Episode Details

This week we’re joined by Justin Sainton. Justin founded Zao, Portland’s premier WordPress Agency. He is also the Lead Dev for WP eCommerce, and a WordPress Core Contributor, so we joined him for a Halloween-themed deep dive into some spooky questions about WordPress development!

Warning: this episode contains some spookily-scary soundbytes; listener discretion is advised.

We talked about (roughly in order):

Errors and Omissions

• 19:22 Blurry text after 3D transform? You need to use only 2D transform or hide, request prop, show. Thanks to Matt Lockyer for clearing that up!
• 20:12 Here’s that jQuery plugin for ‘responsive cropping’. Dynamically crop images to fill available space without cutting out the image’s subject. Great for full-screen images. Thanks to Zsolt Pentz for sharing that!

Q & A:

• 22:06 How much does A/B Testing help in eCommerce, and which tools or plugins do you use to A/B Test?
• 34:30 I’m working with someone on a WordPress site to clean it up and install a new theme. Here’s the problem: they’ve got hundreds of posts and pages chock full of inline styling… and there are so many s! It’s bad. Please tell me there’s a good way to strip all the cruft from these posts and pages in bulk!
• 38:20 I was thinking about managing CSS / JS for WordPress (as you guys were talking about recently), and avoiding extra http requests. This plugin ( AutoOptimize) may be worth a look.
• 41:35 I have a question about Bower and WordPress. I installed Codekit 2 and fiddled a little with Bower components, which I haven’t done before, and I installed WordPress, all good except that the WordPress files are in the bower_components folder. I’m pretty sure you are not supposed to use bower_components folder as the root for your WP projects, so what do I do? Do I take it out? In that case, what’s the point of using Bower to install WordPress?!
• 47:46 I’ve been working on overhauling our site using WordPress, WooCommerce and the woo canvas theme with a child theme. I’ve been nothing but happy with WooCommerce, however, I suspect Woo Canvas may be sacrificing performance for the sake of convenience. Other than saving me development time is there any security or performance advantages to using a child theme or will a lean custom theme perform better and be just as secure?
• 57:00 I have questions relating to WordPress and theme/plugin functionality in response to this article. While I sort of agree with the thesis of the argument I have a hard time wanting to use any plugins to create taxonomies or CPTs. What are your thoughts on this?

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