they can never be sure what the colour of the photo will be.

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  • Using real cron for WordPress with WP CLI

    For WordPress site owners wishing to use real cron via a crontab job, it’s fairly common to see advice to use curl to request the site’s wp-cron.php file on a regular basis.

    In the days before the WordPress CLI (WP-CLI), using the wp-cron.php file was the only technique available to site owners wishing to use real cron events.

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  • Accessibility is more than access for all

    I’m in London visiting friends for a couple of weeks and, predictably enough, took them to see West End production of Hamilton the Musical. Unfortunately one of my friend’s health has deteriorated over the last few years so queuing for entry to the theatre is a problem. We needed an access ticket.

    This doesn’t feel like an access ticket, it feels like a VIP ticket.

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  • Vote Yes! Pull Request

    Vote Yes! Pull Request is a small collection of custom styles to replace the approve button in Bit Bucket. ?️‍?

    Add the following to the bitbucket domain using Stylish.

    @import url(https://peterwilsoncc.github.io/vote-yes-pull-request/bb.css);

    Why? Because I am not one to let an offhand comment go unimplemented.