herb miller - WordPress plugin specialist

Show and tell – What’s going on?

Yesterday, the Cheltenham WordPress Meetup was a series of Show and Tell talks. Along the lines of Lightning talks, these are talks of approximately 10 minutes, where individuals share something they’ve been working on. There were 7 talks planned:

Richard Bell @Rich Bell demoed Ray and Background WordPress processing,
Mark Wilkinson @wpmark demoed his Just In Time CSS,
Elliott Richmond @erichmond showed us how to run Xdebug using Visual Code Studio, setting breakpoints, watching variables and changing values on the fly,
Ross Wintle @magicroundabout demoed his new CSS and PHP based spam pixel plugin to block spam bots
Keith Devon @keithdevon showed us his work on CSS grid for block based themes
We ran out of time before @Jonnyauk had a chance to show his latest work with template parts ( PHP version not FSE ).
and somewhere in the middle of it I talked about 3 plugins I’ve written to help visualise my server side performance: oik-bwtrace sb-chart-block and slog.

This post is the annotated version of the slides.

[Read more…]

Now what’s going on?

On the live site my What’s going on? post failed to display either the Slideshare or YouTube embed. Now what’s going on?

WordPress – Whats going on in the server? from Herb Miller

Additionally, cloning of the post from development to live is getting 403’s. I believe that’s Wordfence being a bit too enthusiastic. It is the 1st of April!

For more info on this see bobbingwide/bobbingwide#15

Slog – server performance testing

An update on my long running endeavour to visualise the effect on server performance of changes to my WordPress websites.

Since 2015 I’ve been developing a routine to compare the effect on server response times of the top 12 WordPress plugins. I’m just about ready to publish some results.

[Read more…]

WebP for my iPad

OK. so I’ve demonstrated that my iPad can’t display WebP format images, so I’ll have to try the picture tag method as a polyfill.

<picture>

  <source srcset="img/awesomeWebPImage.webp" type="image/webp">

  <source srcset="img/creakyOldJPEG.jpg" type="image/jpeg"> 

  <img src="img/creakyOldJPEG.jpg" alt="Alt Text!">

</picture>

This is the sample HTML copied from CSS Tricks: Using WebP Images.

So let’s try displaying oik-types-banner-772x250.webp to browsers that support it and the JPEG version for those that don’t.

<picture>

<source srcset="https://herbmiller.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/oik-types-banner-772x250-45.webp" type="image/webp">

<source srcset="https://herbmiller.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/oik-types-banner-772x250-45-1.jpg"  type="image/jpeg">

<img src="https://herbmiller.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/oik-types-banner-772x250-45-1.jpg" alt="GIMP 45% - 21KB">

</picture>

Image size reduction by quality

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tells me I can improve the performance of my website’s loading by taking the opportunity to Properly size images. For the home page on oik-plugins.com it reckons it can save 1.2 seconds on mobile, and 0.16 seconds on desktop, were I to serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.

For the oik-types banner image ( which it sees at 74.5KiB ) it suggests there’s a potential saving of 48.8 KiB. ie. It could be reduced to 25.7 KiB.

We’ve tried a range of qualities using Photoshop and GIMP. According to the chart below, using GIMP, I can achieve the image file size reduction by saving the image with a quality of 55%. But it looks like I could get away with 45%.

On oik-plugins.co.uk, where I’d already reduced the image to 70% quality (30 KiB), it reckons I can still save 22.7 KiB on Mobile. I assume that’s if I serve a file that’s already no wider than the user’s device.

It also suggests, Serve images in next-gen formats.

[Read more…]

Localization of Full Site Editing themes

The WordPress Gutenberg project’s plan for internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of Full Site Editing themes (FSE) has not yet been formulated. I’ve written a proposal, entitled Internationalization and localization: translating templates and template parts, raised as Feature request #27402.

I believe that very little needs to be done to Internationalize a file containing Gutenberg blocks and HTML, and that it can be translated and localized into a statically delivered file in the user’s required locale ( language and country ) using the process described in the feature request.

This post briefly discusses some of the challenges of translating rich text content.

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Fizzie – an experimental Full Site Editing theme

Phase 2 of the development of the Gutenberg block editor introduces Full Site Editing ( FSE ). In order to document the 23 new blocks, I felt I had to embrace Full Site Editing and develop my own experimental theme, which I chose to call Fizzie. The requirements of Fizzie are:

Implement Full Site Editing.
Same look and feel as the Genesis-a2z theme.
Support documentation / demonstration of each of the new blocks in Gutenberg.
Find out what bits are missing from and/or not working on Gutenberg.
Implement on blocks.wp-a2z.org, when stable.

What is Full Site Editing?

[Read more…]

How to survive WordPress 5.5’s removal of jQuery-migrate

I started upgrading to WordPress 5.5 and soon began to experience a load of problems with core functionality. Things that should work no longer worked. I first noticed it on a client’s site when Media Library didn’t display anything.

Media Library not working in WordPress 5.5.

WordPress TRAC Issue #50993

This post summarises my investigations, some of the problems I encountered, the workaround and some notes about what I need to do in the future, which is a work in progress.

TL;DR – 25th August 2020

As far as team Yoast are concerned the problem should go away if I upgrade to WordPress SEO v14.8.1.

Fixes a bug in WordPress itself where script concatenation was causing JavaScript errors, which in turn led to Yoast SEO malfunctioning. This bug was introduced in WordPress 5.5. We’re fixing it by disabling script concatenation entirely.

from the WordPres SEO v14.8.1 readme.txt file

With their fix being a workaround. Roll on WordPress 5.5.1

TL;DR – previous update

The problems that I documented last week were either due to a bug in WordPress or a bug in the Gutenberg plugin. There were two TRAC issues, and the problem had already been reported in Yoast’s GitHub repo.

The problem originally occurred with Gutenberg 8.7.1, WordPress SEO 14.7 and WordPress 5.5.

It appears that Gutenberg 8.8.0 has fixed the problem. There’s no longer a need to apply the patch developed for TRAC ticket #50999, nor, it seems, do I need the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin.

The “what I need to do in the future” part is still a work in progress”. I’ve created a GitHub Project for it.

[Read more…]

SB Children block – my first Single Block plugin

Today I delivered my first Single Block ( SB ) plugin to wordpress.org. It’s called SB Children block and it’s in the Block Directory.

I’ve written up some notes about the plugin. Suffice it to say there were a few challenges along the way. But I’ve left the details of these in the GitHub issues.

[Read more…]

Horizontally scrolling tables on narrow devices

I’ve been looking at how to enable horizontal scrolling on tables created by the [bw_table] shortcode, when the device width is narrow. I want to be able to do it using CSS, without JavaScript. I also want to be able to style the table in the native Gutenberg blocks.

Having looked at a couple of solutions, I believe I’ll be able to achieve it having the table nested in a Group block, and providing the CSS styling using my CSS block.

[Read more…]

Show and tell – What’s going on?

Now what’s going on?

Slog – server performance testing

WebP for my iPad

Image size reduction by quality

Localization of Full Site Editing themes

Fizzie – an experimental Full Site Editing theme

How to survive WordPress 5.5’s removal of jQuery-migrate

TL;DR – 25th August 2020

TL;DR – previous update

SB Children block – my first Single Block plugin

Horizontally scrolling tables on narrow devices

Tide times from tidetimes.co.uk

Tide times from tidetimes.org.uk

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