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]]>Part of the process was recorded with a screenshot every 3 seconds.
]]>Not only can you work on your local server and deploy changes directly with one click, you can also utilize the preflight checklist to make sure the changes you are deploying are not in conflict with the development server.
So, if you have created a new post and during that creation also created a category and/or a few tags, RAMP will automatically create these categories and tags as well.
RAMP also checks if there has been any more recent changes on the production server, saving you the emberassment of overwriting newer changes with older ones.
This WordPress plugin looks quite amazing, and I have not even played with it yet. I would love to play around with it for an upcoming future project!
Now, the most important thing is the Rollback feature. Or it will be for me at least.
If you do any mistakes you can easily roll back to an earlier version, letting you sleep well at night.
The tone and dash of humour on the site is a big plus in my book as well 
Go take a look, and let me know in the comments what you think of it
The company behind is Crowd Favorite.
]]>The functions.php file in your WordPress theme is an underutilized resource for many WordPress powered sites.
Relying on WordPress plugins only to customize your site can result in an overabundance of WordPress plugins which slows down your site.
Whenever possible I add pieces of code to the active WordPress theme’s functions.php file instead, and a great resource for useful snippets of code that works in functions.php is on the continously updated “Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file“.
The WordPress Answers site hosted on Stackexchange is a brilliant resource to interact with other WordPress developers and exchange knowledge.
Here are just a few of the code snippets you can find there:
The list goes on…
Direct link: Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file
]]>It even runs from a USB drive. (Win only)
]]>The developer, Seamus Brady, used to work as a contract IT Trainer and he needed a way to quickly set up test environments.
The best thing is that it works from a USB drive, and is completely self contained. A great idea for setting up test environments in seconds.
Direct link: Instant WordPress (Windows only)
Source: wpmu.org
]]>In this article I will outline a few tips you can do use improve your header.php file.
If you implement some or all of these suggestions, you will loose them if you do an automated theme upgrade in the future.
The header.php in your WordPress theme gets called every time a page loads on your website. Any optimization that can be made here will affect all pageloads on your site.
WordPress theme developers have to develop the theme to be used on a wide range of WordPress websites, but once installed and configured, you can make some changes to the header.php file to make your site run a lot faster!
Here is how the top of my header.php file looked. I’m sure yours will look somewhat similar.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
Notice the 3 pieces of PHP code? These pieces of information is collected via WordPress PHP functions that in return uses internal function and database calls.
Does that description sound slow? It’s not that bad, but in terms of optimization, every millisecond gained matters.
The fix is simple.
Load your website in your browser. Find and copy-paste the corresponding code in the source code.
This is the correct HTML code which you can simply copy-paste and overwrite the corresponding area in your header.php
Here is mine after copy pasting:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US" xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"><head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
Unless you intend to change your url feed at some point in the future, you could also save some speed on hardcoding your feed urls.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="http://www.concept-i.dk/feed/rss" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> Atom Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
That is 4 unnecessary pieces of PHP.
Here is what mine would be once optimized using the same procedure of visiting the website and copy-pasting the processed HTML code.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="CleverWP.com RSS Feed" href="/feed/rss2" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="CleverWP.com Atom Feed" href="/feed/atom" />
I take RSS optimization one step further by using Feedburner.
I recommend using Feedburner or similar service to speed up your website even more.
I have recommended using Feedburner in the past, so I will be brief.
Here is what the code is reduced to, and there is no PHP code.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="CleverWP.com Feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/cleverwp">
Read more on the Feedburner service page. Best of all? It’s free!
Throughout your header.php file you will see several calls to bloginfo() and some parameter. The function returns important information about your WordPress site, such as name and url location of your theme.
The WordPress function, bloginfo(), fetches and returns the data from the database.
If your theme depends on the exact same call more than once, you can improve the speed.
<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>
You will most likely find this piece of PHP code called several times throughout your header.php file.
We can save processing time by storing the value in a PHP variable, and then simply output that variable instead where needed.
Somewhere before the first time the call is made, insert the following PHP code:
<?php
$template_directory = get_bloginfo('template_directory');
?>
The get_bloginfo() is very similar, except than instead of simply outputting the value, it returns it to the variable instead.
From now on we can simply replace each occurrence of
<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>
with
<?php echo $template_directory; ?>
Repeat the process with any more calls you find repeated several times, each time saving a bit of time.
There are many more things to do when optimizing header.php, and with these steps you are well on the way to a faster and smoother running WordPress site.
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