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...
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...
By Tim Lees 8th August 2017
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new EU regulation that strengthens the rights of individuals regarding their personal data and unifies a single set of rules for this purpose across all EU states. Each state will have a Supervisory Authority (SA) to ensure that compliance is being met. The GDPR will come into effect on the 25th May 2018. The regulation looks to ensure that users (termed as Data Subjects) have as much informatio...
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 ...
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...
By Andrew McDonald 10th May 2017
In my last post, Testing In Laravel, I spoke about the importance of functionality testing during large scale projects and how we can achieve this via the tools that come packaged with Laravel. In that post I gave an example of a very simple Laravel test, where it will click a link and see if the page is redirected to a login page. In this part we will create a test for the actual submission of a form and test both an instance of a failure ...
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...
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 &...
By Kirsty Gasston 24th April 2017
The important first step in the design and development of any website is the production of a set of website wireframes. This is even more important since the introduction of responsive website design and mobile-first web design. But what exactly are website wireframes and why are they so important? What is a website wireframe? A website wireframe is a layout for a page of the site, demonstrating the structure of the page and the elements to be ...
By Tim Lees 31st March 2017
In this article we will look at what HTTPS means and why your website should be secured using the protocol. What is HTTPS? HTTPS stands for ‘HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure’. You may have noticed that when navigating websites you will see this protocol (https) and its non-secure variant (http) at the beginning of the website address bar in your browser window. The HTTPS version is identified (in most browsers) by a green padlock. HTTP...
By Ollie Reardon 28th March 2017
Ever visited an online ecommerce store but left without purchasing due to getting frustrated with navigating around the website? Maybe the website is missing some essential features such as no option to pay via PayPal, Bitcoin or other favoured methods of payment? Here is a list of some of the most important must-have features to have on any ecommerce website: Mobile Friendly Design Like any other website, having a mobile friendly web design...
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 ...