Dev Blog

On Friday, Irene and I visited the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop to learn more about information retrieval and to meet the Dutch/Belgian Information Retrieval community. Before going to this conference, I didn't know what Information Retrieval was. Now I know what it comprises and how it relates to software development at Yoast. In our recently released …

According to the World Health Organization, 246 million people have low vision worldwide. Approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women in the world have some form of altered perception of colors. At Yoast, we’ve decided to review the colors used in all our projects to improve text contrast and readability. Better …

Universal access to content is an essential aspect of the web. Helping people finding content is one of the first steps. For that reason, it is the responsibility of every developer to make sure content is accessible for everyone. At Yoast, accessibility matters a great deal. We’re all focused in an ongoing effort to improve the …

One of the goals of the development team whilst building the JavaScript onboarding wizard in Yoast SEO 3.6 was to make it generic. We love the open source community, so we made the wizard freely available for everyone. That means you can use our wizard component for your own needs! I’ll give a short explanation …

When you install our Yoast SEO plugin onto your WordPress site, there are some basic things that you have to set up for your site to rank. Normally you have to go to the settings of the plugin and set everything up yourself. There are a lot of settings in our plugin, and they're not …

Back in 2001 I did my first internship at a web company in Groningen (in the north of the Netherlands). This is where I discovered I have a passion for web development. Since then I’ve mostly worked at companies with a very small technical team (1-3 people) which brought out my constructive and problem solving …

Recently, I switched from a MacBook Pro to an MSI GS70 as my workstation. This meant that I had to reconfigure my development environment in Windows. This had to be done in a way so that I still had access to the same tools that my colleagues use on their Apple machines. In this post …

PhpStorm has been growing in popularity in WordPress circles. On one hand it's a solid code editor choice in general. On another it's great for projects in the WordPress ecosystem, which typically contain a balance of legacy code and modern PHP practices. I remember troubleshooting some issue in Yoast SEO years ago. I grumped that it wouldn’t …

A nice way to optimize your test flow is by having PhpStorm run your unit tests for you. It can be quite some work to set this up for WordPress plugins, since they depend so heavily on WordPress. In this post, I'll go over all the steps you'll have to take to do this.

Let's face it. You don't like testing new software. You want software to be done and production ready. You don't have time to try out new software. Especially when you're in the middle of a busy period. I know. Now spare a few minutes of your precious time and read these three reasons why you …