Greg Boone

Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI

Tag: WordPress

  • WordPress at 20

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    Greg Boone
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    It’s a little wild that I’ve been using WordPress longer than I’ve been in the (professional) workforce. Something I think about a lot is how impactful WordPress has been on not only my life, but the life of the new web, and how the early decision to empower creators with the four freedoms of the…

  • Sabbatical prep

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    Greg Boone
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    I hit five years with Automattic on January 20th 2023 and with that milestone I became eligible for a special benefit: A sabbatical. It’s a bittersweet timing, a little, because we’re in the middle of an exciting growth opportunity for the public sector, and especially the federal marketplace. Still, I’m extremely excited for June 19th…

  • On Twitter and social media stuff

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    Greg Boone
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    I was an early adopter of Twitter, I suppose. It was founded in 2006 and I think I created my account in 2007 or 2008. There were only a handful of people I knew with an account and it was a pretty exciting time to be a user. Back then, you could use the website,…

  • Leaving 18F

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    Greg Boone
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    Today was my last day at 18F, the startup-like agency inside the U.S General Services Administration I joined back in September 2014. When I joined I wrote: “Working with a team of talented individuals to create a more open, transparent, and accessible government is a cause close to my heart.” That’s still true. It’s also…

  • What I learned setting up WordPress on cloud.gov

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    Greg Boone
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    Since around June, I’ve worked on 18F’s cloud.gov product and this week marked my last quarter on the team. We end every quarter with a so-called “innovation and planning” sprint. The product managers do the planning and the team members do the innovating. Innovating in this context means working on parts of the product that…

  • Switching back to WordPress

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    Greg Boone
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    I’ve been writing this blog as a Jekyll for quite some time now. There’s a lot I really do love about the idea of static sites, but also a lot I’ve cooled on. One of those things was the writing experience. My first encounter with Jekyll was at CFPB and I briefly switched to Octopress…

  • The Lasting Power of WYSIWYG

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    Greg Boone
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    Jekyll has become one of my favorite things lately. At 18F we’re using it to power our website but also our Hub project which includes serving up snippets, our weekly team updates submitted by Google Form, as well as a tremendous amount of information that is a mix of pages restricted to our team and…

  • rePress: Jekyll with a WordPress Frontend

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    Greg Boone
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    Note: I’m not maintaining this open source project anymore. There was a pretty cool reception to it and I didn’t have time to maintain it for just myself. I still think it’s a good idea, though. 🙂 About five months ago I left the riveting world of WordPress development for the greener pastures of helping a…

  • How can I Configure WordPress to Handle Dynamic Hostnames?

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    Greg Boone
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    An increasingly common problem enterprise-level WordPress installations will face is how they handle build, staging, and production environments where IP addresses inside a VPN use a different hostname to access the same server as those outside the VPN. In this case, the wp-config.php file is a little more complicated than in the famous 5-minute install.…

  • Writing Integration tests in WordPress

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    Greg Boone
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    Integration testing, like unit testing, is a best practice with the goal of evaluating a piece of software’s ability to interface with the rest of a system. Earlier I elaborated on the distinction between integration and unit testing and I won’t repeat myself here. Instead I’ll briefly expand our definition of integration test and demonstrate how to…

  • Using Composer to Manage a WordPress Installation

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    Greg Boone
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    The team at Roots.io have a fantastic walkthrough of Composer and why and how you should use it in managing a WordPress site. Composer is a wonderful piece of technology that reduces the headache of figuring out how to managing the individual components of your site to a single file and software solution. With WordPress,…

  • Octopress: Six Months Later

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    Greg Boone
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    When I was a week into this blog, I wrote down some of the reasons I liked Octopress, my initial impressions of it as a blogging platform and whether it could compete or replace WordPress. It was a leap for me, a WordPress developer and long time fan of the platform. In general I have…