Development workflow Advanced
The price of headless: preview, editing and operations
Headless is not a free upgrade. The gains are real and so are the losses — and the most underestimated of them is preview.
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28 articles· Development workflow · Developers
Development workflow Advanced
Running WP-CLI in CI: what the checks actually look like
Checks that rely on somebody remembering get skipped in a busy week. Stack the cheap ones first, run the rest against a disposable WordPress, and the remembering stops…
Development workflow Advanced
Finding out what is attached to a hook, in order
A callback that never runs, one that runs and gets overwritten, and a hook that never fires are three different problems. Reading the registry separates all three at…
Development workflow Advanced
Designing rollback: reversing code and database together
Putting the old code back does not put the old data back. If the new code has already migrated your data, the old code cannot read it —…
Development workflow Advanced
Adding your own hooks: extension points instead of edits
Code with no extension points gets forked or edited in place. Where you put do_action and apply_filters — and how many — decides how long that code survives.
Development workflow Advanced
CI for WordPress projects: what you can realistically check
CI earns its keep without a full test suite. Syntax, coding standards, a build check and a boot smoke test are a realistic starting point.
Development workflow Advanced
Adding your own WP-CLI command to a plugin
Registration is three lines and your docblock becomes the help text. What deserves thought is choosing between log, warning and error — because error stops the run.
Development workflow Practical
Removing someone else’s hook: name, priority and timing must match
remove_action says nothing when it fails, and a wrong name, a wrong priority and running too early all look identical. Checking the return value is half the fix.
Development workflow Practical
Three deploy strategies: rsync, git on the server, built artefacts
What separates the three is not speed but the rollback story. Decide how you undo a deploy before you decide how you make one.
Development workflow Practical
Idempotent seeds: running twice must create nothing
A seed script never runs only once. Get the lookup wrong and the check passes, the insert runs, and WordPress quietly appends -2 to the slug.
Development workflow Practical
The the_content chain: before and after wpautop are different strings
One filter, two different strings depending on whether you sit at priority 1 or 12. Pick the wrong side and your pattern simply never matches.
Development workflow Practical
If staging differs from production, your tests are lying
Staging does not need to be a similar environment; it needs to be identical in the ways that matter. Which ways those are can be written down as…
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Prompting an AI for UI design — drafting with Claude and GPT
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SCSS from the ground up — variables through module structure
The core syntax of SCSS (Sass) and what it solves that plain CSS cannot: variables, nesting, mixins, @use and module structure — organised around patterns you can use immediately.
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Themes & plugins
Design tokens and theme colour systems — brand identity in SCSS variables
How to turn a colour palette from a pile of hex codes into a system that means something — semantic token structure and SCSS variable patterns, from a real project.
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Designing a responsive typography system — the science of readability
Hard-coded pixel font sizes are over. Type scales, fluid sizing with clamp(), Korean webfont optimisation and line-height ratios — building typography that reads well on any screen.
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Development workflow
From Figma to SCSS — a designer-developer handoff guide
Minimising what gets lost between a Figma file and the code: extracting tokens, naming components, keeping the spacing system in sync — the whole workflow, step by step.