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Plugins I’m running in my WordPress blogs

Not that anyone asked.

When it comes to the plugins on my blog I like to think I’m a bit of a minimalist.

No Plugins
I don’t have any plugins currently running at https://joseph-dickson.com

My “professional” blog at joseph-dickson.com is running bare bones WordPress, on the occasion of a new version update I’ll run WP-Optimize to clean things up a bit then uninstall it. I’d keep it around if I had more things going on over there.

Four Plugins
On this very site I’m running four. Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress and a brute force security plugin in the Must-use folder that I’m considering removing as it’s a little redundant alongside Jetpack.

I get some grief from friends for using Jetpack but find many of it’s features worthwhile. Video CDN, automatic backups, comment spam filtering.

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Testing Out Twenty Nineteen

laptop in a dark room

I’ve become a bit of a fan of Gutenberg over the last several months. So when the upcoming Twenty Nineteen theme was announced earlier this week I had to give it a shot as soon as possible. I love kicking the tires on a new default WordPress theme before all the bugs are ironed out.

I love kicking the tires

Twenty Nineteen will feature Gutenberg at launch so theoretically all the core blocks will work as expected so developers like myself can refer back to it’s code as an example of how to build a compatible theme.

hot lead type blocks for publishing books
Hot lead type used in printing. Photo Source: Pixabay

My hacking to do list

  • Create a Child Theme
  • Figure out a way to customize the blue overlay on featured images
  • Perhaps create a Gutenberg block or Customizer setting to adjust the color settings
  • Submit results to the community

Once complete I may be able to create a presentation for my local meetup.

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WP-CLI at IEWP-ADV

Today we looked at WP-CLI at the Inland Empire Advanced WP meetup and I’ll be honest I was probably more excited than anyone watching me.

Double Keyboard Hacking GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY
What I think presenting WP-CLI looks like
Star Trek Computer GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY
What it probably looked like
Computer GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY
What the attendees probably wanted to do

I’m a big fan of WP-CLI and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t break my live website. In fact I couldn’t delete a theme in the WordPress dashboard and WP-CLI removed it without an issue.