WP Engine does not have this and that …

First, I would like to say that I’ve only had my WP Engine experience because I’m working on somebody else’s website, and that website is hosted at WP Engine. There may be some great advantages to using WP Engine, but I’m not in love.

Update: I’ve kept updating this post, and it’s turned into a lot of my gripes about WP Engine, not just a list of what it doesn’t have.

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WP Engine does not allow any changes to file or directory permissions

My WP Engine experience is related to a job I’ve been working on for the last week. I wanted to use wkhtmltopdf to generate some PDFs via PHP. Since wkhtmltopdf is an executable file, it would need to allow executable permissions for www-data (or whatever WP Engine’s user name is for apache). I tried to change permissions via FileZilla, but it couldn’t be done.

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PHP Framework Side-by-Side with WordPress

I was working on a website this week where I wanted to use WordPress so the client could benefit from its CMS and blogging capabilites, but also wanted to use a PHP framework to handle some custom programming. Compared to WordPress, almost any PHP framework is going to be easier to do custom programming with. But what about routing? How will the website know what to route to the framework, and what to route to WordPress?

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Rename WordPress Default Post Type

If you want to rename the WordPress default post type, I wrote a super simple plugin to handle this. Before installing and activating the plugin, all you need to do is change the value of the $singular and $plural class properties. Use whatever you want. For instance, if you want “Posts” to be “News”, you would change both values to “News”. If you want “Posts” to be “Articles”, then I’ve already done that for you in the sample code below.

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Searching WP Comments Before Enqueue

WordPress makes it relatively easy to search through post content before it’s too late to use its wp_enqueue_script or wp_enqueue_style functions. Comments on the other hand don’t have an action hook that is called early enough.

This blog uses Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter for a styled display of code. It’s really easy to implement, but required creating a plugin to check posts and comments for highlighted code. I wanted to load the associated JavaScript and CSS for blog singles and pages when needed, but not load them when there is no code to highlight.

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Change Domains w/ a WordPress Installation

I’ve done WordPress domain changes a few times. Most of the time it’s just a way of importing a production installation to my development environment, but I’ve done it a couple times on production environments. To be clear, I’ve never had a problem with it. There’s a first time for everything, right?

WordPress documentation regarding the subject:

Changing The Site URL
Moving WordPress

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