Dev Blog

Ever wondered how the illustrations on yoast.com are made? In this post all will be explained.

Testing WordPress plugins can be difficult, especially during development, when you want the feedback loops to be small. A local development environment can help. This enables you to test your plugin on a local WordPress installation, running on your own computer, without the need for a live website. However, setting one up can be difficult, …

Welcome to part six of our series on using WordPress JavaScript APIs, in which we explore the APIs that were introduced in WordPress 5.0. We'll have a look at how we can use them to better integrate with other plugins, in a reliable and safe way. Make sure to also check out our repository on …

Welcome to part five of our series on using the WordPress JavaScript APIs, in which we explore the APIs that were introduced in WordPress 5.0. We'll look at how we can use the APIs to better integrate with other plugins, in a reliable and safe way. Make sure to also check out our repository on …

Being lazy is often not a word you want to be described as. If I call you lazy, you would object, right? But lazy is not that bad, and being a lazy programmer is certainly not a bad thing. Bill Gates allegedly said: "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a …

Composer is a dependency management tool. It allows you to add libraries as a dependency, so you don’t have to solve every problem yourself. You can make use of the solutions provided by others to save yourself some time and likely account for edge-cases you hadn’t even thought of. Why would you use dependencies? For …

Every developer has the habit to reinvent the wheel. We search for excuses to do everything ourselves, such as "Ah no, that thing doesn't fully cover what I need" and "I don't trust code I didn't write myself". That's too bad because others might have fixed the same issues you ran into. In this post, …

The content analysis is a staple of our SEO plugin. We do our best to provide you with the best insights on how you could make your texts more readable and search-engine-friendly. In order to be able to give you this valuable feedback, we need to do a lot of computations. A logical solution would …

If you have limited knowledge about JavaScript, building native Gutenblocks can be a challenge. All the documentation contains JavaScript. Yet, when you build a theme, most things are done with PHP. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) built a great bridge to close this gap, allowing you to build Gutenblocks with just PHP! As ACF is an …

Unit-testing your WordPress plugin can be challenging. Luckily there are tools out there making it a lot easier. In this post, we will be covering the following tools: PHPUnit, Mockery and BrainMonkey. Together these tools can be a powerful tool to ensure the technical quality of your plugin. Before we started using these tools at …