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

How To Deploy & Publish a .NET MVC Application

This is the second post in the series called .NET MVC From a PHP Developer’s Perspective where I discuss the pros and (mostly) cons of jumping onto the .NET bandwagon. Keep in mind that I’m a php/unix guy. I’m now at week 5 and I recently deployed my .NET MVC application to a web hosting provider. This was done for a testing and debugging purpose, since I had to become familiar...

Moving Away from the Amazon Cloud

I wrote quite a few posts about Amazon Web Services and I hosted my blog there too for a while, but after some time I decided to switch back to a cheaper hosting provider and leave Amazon for the big projects inside our company. This turned out to be quite tricky. Moving away from the Amazon cloud has some pitfalls you should watch out for. So this post is not only a note to myself about how to...

A 60-Day Trip from PHP to .NET MVC

This is quite an unusual post I guess, something that came in to my mind a few days ago. If you’re familiar with my biography you know I’m in love with php, unix and the open source world. The reason I’m writing this post (or maybe set of posts) is that I found quite a good client, who’s very strict about technology, so the very basic website that they’re looking for...

SugarCRM as an Applicant Tracking System

I wrote a few posts about SugarCRM some time ago, including ways to play with their SOAP interface to gather and input data. Today we’ll discuss the flexibility of SugarCRM and the way it could nicely fit into an applicant tracking system. In short, almost every aspect of SugarCRM is a module. Leads, opportunities, tasks, projects. All these are modules. SugarCRM comes with a Module Builder...

Dave Winer's Commenting Proposal

Based on a recent post by Dave Winer (RSS pioneer) called Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system. And a follow up has been posted here: Why I like comments. Briefly, the idea behind the new commenting system it is the following: Disable commenting on posts older than 24 hours Comments are invisible to other commenters until the 24 hour period expires Commenters can edit their comments during...

WordPress and Magic Quotes

This is crazy, and based on a post called WordPress and PHP magic quotes: you want to run me crazy! by Stefano Lissa. I’m writing a plugin prototype for WordPress that uses the new Facebook Graph API to post stuff to my wall on Facebook (upcoming blog post). The original Facebook PHP SDK comes in very handy when working with the Facebook API, and I had quite some fun using it, but...

Trends: WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla

The battle’s been going on since 2004-2005, the three open platforms (WordPress, Drupal and Joomla) have been competing for ages. Which is the most popular? Of course you could search for reviews, votes, researches. I even came across a commercial research document about content management systems, their pros, cons and popularity. It still is difficult to convince clients (especially the...

Counting Facebook Fans in PHP: The Graph API Way

In a previous blog post called How to Count Facebook Fans in PHP I’ve shown a code snippet of how to count the number of fans on a fan page using PHP. Times have changed, the Graph API has been introduced, and due to some responses I introduce here the new way of retrieving your fans count using the new Graph API and php. Before you copy and paste, flush my comments with ‘my code is...

How to Generate Quality Data for MySQL

We all had fun with the World Database, Sakila and the others when learning MySQL (see Example Databases), but it sometimes isn’t enough to run certain experiments, benchmarks within your own schema. Of course you could write a script that would generate junk data based on your column types and populate your database with a few thousand entries, but as it turns out, Benjamin Keen already...

WordPress: Oh Those Actions and Filters!

Reading Joost de Valk’s quick post about Simple WordPress Debugging with a query variable made me think for a while. Really, how often do you come across a white screen with no clue of what’s happening? Very effective indeed, and good note about the security issue, but anyways, what came into my mind is a life-saver for all WordPress themes and plugins developers. I came accross this...