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What is caching?

By Kirsty Gasston 13th March 2018


At some point during your website's development or maintenance, your web developer(s) are bound to mention caching to you, and will likely stress how important it is for your website's speed and optimisation. But what is caching exactly and why is it so important? Caching basics First, you need to understand the basics - when you load a webpage in your web browser, the browser must download the required files to display that page. This includes...

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Get Country Code in PHP, with PHP Countries

By Jordan Hall 14th February 2018


Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web Services, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of. Installation To inst...

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Get UK Bank Holidays in PHP

By Jordan Hall 3rd November 2017


If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...

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Updating Laravel from v5.1 to v5.5

By Andrew McDonald 12th October 2017


So the new long-term support version of Laravel has been released taking us from the last long-term support version v5.1 to v5.5 with all the improvements that brings, however while there is plenty of guides around for upgrading from v5.4 to v5.5 there are none for upgrading from v5.1 straight to v5.5 unless you painstakingly upgrade to every version in between. But don't worry I have already been doing the upgrades to our current projects in ho...

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WordPress plugins for a successful CMS

By Kirsty Gasston 4th October 2017


WordPress has always been a very powerful blogging platform, but for website developers and those looking to update and add to their website on a regular basis, it can also be used as a very powerful content management system (CMS), with the implementation of the right plugins. Here's a summary of the plugins that we consider to be crucial in the setup of a website that will be using WordPress as a full CMS. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) As web ...

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Advanced Custom Fields Basic Introduction

By Kirsty Gasston 24th August 2017


Advanced Custom Fields is a particularly useful WordPress plugin which allows you to take full control of your WordPress edit screens & custom field data, making content editing much easier. Installation You can install the free version of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin in the same way as you would any other WordPress plugin - login to your WordPress administration and search/install the Advanced Custom Fields plugin from the plugins pag...

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How to migrate data from one database to another (with UXDM)

By Jordan Hall 17th August 2017


This article is aimed at developers looking to migrate existing data from one database schema to another. It should be very useful if you are planning to move from one system to another, such as moving from Drupal to WordPress, or wishing to migrate external data into a new bespoke system. The UXDM (Universal Extensible Data Migrator) is an open source PHP library we have created to simplify the process of moving data from any source to any dest...

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Securing your WordPress website

By Tim Lees 6th July 2017


WordPress is by far and away the most popular content management system. However, due to it’s popularity it also attracts huge numbers of attacks. Thankfully, it’s popularity and versatility also means that it’s core system is always worked on in the way of regular updates. Many of these updates continually improve the security of WordPress. However, regularly updating WordPress with core updates doesn’t mean that you should ignore other ...

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Are you missing Structured Data on your website?

By Ollie Reardon 25th May 2017


To help search engines such as Google or Duckduckgo to get a better understanding of the content you have displayed on your website, you can use “Structured Data”. Structured Data is a list of details about the web page, that isn’t rendered on the actual page for users to see, but can be picked up by search engines, such as Google, to provide them a better understanding of the information displayed for the end user. What is Structured Da...

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Creating Custom Post Types in WordPress

By David Foley 5th May 2017


Custom post types are the same as a basic post type that are already present in WordPress. However, the beauty of custom post types is that you can tweak them to your individual needs, allowing for great customisation. Custom post types are perfect for those projects where the default post type just isn't up to the task. In this blog post, I will be going over how to create a simple custom post type in WordPress and then provide a number of ex...

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Rapid Web’s Open Source Contributions 2016 & 2017

By Jordan Hall 25th April 2017


At the beginning of last year, I posted about our open source contributions from 2015. Most of these projects focused on frontend web development. This time around, the majority of our new open sourced projects are backend code and libraries. They also include a small selection of 'Simple' libraries, designed to wrap around complex functionality and abstract it. Here's a summary of our main open source projects and contributions from 2016 &...

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Testing In Laravel

By Andrew McDonald 21st March 2017


The importance of functionality testing during large scale projects cannot be underestimated and is even more important while using version control. What happens if the lovely login process you have just completed suddenly stops working because another developer has inadvertently uploaded new functionality that, while not directly influencing your login process, has still caused it to break? One way to go about fixing this would be by testing ...

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