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.

25 Steps Before Launching Your WordPress Website

Posted in WordPress on April 18, 2019 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: August 8, 2023)

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.

The WordPress Customizer – A Developers Guide (Part 2)

Posted in WordPress on May 18, 2017 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: August 21, 2023)

In Part 1 of this series, I showed you how to start adding Customizer functionality to your theme (or plugin). As well as showing how to add Panels & Sections, I also walked through the process of creating the individual Settings and UI Controls, sanitizing your data, updating the live preview and retrieving your settings. In Part 2 we’re going to look at creating Customizer Custom Controls.

The WordPress Customizer – A Developers Guide (Part 1)

Posted in WordPress on May 10, 2017 by

Anthony Hortin

(Updated: September 20, 2022)

If you’ve used WordPress in the last couple of years, you’re no doubt familiar with, or have at least heard of, the Customizer. The WordPress Customizer allows users to modify and configure theme options, whilst also providing them with a live-preview of those changes. The Customizer was built to provide theme developers with a standard interface they could use when providing customisation options within their theme.