On the Delicious Brains site, there's a tutorial posted asking WordPress plugin developers if their code is ready to work with Gutenberg, the next major release of the editor used in the popular blogging tool and content management system.

WordPress 5.0 is right around the corner with the flagship feature, the new Gutenberg editor, set to change the WordPress landscape dramatically. Gutenberg not only impacts how you write content in WordPress, but how developers build plugins for WordPress.

[...] In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took for making Intagrate, my Instagram WordPress plugin, Gutenberg-compatible, which will hopefully get you started on making your own plugins Gutenberg-ready.

The post starts with some general things to consider about Gutenberg's functionality as compared to the classic editor and some key places to check in your own plugins. They then provide a guide to testing your plugin by installing the standalone editor package. It then walks through the three main places to check functionality:

• custom post types
• custom meta boxes
• TinyMCE

The post ends with some suggestions of possible enhancements such as making use of shortcodes and converting custom meta boxes.

For the WordPress users out there, the RIPSTech.com blog has posted an invaluable "cheat sheet" sharing details on securing your configuration to prevent exploits and other issues down the line.

WordPress is the most frequently installed web application in the world. The system is operated not only by experienced developers but also by beginners. In this blog post, we summarize what to look out for when configuring your WordPress installation’s security.

In our series about misconfigurations of PHP frameworks, we have investigated Symfony, a very versatile and modular framework. Due to the enormous distribution and the multitude of plugins, WordPress is also a very popular target for attackers. This cheat sheet focuses on the wp-config.php file and highlights important settings to check when configuring your secure WordPress installation.

Suggestions made in the guide cover values involving: debugging, database credentials, keys/salts, database repair, external requests and many more. The post provides examples for each of the settings and a recommended value to make it easy to drop in the changes and harden your WordPress installation.

On the DeliciousBrains.com site they've posted the latest installment for their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series (part 12) showing how to move your WordPress installation over to a new server.

In part 11 of Hosting WordPress Yourself I demonstrated how to update a server’s packages (including PHP). However, I didn’t show how to upgrade the server itself, because it’s not something I recommend.

[...] In this article, I’m going to walk you through the steps required to migrate an existing WordPress site to a new server. These are the same steps that I took just a few months ago to migrate the Delicious Brains site to a new server with little to no downtime.

The rest of the article is broken up into several different sections, each with descriptions and commands/code you'll need:

• Securely Copying Files
• File Migration
• Nginx Configuration
• HTTPS Certificates
• Spoof DNS
• Database Import

They also include hints on migrating with minimum downtime and things to look out for when you "flip the switch".

Terry Chay has posted the answer to an interesting question about the PHP language that asks what is something very few know about PHP. The original answer was shared on Quora but he's copied it here for more visibility.

Question: What’s something very few people know about PHP? Answer: It is mind-bogglingly popular for web development. That popularity hasn’t diminished even though conventional wisdom says otherwise…

Over a decade ago, I said about 40% of the top 100 websites use PHP. [...] Overall, almost 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and that has held steady for years! Newer web languages such as Ruby or NodeJS have only grown at the expense of other languages such as ASP, Java, or Perl.

He also shares some about the role of WordPress in these numbers (a big chunk at 30%) and a guess at how many PHP developers there are in the world right now.

On the Delicious Brains site they've continued their series covering the deployment of WordPress applications with part four of the series. In this latest tutorial they walk you through the process to set up automated deployments of your WordPress site. In this case, they focus on the use of either the Buddy or DeployBot tools to help automate the process (rather than a roll-your-own solution).

In my last article, we looked at different methods of deploying a WordPress site using Git. We also looked at using an external CI service (such as Travis) to automatically trigger a deployment on your remote git repo.

In this article, we’re going to build on what we have looked at previously and consider some alternative hosted services that can help us with automated deployments for our WordPress site. There are many hosted services that we could use to deploy our WordPress site but we’re just going to look at a few of the bigger ones: Buddy and DeployBot. Unlike Travis, these services are dedicated to automated deployments and offer a lot more functionality and flexibility.

They start off by listing out some of the prerequisites you'll need for your environment including a WordPress site in a Git repository and a working install of Composer. They then walk you through the process to set up the automation in a similar way on each platform:

• Signing up for Buddy and adding a new project
• Setting up a new pipeline
• Configuring the tasks to run
• Transferring files
• Connecting it to the production environment

Once all of that it set up, you're ready to run the pipeline and test it out. Screenshots are included for each step of the way to make sure you're in the right place and are getting the settings correct.

The Delicious Brains site has continued their series covering WordPress deployment with part three: Deploying WordPress Using Git. While their instructions relate to WordPress, the examples given would work for any PHP-based application.

In my last article, we looked at deploying WordPress using some different command line (CLI) tools. In this article, we’re going to look at how we can deploy WordPress using Git, both manually via the CLI and also automatically when you push code to your remote repository.

They start by listing out the tooling you'll need to follow along - Git and Composer - and an example repository you can work from. The post then walk through three different methods you can use to deploy making use of Git:

• a "git pull" on the production server
• automated deployment via webhooks
• deployment using a continuous integration service

For each item there's a brief summary included as well as configurations, screenshots and setup instructions.

On the Delicious Brains site there's a new tutorial posted for the WordPress users out there sharing a case study of the performance impact of WP Offload S3 on the average page load time.

One of the great things about working at Delicious Brains is working on products that I use and love outside of work. I was a WP Migrate DB Pro customer well before joining the team and still use it daily on personal sites and side projects. However, I’ve not often had the need to use our other plugin, WP Offload S3 to offload site media files to Amazon S3.

The post starts with some of the background on why the author chose the WP Offload plugin in the first place and what features it provided. The tutorial then walks you through the installation process and how to have assets served up by Cloudfront correctly. It also includes some things you should consider when figuring out if this setup is for you. It then wraps up with some benchmarks of the results post-implementation, seeing a decrease of almost a second off of the previous page load time.

The Delicious Brains site has posted the final part of their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series to their site. In this latest tutorial they cover ongoing maintenance tasks for your server to keep it running smoothly and secure.

So you’ve followed our in-depth guide and built yourself a shiny new server that’s secure and tuned for optimal WordPress performance, but what’s next? In this installment of Hosting WordPress Yourself, I’m going to outline a few tasks that should be carried out on a regular basis to ensure that your server continues to run securely and perform well. We’ll look at performing software updates, upgrading PHP, and a few “gotchas” to watch out for that we may have experienced ourselves. Let’s dive straight in!

The article is broken up into several sections, each with a summary providing a bit more background:

• Keep Plugins and Themes Updated
• Check Backups are Running
• Keep an Eye on Server Metrics
• Watch Those Log Files
• Update Server Packages
• Upgrade PHP

They also talk about upgrading the OS itself (Ubuntu) and how to outline an action plan that, when used regularly, can keep your system and software up-to-date easily.

On the DeliciousBrains.com site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to create a WordPress plugin using Vue.js to make interaction with the page simpler (and nicer than just a normal page reload).

It’s been a while since we’ve played with Vue JS on this blog, so why don’t we take a beginner-focused look at how one might go about building a simple polling plugin for WordPress with Vue.

Why Vue? Vue can scale up to be used for full-blown single page applications, but you can also use it to add small bits of interactivity to sites, pages, or plugins where in the past you may have used jQuery.

[...] Why a polling plugin? There are scores of polling plugins for WordPress, most of them are free, and most of them will be better than the one we’re going to build today, but there is something missing from the current offering of polling plugins: none of them are polka themed…

They start off with the PHP code required to power the plugin (a.k.a. "Pollka King") and load the required resources. They make use of a shortcode to refer to the plugin and show the structure they'd like to use in the editor to create the poll. The backend and frontend code is included along with screenshots of how it should look along the way.

The Delicious Brains site has posted the second part of their "deploying WordPress using the command line" series today. In part one they talked about automated deployments and why they're important (and useful). In this latest tutorial they start in on the setup of the environment and the tools you'll need to complete the deployment.

In my last article, we looked briefly at why automated deployments are important and how to prepare a WordPress site for automated deployments.

Now that our WordPress site is ready to be deployed, in this article we’re going to look at how we can use command line (CLI) tools to deploy WordPress from our local computer to a remote server. While we’re not quite at the stage of being ready to set up automated deployments just yet, understanding how we can use CLI tools to deploy WordPress will serve as a good foundation for all of the automated deployment methods we will look at later in this series.

The article then walks through the different pieces you'll need to set up including a DigitalOcean droplet as a destination and a choice of several data transfer tools:

• SCP (secure copy)
• rsync
• Deployer

The post also mentions the WP-CLI tool but points out that it doesn't include functionality to actually move files, only work with local ones.