Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress Plugins: PlatformInfo & Cachify

The sense of irony in writing about a WordPress plugin, on a WordPress blog, hosted on a system where I can’t install plugins (welcome to wordpress.com!) is not lost on me, however I shall persevere…

Over the winter break I’ve been writing and contributing to WordPress plugins, as a means of:

  • contributing to an Open Source Community,
  • learning something to prevent brain-rot, and
  • it’s PHP, so you’ve got to love it

Firstly, I’ve written a WordPress plugin called PlatformInfo. It’s fairly simple, so that I can learn the plugin ecosystem, refine my tooling, etc – but it’s designed to do one thing fairly well. PlatformInfo displays, ad-free and no-nag, important information to help you diagnose issues with your WordPress setup or plugin development.

It’s useful for issues related to common php.ini settings, environment variables, user constants, and OPcache.

I’ve even managed to get it published in the official WordPress Plugin Directory, so other WordPressers can install it straight from WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/platforminfo/

Secondly, I’ve contributed Redis support to the well-known and popular caching WordPress plugin called Cachify. This plugin is one of many looked after by the pluginkollektiv.

Both have taken me about a week, in between Christmas, New Year, family Zooms, walking, trying to keep my mental health in a reasonable place, etc – but I’ve learned a lot (WP Coding Standards, SVN, PHP’s output buffering, Sniffs for phpcs, GitHub Actions, etc) and am already working on plugin contribution #3… watch this space.

In the mean time, for those of you interested, here are some links to code and documentation that you may find useful if you’re developing WordPress plugins: