WordPress emojis not working with PHP 8 😲

Posted in WordPress on September 27, 2023 by

Anthony Hortin

I had an issue with one of my own sites recently, where it wouldn't let me save Emojis in the post content. The site itself is nothing out of the ordinary and is just using the Classic Editor. This particular site was also running PHP 8.1.

For an issue such as this, I checked that the wp-config file had define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4');. The database collation was also utf8mb4. As a simple test, I also tried editing some page content directly in the wp_posts table using phpMyAdmin. I was able to save the content with an emoji 🎉, but when I refreshed the content in the Post Editor it simply showed as a ?. Likewise, when trying to view the content in the browser ☹️. The exact same site was working fine in my local development environment, and I even tried disabling plugins to see if they were the cause, but the issue still remained. 🤬

Setting up WooCommerce and Amazon S3 (AWS) for Digital Products

Posted in WordPress on July 22, 2022 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: August 15, 2023)

If you're selling, or even giving away, digital products on your WooCommerce store (e.g. Audio/Video files, Zip files, eBooks, PDF's etc…), it's a great idea to offload those resources onto a third party, like Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service), which is part of AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Offloading your products to a service like S3 means that your hosting disk space and bandwidth wont be impacted when customers purchase and download your products. If your products are attracting a large number of downloads, or if your products are quite large in size, this can be a huge saving in terms of hosting costs. Using a service like Amazon S3 isn't free, but it will be cheaper than paying for extra disk space and/or bandwidth from your hosting provider.

Hiding the Site Health Progress Counter

Posted in WordPress on May 8, 2019 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: January 6, 2024)

WordPress 5.2 introduced two new pages called the Site Health Check. You can find the Site Health page under the Tools menu within the Dashboard. This page has two screens. The first is the Status page and the other is an Info page. The idea of these new Site Health pages are “to help end users to self-service their site through common configuration issues and other elements that go along with having a healthy online presence. It also provides a standardized location for developers to add debugging information”. (You can find out more info in the Site Health Check in 5.2 post on the Make WordPress Core blog)

25 Steps Before Launching Your WordPress Website

Posted in WordPress on April 18, 2019 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: May 7, 2024)

There's a lot to do before making your site available to your live audience. Have you installed caching? Do your contact forms work properly? Are your theme and plugins up-to-date? Regardless of whether you're just building your own website or you're developing and supporting websites for numerous clients, it's a great idea to have a plan to make sure you've completed everything.

With that in mind, I've compiled a checklist of 25 steps that you should undertake before launching any of your websites.

Updating Your WordPress.org Plugin Readme

Posted in WordPress on June 23, 2017 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: March 11, 2021)

Whenever a major version of WordPress is released, WordPress.org will send a reminder to plugin authors to test their plugins with the latest version, and also to update the Tested up to value. This gives your plugin users some peace of mind that your plugin has been tested and works with the latest version of WordPress. To update this value, you don't need to release a new version of your plugin, you can simply update the readme.txt file in your latest tagged version.