cjhaas

Member Since: November 27th, 2012
Location: La Crosse, WI
Website: vendiadvertising.com
Job Title: Director Of Web Development
Employer: Vendi Advertising
Find me on:

WordPress Origin Story

WordPress is for people who don’t know how to program… is what I thought.

For more than a decade I built and rebuilt CMS’s for various projects. Step #1, built a user system. Step #1.5, remember how to probably salt and store a password hash. Step #2, figure out the different content types and build custom “page editors” for each. Step #n, explain that each thing that we didn’t figure out at the beginning meant either a big code change or forcing the editor to go into HTML mode.

Rinse and repeat the above with whatever is changing. MD5 is out, SHA1 is in. TinyMCE is out, FCKEditor is on, then out again. Bye-bye text, hello varchar(max)! Unicode…

About 5 years ago I started the process again for a new client but this time instead of just building what I knew I wanted to see what everyone else was doing possibly learn some new tricks. At the same time another client required WordPress for a project so I decided to get two carrots with one pull (vegetarian version of two birds) and dove into the code.

One of the first rules that every WP developer is taught is “don’t hack core”. Unfortunately for me, WP core wasn’t outputting what I wanted in some cases so I was forced to hack the core (sorry). That is, until I found out about hooks. Holy crap! I also saw that other CMS’s were doing that too and it was a game changer for me. When I went back to my custom CMS that I was building I knew I wanted these hooks so I rewrote most of it with this concept in mind.

Next I looked at WordPress’s actual database tables and I couldn’t find where they were storing the descriptions of their content types. There was a table called “wp_posts” with a “post_type” field, but where were the tables that described these types? There should be a “types” table and a “fields” table and a “field_types” table, then there should of course be the various join tables of “type_fields” and “field_field_type” and so on. But nope, WordPress did it all in code and they basically put everything into two main tables for “posts” and “meta”. Huh, a key-value store or property bag for meta information that allows for n items and I don’t need to rebuild my SQL code over each time. Okay, let’s rebuild my custom CMS with this in mind, too.

I think I rebuilt my custom CMS at least a half a dozen times with things that I learned from WordPress. Eventually that project shipped but I decided for my next project to jump in and give WordPress a full fair try and I haven’t looked back since.

Contribution History

Core Contributor
Core Contributor
Documentation Contributor
Documentation Contributor
Plugin Developer
Plugin Developer

Activity
Plugins
Favorites

Created a topic, Deprecated hook: wpmu_new_blog, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
The hook wpmu_new_blog was deprecated in WordPress 5.1…

4 months ago
Posted a reply to Lastest Version 1.2.4 is causing errors, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
We're seeing the problem, too. The line right above it (305) actually does a proper…

1 year ago
Created a topic, PHP 7.2 & count(), on the site WordPress.org Forums:
On line 248 of /admin/class-equal-height-columns-admin…

2 years ago
Posted a reply to cache not clearing on page update, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Brian, We found one bug but we're not sure exactly if it is your…

2 years ago
Posted a reply to cache not clearing on page update, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Brian, we are still debugging this along with a Divi issue but we should…

2 years ago
Posted a reply to cache not clearing on page update, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Brian, to the best of my knowledge there should be nothing in 4.9 that…

2 years ago
Posted a reply to Update?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Tuscanytrace, Our main goal of the fork was to keep a stable version of…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Please disable WordFence\\s cache before enabling Vendi Cache, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi @magneticeye, when we forked Wordfence's code we were able to simplify their options away…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to multisite?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Doni, This plugin is still active but we are trying to get a lot…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Vendi Cache not creating cache files, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Sorry, I meant to address that but got distracted! There is a checkbox in the…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Vendi Cache not creating cache files, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi @zaewin, I apologize for missing your original post. The logic for disabling the cache…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Vendi Cache not creating cache files, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Jay, The cache is over-sensitive when it comes to PHP errors. Currently if it…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Undefined index, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
In the two files you pointed out, to the best of my knowledge the ||…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Very helpful!, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Jordy, I'd love to help with a beta, you can email me at chris…

3 years ago
Created a topic, Very helpful!, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
We acquired a fairly large site with about 1,500 media…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Exception handle, PHP 7, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
We ran into this today, the fix appears to be pretty simple. We did not…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to The Twig_Autoloader class is deprecated and will be removed in 2.0., on the site WordPress.org Forums:
I went ahead and just did it on my repo. This diff (scroll all the…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to The Twig_Autoloader class is deprecated and will be removed in 2.0., on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Do you have a git repo for a PR?

3 years ago
Created a topic, The Twig_Autoloader class is deprecated and will be removed in 2.0., on the site WordPress.org Forums:
When running PHP7 with full debug and errors turned on…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Does it support Wordfence donotcache() function ?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Can you try using the fully-qualified class name? \Vendi\Cache\api::do_not_cache()

3 years ago
Released a new plugin, Vendi TinyMCE Anchor

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Update to 1.2.0, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Mark, I was wondering if you had a chance to test out 1.2.1 yet?…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Thanks for your work !, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Thanks Robswaimea! We were disappointed when we heard that Wordfence was removing the feature but…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Update to 1.2.0, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Mark contacted us directly but this should be addressed in 1.2.1 which was just released.

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Update to 1.2.0, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Mark, I'm sorry to hear about this. We had one other user with this…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Minor Bug in Vendi Cache, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi foley2013, We just released version 1.2.0 that addresses this typo. Thanks again for catching…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to wfCache::clearPageCache();, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Roger, We just released version 1.2.0 that has this feature as part of the…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Does it support Wordfence donotcache() function ?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi wordpresslover7, (Santa brought me a Windows 10 BSOD that I had to play with)…

3 years ago
Created a topic, wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip Gave me WP 4.2.10, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Part of my SOP for installing WordPress is to run the …

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Does it support Wordfence donotcache() function ?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi wordpresslover7, We are planning on releasing an incremental update next week sometime (probably Tuesday…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Vendi Cache work on Multisite?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Thanks webby1973! I'm hoping to have an updated release by the first of the year…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to wfCache::clearPageCache();, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Roger, We'll be adding that in very soon! Unfortunately do to namespace conflicts the…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Vendi Cache work on Multisite?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi belvesvalley, We haven't tested Vendi Cache on multisite and as of right now we…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Does it support Wordfence donotcache() function ?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi wordpresslover7, In order for Vendi Cache to exist in an environment where Wordfence is…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Feature requests, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi logicalt, We're glad that you were able to use our fork of Wordfence's code!…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to cannot enable cache, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Max, I apologize for missing you here but I'm glad you figured this out!…

3 years ago
Posted a reply to Minor Bug in Vendi Cache, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi foley2013, thanks for catching that! We tried to move all of the text into…

3 years ago
Released a new plugin, Vendi Cache

3 years ago
Wrote a comment on the post Shortcode Roadmap Draft Two, on the site Make WordPress Core:
The first draft was quite honestly very scary. This new draft is spot on! Thank…

4 years ago

Developer

Vendi Abandoned Plugin Check

Active Installs: 900+
Vendi Cache

Active Installs: 1,000+
Vendi TinyMCE Anchor

Active Installs: 100+
Vendi WP Markdown

Active Installs: Less than 10

WordPress.org

Profiles

WordPress Origin Story

Contribution History

Developer

Vendi Abandoned Plugin Check

Vendi Cache

Vendi TinyMCE Anchor

Vendi WP Markdown

Plugins

Advanced Custom Fields

All-in-One Event Calendar

Bad Behavior

CMS Tree Page View

Keyy Two Factor Authentication (like Clef)

The Events Calendar

The WP Remote WordPress Plugin

Vendi Cache

W3 Total Cache

Wordfence Security - Firewall & Malware Scan

WordPress Gallery Plugin - NextGEN Gallery

Yoast SEO