Markdown is a wonderful way to write content on the web, it’s what I use to write every blog article you see here on kevinleary.net. While working with Upstatement’s Timber plugin I came across a situation where I wanted to…

If you want to change the wording of an admin menu inside of WordPress without editing the plugin directly you can make use of the $menu global variable that exists within the WordPress admin. Manipulating this data structure will allow…

The tutorial will show you how to setup and work with Angular.js inside of a WordPress plugin to create a stand-alone, API powered, Angular.js single page app or microsite that is available at a defined path of a WordPress website.…

I find myself doing this all the time, so I wanted to make note of the snippet here for anyone else commonly looking to add a Git remote for an existing Heroku app using the Heroku CLI. Open up your…

I picked up a strange issue on my WordPress site today while reviewing stats in Google Search Console. I noticed a malicious 301 redirect happening for an old post, one that had no redirect rules set. Specifically the post had…

If you want to use regex for an Express.js route rule then you must use a JS regular expression object instead if string by wrapping your regular expression in slashes (/) instead of quotes (“). To look at a common…

Angular’s built-in $http service and it’s $http.get() method do NOT cache responses by default. There are a few different ways you can enable $http caching, below are some helpful examples of each. These examples are ordered in terms of difficult,…

Angular’s templating system is wonderful, and it build’s on some common practices established years ago by the Handlebars templating engine. Sometimes I encounter projects where an existing templating system conflicts with Angular, such as a server-side templating language like Mozilla’s…

This is the best way I’ve found to create an Angular.js directive that’s restricted to a specific HTML element or tag. There’s no directive configuration option in Angular.js to do this, but I recommend adding the `restrict: ‘A’` to your directives config so that it only matches an attribute name. Once we have that in place the key aspect that makes this happen is this line: if ( element[ 0 ].tagName !== “A” ) { … }

I use gulp-uglify to minify my JavaScript for a large Angular.js project. Recently the compile process became incredibly slow, taking upwards of 15 seconds to compile JavaScript each. I’m convinced there is an underlying issue here, but for now I was able to solve the issue using a filesystem cache. This reduced a the JS build task with Uglify from 15-20 secs down to 500ms-1.5secs.

What is User Enumeration? WordPress websites may reveal whether a username exists on system through the author query variable. When a web app leaks information about whether a username exists or doesn’t exist, this is called user enumeration. A common…

As of 2017 here are the two best ways I’ve found to handle the transfer of a WordPress database from development to production. WP Migrate DB Pro The WP Migrate DB Pro WordPress plugin will let you push, pull, and…

WP_Query is the primary way to write custom queries in WordPress. If you’re having trouble combining a search value (s argument) and taxonomy query (tax_query argument) using WP_Query try using the following class to solve the issue. /** * Search…

If you want to fully replicate an https/SSL Node.js/Express app server locally you’ll need a self-signed AND trusted certificate setup. More often than not I see dev’s settle with an untrusted state for their localhost, which is an annoying and frustrating work around. I don’t want to tell Chrome and Safari that I trust the website every single time I open it up. Luckily there’s a way around this, just follow the steps below on your mac to get `https://localhost` serving your Express.js Node app loading with SSL locally.

Receiving JSON POST data in PHP is a common scenario I come across when building custom WordPress API’s. If you’re working with JSON API’s powered by PHP you may find that $_POST is not working with JSON, and you may…