WordCamp Moscow 2016

I’m Konstantin Kovshenin, a WordPress core contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in the rainy UK. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

I do code review, training and consulting on WordPress performance, scaling and security. Schedule a call if you’re interested.

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Recent Blog Posts

Quick Tip: How to Make Tweet Embeds Responsive

Twitter embeds were introduced in WordPress 3.4, allowing you to insert tweets by pasting a link to that tweet on a line of its own, in you post or page content. However, many responsive themes (including mine) resulted in broken layouts on narrow screens, since the embedded tweet will get a fixed width of 550 pixels. After a little poking around, I found an easy way to solve this with some CSS...

SEO Plugins and Themes will not do Magic

Pro tip! If your content sucks, SEO-friendly themes and plugins won't do magic. Stop wasting your money and start improving your content.
— Konstantin Kovshenin (@kovshenin) August 22, 2012

And when you’ve improved your content, take a look at the search engine optimization guidelines and make sure you’re not overdoing it ;) Thanks to everyone who retweeted this.

Tip: get_posts will suppress_filters by default

I was wondering why my posts_where filter was not being executed on my WordPress query and after a bit of poking around, I figured out that get_posts sets suppress_filters to true, unless specified otherwise, making WP_Query skip a bunch of SQL filters, including the posts_where I was trying to set. So learn the easy way — get_posts will suppress filters by default. Hopefully this...

WordCamp San Francisco 2012 Videos

Videos from WordCamp San Francisco 2012 are being published to WordPress.tv. Time to watch those sessions you missed during the event, or watch the ones you enjoyed most :)

oEmbed in WordPress Comments

If you’d like to enable embeds (Twitter, YouTube, etc) in WordPress comments, check out Evan’s neat little plugin. As opposed to many other such plugins, Evan’s approach is very simple and far more future proof.

Nonces on the Front End is a Bad Idea

Here’s a tip! Don’t add nonce fields on the front end of your site for logged out users. That may cause trouble with page caching plugins, which will serve HTML from cache with the nonce field, even if the nonce has expired. Also, nonces don’t really help prevent spam in contact forms, etc., especially for anonymous visitors. Nonces are used for security.

WordPress Moscow Meetup #6

The sixth WordPress Meetup in Moscow was held on Saturday. Not as much attendees, due to many group members being on vacation and such, but the meetup was quite productive. We spoke mainly about themes development, and the _s theme.
We also talked briefly about WordCamp Moscow, which will be held in 2013.

WordPress Plugin Review Discussion

Otto, Brian Krogsgard, Ben Lobaugh, Erick Hitter, Jake Goldman, Kailey Lampert, Shane Pearlman, John Hawkins, Patrick Garman, Ryan Frankel, Andrew Norcross. Google Hangouts seemed to work pretty well! I don’t have a strong opinion about any of the points they discussed, but I would love to see an option to flag a particular plugin with a security issue, and obviously, write what the issue...

How to Get a List of Contributors from a Github Project

We launched underscores.me a few hours ago and the overall feedback is great. People seem to love how we automatically pull in contributors using the GitHub API, so I decided to share the code snippet that does that (using WordPress): function underscoresme_get_contributors() { $transient_key = 'underscoresme_contributors'; $contributors = get_transient( $transient_key ); if ( false !==...

Introducing Underscores.me

Underscores.me — The Best Way To Get Started With The _s Theme on ThemeShaper. It’s a project Hugo Baeta and I have been working of in the past few days. Make sure you check it out and come back with some feedback. If you’d like your face to appear in the list of contributors, make sure you contribute at least one patch (or pull request) to the underscores project on Github. Have fun!