Episode 59: WordPress 4.5 and Imposter Syndrome

We would like to thank the sponsor of today’s show, Gravity Flow. Gravity Flow allows sites to automate business processes for internal routing, scheduling, reporting and more. You can go to GravityFlow.io to learn more.

In today’s podcast, we’ll update you on what’s been happening, we’ll discuss some of the great changes that go along with the WordPress 4.5 update, and we’ll talk about the common condition of imposter syndrome.

Brad’s Update

Brad recently returned from his trip to Costa Rica. It was the first time in four years that he and his wife had been able to get away without this kids, and they had a great time kayaking at the base of a volcano and hiking up a steep, dormant volcano. He purposely took only his tablet, which is uncomfortable to work on, so he’d have a deterrent to spending too much time trying to get work done while on vacation.

While he was away, his company released the free version of WP Migrate dB 0.8. He expected that Migrate 1.6 Pro would be releasing by the time this podcast came out. Ian from Delicious Brains put up a long tutorial post about Backbone JS, which is great to refer to for more information about this. The other Iain, aka “Beardy,” wrote a post about using Codeception to automate WordPress plugin testing, which is another valuable resource.

Pippin’s Update

Last weekend was pretty eventful, as Pippin discovered a big bug in a recurrent payments plugin. This was an emergency situation requiring an immediate fix: There was a fatal error in an upgrade routine that led to incorrectly assigning customer IDs within the accounts of customers using Stripe to make payments. Between finding the problem, fixing the code, contacting the affected customers and cancelling the affected orders, the problem took over 48 man-hours to solve. The good news is that it is finally solved, and no further reports of the problem have been made.

Pippin says that in this case, hindsight was 20/20, as it was one line in the coding that was the culprit. Braces were not used on a condition, which is a simple enough error to make, but one that had serious consequences.

More pleasant big news is that Easy Digital Downloads just celebrated their four-year anniversary! Pippin wrote a post about it on the Pippin’s Plugins blog. Occurring at about the same time was the one millionth download for EDD!

In This Episode

Some of the great new features in WP 4.5. These include the capability to have custom logos, filters to add devices, a way to toggle between different screen sizes, better image compression and so much more. We highly recommend reading through the WP 4.5 field guide by Aaron Jorbin and checking out the support forums at WordPress.org to find out even more.

All about imposter syndrome, which is the idea that you are an imposter, or inferior to others in your field. This is so prevalent among WP developers, and in many other industries as well.

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