Dev Blog

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 …

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to join the Yoast Dev team on our visit to PHPBenelux Conference 2016 in Antwerp, Belgium. This two-day event was jam-packed with tutorials, speakers, interesting conversations and lots of laughs. There was too much going on to cover it all, but I’ll discuss some of the …

Compared to many other IT-related conferences, WordCamps have always been slightly less technical. Not as focused on writing code as many others are. Over the years I've learned this may have something to do with the way our community is built. The WordPress community is not as homogeneous as others. It consists of developers, designers, …

Let's be honest. We've all been tempted at times. A gathering of hundreds or thousands of people with the same interest, the same goals, the same vision. That sounds really promising, doesn't it? Well no. It doesn't. Let me show you why you should never attend a WordCamp. WordCamps are full of people As most …

Two weeks ago Taco, Patrick and I went on a trip to the US of A to visit Philadelphia for the first ever WordCamp US. There are a lot of topics to cover, but in this article I'll highlight some of my experiences as a developer taking part in WordCamp US and the WordPress Community …

Git hooks are small executable scripts that provide a way to trigger actions on different points in a git workflow. At Yoast we've found multiple use cases, including regeneration of autoloading classmap, codestyle checks and asset minification.

One of the tasks I took on this year is crunching through the GitHub issue tracker of Yoast SEO. Much of it was to organize and improve how GitHub labels shape the issue tracker workflows. In a large and long running open source project issues have a life of their own. It's a challenge to keep a clear picture …