Cameron Jones Web Developer

In April 2015 I took my first step into the WordPress ecosystem by releasing the Mongoose Page Plugin. It took off very quickly, and grew to more than 30,000 installs within the first 3 years. The other day I noticed that the active install count had dropped to 10,000+. From the peak of more than 30,000 active installs, it saddened me to see that it had dropped so low, and it made me think back…

I recently presented Save Time Creating Content With Block Templates at the Page Builder Summit 6.0. As the name suggests, the Page Builder Summit is a virtual conference focused on WordPress page builders. I met both of the organisers at WordCamp Europe earlier this year, and it was an honour to be invited to speak at the sixth edition of the summit. My talk demonstrated how you can use Block…

I’m excited to announce that I’m speaking at the Page Builder Summit 6.0. The summit is running from September 18th to 22nd, and there’s a ton of awesome talks scheduled. Best of all, it’s free to attend! I’ll be presenting Save Time Creating Content With Block Templates. Some of the key takeaways you’ll get from the presentation include: How to set up article outlines to load when creating…

I recently spent a whirlwind weekend in Athens for WordCamp Europe 2023. For much of the last 3-4 years I wasn’t sure if I would even get to attend a WordCamp again. The WordPress community in Australia has been very slow to recover from COVID, so this was not only my first WordCamp outside of Australia, it was my first WordCamp anywhere since 2019. I was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the…

Adding A Custom Icon To The Social Links Block Should Not Be This Hard

Why I’m Not Sold On ‘Five For The Future’

There has been a concerted effort to promote WordPress’ “Five For The Future” initiative in recent times. According to WordPress.org: Five for the Future encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development. Lately however, it’s been less “encouraging” and more “demanding” and slander campaigns against those who don’t hit that mark. As much as…

Why WordPress’ Diminishing Market Share Shouldn’t Come As A Surprise

As highlighted by Joost de Valk and WP Tavern, WordPress’ market share has first stagnated and now fallen since the start of the year. Considering how long WordPress has enjoyed consistent growth, some people will be rightly surprised and/or concerned about what that means for WordPress. Here’s my hot take on why it shouldn’t be a surprise and why it’s not as big an issue as it may seem. 1. The…

How To Prevent var_dump From Being Truncated When Using Local By Flywheel

PHP’s var_dump is one of the most handy functions around, allowing you to see any sort of data in a practically human readable format. If you’re like me and do a lot of work with external APIs, it’s indispensable when it comes to figuring out the type of data your responses are. Unfortunately if you use Local by Flywheel, var_dump gets truncated just a few levels down, which is rather…

How To Get The Excerpt By Post ID

Most WordPress templating functions are available in two formats, one to echo and one to return. These are normally in the form of the_xxx() to display, and get_the_xxx() to return. Some examples of this are: Post title: the_title() and get_the_title()Post thumbnail: the_post_thumbnail() and get_the_post_thumbnail() Aside from differing in returning or displaying the response, the main…

WordFest Live Is Back, And So Am I

Following the successful event in January, WordFest Live is happening again on July 23. To make that news even better, I’ll be speaking at this event as well. At the last edition I presented “WordPress Sucks!“, a breakdown of some of the issues WordPress has both as software and in the community and ecosystem, which was really well received. This time around, I’ll be presenting something a little…

Looking For A Free LastPass Alternative? Try Bitwarden

If you’re like me, you woke up today to the news that LastPass will be crippling their free tier by limiting it’s use to just one type of device. If you’re also like me, the first you heard about it was discussions on social media and not from the company itself. While this has only been announced in the past 24 hours, that they haven’t let their users know themselves feels quite shady. I could…

I’m Speaking At WordFest Live 2021

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at WordFest Live on January 21st, 2021. Having not been to a WordCamp for over a year due to COVID-19, I’m super excited to be back speaking on stage again, even if it is only virtually. WordFest Live is a continuous 24 hour event with speakers presenting in timezone’s they’re active for. I’m expecting it to be similar to WordSesh if you’ve attended…

How To Remove The Uncategorised Category From WordPress And WooCommerce

Out of the box, WordPress includes a default category for posts called “Uncategorized”. It not only looks unprofessional, it’s largely unnecessary. While you can rename it to something more suitable, I tend to use “General”, you can’t delete it. At least, not without a bit of code.

The first thing we’ll want to do is filter the taxonomy arguments, using the register_taxonomy_argsfilter. When a…

Introducing WP Theme Components

I recently had a lovely chat with Nathan Wrigley from WP Builds about one of my recent projects WP Theme Components.

WP Theme Components was born out of the repetition of needing to copy the same functions between multiple sites. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember which project had the most best version and…

How To Set A Default Featured Image For Your Posts And Pages In WordPress Using Advanced Custom Fields

They say pictures are worth a thousand words. That might be a slight exaggeration, but images can be vitally important for websites, particularly for layouts that use featured images. It’s common for themes to display grids or lists of posts, and if some of the posts don’t include a featured image the site can look broken.

One way to avoid the issue of posts missing featured images is to set a…

How To Use The New acf/register_block_type_args Filter To Optimise ACF Block Registration

On March 26th, Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.9 was released. It was a relatively minor release, mainly including a couple of bug fixes, translation updates.

But this would be the release that changed everything about block registration.

Quietly, a new filter acf/register_block_type_argswas introduced. This allows plugins or themes to modify the registration arguments of a block, similar to how