Thoughts on WordPress development priorities

WordPress has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time.  In particular, the releases of the last two years, along with the fast growing base of plugins, have made the platform incredibly flexible for content management.   More and more,...

WordPress 4: First Impressions

I’ve had a chance to experiment a bit with the latest beta version of the upcoming WordPress 4 release. It’s safe to say that users of recent versions of WordpPress 3 will make an easy transition to WordPress 4.  There are no radical design departures. ...

A simple, active firewall for Linux

Frustrated by brute force attacks on your server from botnets with ever-changing IP addresses? Me, too. I finally got around to assembling a simple Linux active firewall, which I call “slaf”. This PHP script monitors the CentOS secure log and records...

Sunshop: Bulk move product categories

A recent implementation of Sunshop involved getting thousands of products into Sunshop from a wholesale inventory file. The wholesaler had very high level category arrangements that wouldn’t work for a online store. The store needed many more categories and...

Wrapping up 2013

I started 2013 with an important goal: Migrate my hosting operations to a reliable data center provider, so I could focus on building web sites and writing software for my customers. For eight years, ZJS Technology’s hosting operations were housed in a Ft....

Sunshop: Get a product’s top parent category

If you do any custom development for Turnkey Webtools’ Sunshop shopping cart software, sooner or later you come across this challenge. Categories in Sunshop are organized very simply. Every sub-category has a parent category id (stored in the “subof”...

Service interruption on March 6, 2013

9:30pm: Server Helios is currently experiencing a failed power supply. The data center staff are working to swap the power supply with a new unit and return the server to active status as soon as possible. 3/7/2013 12:00am UPDATE: The server is repaired and back...

Favorite development tools

EditPlus – This little known Windows text editor is designed for developers, and it’s a terrific tool for web developers. It offers syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript, along with excellent FTP integration, which makes editing files on a...