web development

WordPress 4.9 Field Guide

WordPress 4.9 is just around the corner (scheduled for release tomorrow, November 14th). This version brings an impressive number of new features and improvements. The stats so far are:

Roughly 400 bugs, 181 enhancements, 7 feature requests, and 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed in WordPress 4.9.

Figuring out all these changes and how they affect you is an effort in itself. But don’t you worry! Here’s the WordPress 4.9 Field Guide, which showcases all the main changes and provides plenty of additional resources to follow up.

Wow! WordPress 4.9 packs quit a punch!

GitHub : Archiving Repositories

Last week, GitHub introduced archiving of repositories. While it might not seem like a news worthy feature, it is quite useful for both individuals and teams. Two particular scenarios that I find helpful are:

Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained. This should save quite a bit of time for people who randomly end up on a project’s page, via searching GitHub/Packagist/Google or somewhere else.
Provide an insight into how many of the person’s or team’s profile are active. It’s often difficult to estimate at a first glance, when looking at a GitHub profile of a person or a team who have been developing for a long time, how many of their projects are actually actively maintained.

Easily optimize images using PHP

Via this blog post I came across this PHP image optimization library, which somewhat reminds me of this blog post from a couple of years ago. As good as ImageMagick is, it takes time and effort to find all the right options. With Spatie Image Optimizer you have an almost out of the box solution for optimizing images in a variety of formats.

This package can optimize PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools.

Best Automation Testing Tools for 2018 (Top 10 reviews)

Here is a nice review of the top 10 best automation testing tools circa 2018. It covers the following:

If you are just setting up the QA team or department and want to know what’s new and hot, or old and tested in the world of automated testing, have a look at these tools.

Git Magic

If you are trying to learn Git, but the Git Book looks large and intimidating to you (which it isn’t), have a look at Git Magic. It’s smaller and simpler, and seems like a good start for those of you just getting your feet wet in the git world.