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.

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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Categorized as General

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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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.

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.

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.

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