A Hackathon in Barnsley
Featured photo by Shaun Bellis. On Saturday 6th July 2013 my company Make Do, held their first ever hackathon at the Barnsley DMC to great acclaim, which incidentally was the first ever event of its...
View ArticleCompile SCSS and JavaScript with Grunt
According to its ‘read me’ file, Grunt is a task based command line build tool for JavaScript projects. However it is much much more than this. At Make Do, Grunt is a fixed staple in our front end...
View ArticleGetting started with Vagrant
After my tutorial on how you can compile SCSS and JavaScript with Grunt, I figured I would delve into the world of setting up distributed development environments with Vagrant. Wait, there could be a...
View ArticleDebug PHP with Vagrant using Xdebug and Sublime Text
Following hot on the trail of my recent post about getting started with Vagrant, I figured I would let you know how you can debug the PHP that is running on your Vagrant box with Xdebug, using your...
View ArticleManaging a large website using Task based navigation
It is no secret that before I co-founded Make Do, I spent a great deal of my web development career working for public sector organisations such as the NHS and local government. During this time I have...
View ArticleEmbracing and Growing a Digital Community
Featured photo by Shaun Bellis. Barnsley is where it all began for me, both literally and metaphorically speaking (I was born there, and my business is based there). So you could say that I have a bit...
View ArticleCross Pollination of Digital Communities
Following on from my blog entry Embracing and Growing a Digital Community I would like to put forward a few suggestions that people can do to further grow and nurture their digital communities. These...
View ArticleCreating a Custom CMB2 Link Picker Control for WordPress
In this tutorial I will look at how you can create a custom control to extend the functionality of CMB2 (Custom Meta Boxes 2) by WebDevStudios. At Make Do we only develop websites (and web...
View ArticleStarting your own Business and the Law
This week I delved into the legal side of starting your own business, by attending the “Founders Network Masterclass on Legals” event, superbly put together by Tech North. The event was held at the...
View ArticleContributing to WordPress Core for Absolute Beginners
At my company Make Do we only develop websites and applications with WordPress. However I have never made a submission to WordPress Core, that is, until today. This blog post details my first...
View ArticleWordCamp Sheffield ‘Meat’ Up – Summer BBQ
Every second Tuesday of the month I attend WordPress Sheffield, I don’t usually blog about them (before we get into this post, I promise to blog about every one that I attend from now on however, as...
View ArticleReblog: The Bike-Shed Effect (placing too much importance on trivial things)
Today I found a blog post from a former Local Government colleague of mine, Chantele Smith, all about “bikeshedding”, or the Parkinson’s Law of Triviality to give it its official name. Bikeshedding is...
View ArticleHow to add items to robots.txt with WordPress
One thing that I love about my job is that most days I learn something new. Today I learned that WordPress auto-generates its own robots.txt file, and that there is a filter that you can hook into to...
View ArticleCustom conditional statements around your WordPress enqueued stylesheets
You may be aware that you can add conditional statements around your WordPress enqueued CSS styles (such as <!--[if gt IE 7]><link .../><![endif]-->) to load the script for certain...
View ArticlePrevent XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) by escaping values in your WordPress...
If you are developing a WordPress theme or plugin then it is important to make it as secure and robust as possible. One way to do this is to properly escape values that you use in your project so that...
View ArticleStop Clickjacking by preventing your WordPress site loading in a Frame
Clickjacking is a potential security risk caused by someone loading your website in a frame on their domain, and hijacking interactions you make with that site. For example if your website requires a...
View ArticleEnforce Version Control in WordPress to Boost Security
If you have spent a long time working on your clients website, ensuring everything is in version control (such as git). Then you would be pretty gutted if your client edits a theme file, or adds a new...
View ArticleCode Clinic, Front End North, Remote Working – A Grand Day out in Sheffield
Our culture at Make Do gives us the freedom to work anywhere, and as this week we had our WordPress Sheffield Code Clinic, the team took it upon them to have a grand day out in Sheffield. Business...
View ArticleChanging your WordPress site language (locale) dynamically
There are some fantastic multilingual plugins for WordPress, and WPML is one of my favourites. However for one client project I needed something far more flexible, as this particular client needed to...
View ArticleWordCamp Edinburgh July 2017
Over the weekend of July 21st/23rd the Makedoers traveled North to Edinburgh for a weekend of WordPress-based leaning, networking and some fun and games at the third WordCamp Edinburgh. The post...
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