oEmbed has been around for quite a while but has been making the WordPress news recently, so what is it, how does it work and how can you turn any WordPress site into a oEmbed Provider all really good questions someone should answer that!
This is a bit of an unusual presentation, normally I talk about indepth technical articles but this time around I get to go all egotistical and talk about why I restarted the blog and where it’s going in the future as well as what’s keeping it up and running now.
Most people have shopped online with a credit or debit card and these days we barely think before using the plastic. But, the credit card details we put in don’t just make purchases. They can also tell us a lot about the user including, banking habits, information such as town of origin and even fraud risk.
For many, the concept of using WordPress as a static site generator would seem quite mental. Static Site Generators basically take a content management system’s content and combine it with a theme and generate static html pages. No dynamic content means they can be hosted more or less anywhere, consuming few resources to improve performance and, because they don’t require any specialist software, reducing the complexity of any stack. Imagine hosting your WordPress site entirely on Amazon s3 or Github, well you can but at a cost.
Setting up WordPress is famously easy! It takes only 5 minutes but it’s worth taking some time to look at the best way to structure your next WordPress project. Tim looks at his current preferred WordPress structure and discusses some of the rationale behind it. Continue Reading
Many plugins call on 3rd party services when they do those services often provide some form of credentials and 9 times out of 10 those credentials get stored in wp-options table. Except I don’t want my security credentials in my database. Where you store you secrets can be deeply personal thing.
A common way to call credentials in plugin is something along the lines of
$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' ); define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );
if you are going to do that, then try this instead
if ( ! defined( 'SECRETKEY' ) ) {
$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' );
define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );
}
By checking if it’s already defined before pulling it from DB it allows me to add the API key in the wp-config.php and avoid putting it in my DB.
If you develop plugins that make use of third party services and storing API keys, then give your users the flexibility to store the keys where they want.