If you have been part of the modern JavaScript community, it is likely you have run across a handy library called Immer. While I won't go too far into detail about what Immer does, the gist is it allows you to mutate immutable objects and pass the changed objects back as a new immutable one. This certainly comes in handy when dealing with React state which works almost exclusively with immutable objects and expects new ones to be passed for state updates. It is equally as likely you have run … [Read more...]
Removing Legacy License Support
As I'm sure you have heard by now, we launched a brand new license system back on May 26th, 2019. This system opened up new possibilities for things like subscriptions as well as making support more effective and personalized to each user. While the legacy system served it's purpose well for more than 5 years, this new system will grow with us and is expected to remain in place indefinitely. Now it is time to say goodbye to the Legacy License system. This will free up resources for us to … [Read more...]
Last Night’s Plugin Issues
I want to start out by apologizing to anyone who was inconvenienced by the plugin endpoint issues we experienced last night. I know it can be really annoying when a system that just works for years has an unexpected anomaly causing confusion and frustration. I am so sorry. First let's talk about the actual issues that user were experiencing. There are two of them: 1 The plugins were flagging licenses as invalid and displaying warnings in the WordPress admin. On a basic level, the PRO … [Read more...]
Continued Security Push With HSTS
If you have been following along with much of my community involvement lately, you've probably noticed I've been very preoccupied with security lately. This new found push for rigorous security overhauls all started when I accidentally learned how to hack websites using XHR. Previously, remembering to use POST instead of GET for handling user data was enough to protect against CSRF. NOT ANY MORE! The past few weeks have taken me down many security roads including SRI , XSS, CSRF, CSP … [Read more...]
Advanced Sidebar Menu PRO – Version 3.9.0
Today a brand new version of the Advanced Sidebar Menu PRO plugin was released to the general public! New mandatory PHP version requirement. For over a year the required version of PHP for this plugin was set to PHP 5.4. To give any users who were still on legacy versions of PHP time to update we maintained PHP version 5.2 compatibility. In preparation of the new PHP requirements for WordPress Core, this version officially removes support for PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 in favor of the stated … [Read more...]
Go Live Update Urls PRO – Version 2.6.0
Today a brand new version of the Go Live Update Urls PRO plugin was released to the general public! The most notable addition to this plugin is a WP-CLI command. Now you may update your site using the command line. Extremely simple options allow you make this plugin part of your Devops or Continuous Integration workflow. Translations for all languages were also updated in this release, as well as some code related improvements. Enjoy! … [Read more...]
New Products Business Model
If you are an existing customer you may have noticed a new section in My Account named "Subscriptions". This may also be named "My Subscription" if you have a single active subscription. Based on the feedback I have been getting, there may be some confusion why this section exists. This post should clear things up 😊. Historically, all plugin purchases have come with a permanent license and subscriptions were not offered. Over the past year or so, the plugin userbase has grown at an … [Read more...]
Case Study: Displaying Highlighted Search Terms With Limited Content
As the content of a WordPress site grows (using this site as my case study) search results will also grow. Typically on a WordPress site the search results will either show the post content, the excerpt, or a limited version of the content. WordPress does not highlight the words in the content which match the search terms, nor does it automatically display the relevant sections of a post's content when using the excerpt or a limited version of content. This can lead to potentially unintuitive … [Read more...]
Version 3.7.0 Of Advanced Sidebar Menu PRO
Version 3.7.0 of Advanced Sidebar Menu PRO is now available to all PRO users and may be updated through the WordPress Admin or downloaded through the Downloads area. This version adds a couple of useful features which will automatically work without changing any settings: Pages which are marked "Exclude this page from the Advanced Sidebar Menus" will now also be excluded from the Navigation Menu widgets.Pages shown in the Navigation menu widgets will now display the title which is set on … [Read more...]
Node As A CLI
This is an exhaustive article on creating command line run scripts/executables with node and how it all works. It is broken into sections for convenience if you are looking for a specific topic. Otherwise, grab a coffee and prepare to learn more than you ever wanted to know about node cli. For the purpose of this article the words package and project are interchangeable and both mean a node app which is defined by the package.json standard. For the purposes of this article all project … [Read more...]