On today’s episode, we are going to talk about shortcuts to help you speed up your WordPress development right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 314. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’re gonna to be talking about some shortcuts and some of my favorite topic when it comes to WordPress. I love making sure that I’m being as effective and efficient as possible, so I’m all the time looking for tips and tricks and hacks and different things to help me speed up my workflow throughout the day. So we’re gonna talk all about that in just a few minutes.

The first thing I want to let you know about is look in your WordPress dashboard and you should be seeing a notice for a WordPress 4.7. It was supposed to be released yesterday. I am actually recording this early because I’m out of town this week. So I’m saying that it should be out and, if that’s the case, make sure you do a full backup of your site, you’ve got a good backup with 4.6, and then you can go ahead and update to WordPress 4.7. Then, in a future show, we’ll talk about some of the new features and some of the things to look forward to in WordPress 4.7.

Another thing that you can do–and this is just a trivial thing–is if you are running Jetpack, now since it’s after December 1st, we’ve got a brand new option inside of Jetpack that allows you to turn snow on your website. So you can make your website snow with just a flick of a button. So if that’s anything of interest to you, you can go ahead and turn that on in Jetpack, in your Jetpack settings. Alright, is there a plugin for that section, there’s more than 47,000 plugins out there.

So each week, I try to spend a little bit of time highlighting brand new plugins or plugins that I think are interesting, just so you can see what’s out there and what’s the possibilities of plugins. Today, the plugin of choice is called Float to Bottom. This is a plugin that will add a floating scroll button to the bottom of posts and pages. It’s a little transparenty arrow. It’s an up arrow and it just points up to, and most web users will understand that if you click on this, it’ll scroll you all the up to the top of the page. This is something that’s really nice and handy to have if you’ve got really long blogposts and maybe your sidebar runs out.

So when people are scrolling and scrolling and scrolling with all kinds of content, then you want them to get back to the top very easily, then this is the button for you. This free plugin in the WordPress repository has got more than 4,000 active installs. So yeah, that’s the plugin of the week. So today, let’s talk about shortcuts to speed up your development. I talk about this. I mentioned this a little bit at the top of the show, but I absolutely love hacking productivity things like this.

So this has been something that’s been close to my heart that I love trying to figure out. I’m always trying to figure out how to do things better and faster. Some of these come from the fact that I work in support and so, every five minutes or every ten minutes when I open a brand new ticket, I have to login to a brand new site for the first time and I have to navigate my way through the settings and through the dashboard and things like that. So these are some of the things that came to mind. They’re not in any order whatsoever. It’s just the way that they came to me as I was making this list.

So let’s go ahead and just dive into some of these things that I use to help me navigate WordPress a lot faster. The first one is use your browser’s autocomplete, especially if you’re using your own website. If you go to your website regularly and you’re always going to the plugins page to check those plugins for the update, when you start typing in your URL, you could actually type in like say YourWebsiteEngineer.com/WP-admin/ and then if you start typing plugins, P-L-U-, that will autocomplete and you can hit enter and it’ll take you right to the plugins page.

No need to login to the dashboard and then click on plugins and then wait for that page to load and then, from there you can do whatever you needed to do from that page. So that’s just an easy way to do autocomplete. I do this a lot, especially with customer sites that they come back and forth a few times. I send them a reply and then they come back and I still need to check those shipping settings or their tax settings or their checkout settings or something. As I type, it autocompletes and it’s like WP-admin/settings/ whatever. I’m like, “Oh, that’s the settings to get me directly to the shipping settings.”

Then I can hit enter and it’ll automatically go there. That’s just a little hack to save a little bit of time. So, the first one is use your browser’s autocomplete. The second one is configure a password manager, whether that be 1Password or LastPass or whatever, especially for clients. I never really used this for clients when I was working in the client world. I’d always save those in a different place, but I think it would make it much more convenient to have a specific tag because you can tag things in 1Password and probably even LastPass. I guess I’ll just say that I’m a 1Password user, so this is where all my knowledge comes from.

You can tag them and then, when you get to their site, you can use the 1Password feature and, if you actually do command – On the Mac it’s command/. That will open up the 1Password little quick thing and automatically login to your website, which is really handy. It saves you a lot of time and you don’t have to go looking around for, “What was that password? What did I change it to?” and all that stuff. You just keep it in your 1Password or LastPass. It makes it really, really easy. Now you have to take security with a little bit of thought process as well because it’s going to be less secure to keep everything in LastPassword.

If somebody were to get your password, then they’re going to go ahead and get all of your clients. So it may be possible you may want to use 1Password for yourself and LastPass for all your customers or clients or something like that. That’s another thing to think about, but password managers are gonna help your life be a lot smoother and a lot less annoying because you can just login without knowing what their passwords are. Alright, another thing that you want to look at or maybe install on your computer–and I’ve got links to these in the show notes for episode number 314–but there are Chrome extensions.

The ones for WooCommerce–and this one is the one that one of my colleagues, Will – We’ll talk about him in a little bit as well. Will created this WooCommerce little button that hangs out in the Chrome admin toolbar, or up there with what they call the extensions or the apps that are running inside of Chrome. It’s just a little WooCommerce ninja and you click on it. It kind of displays links to all of the settings pages inside of WooCommerce.

So if you want to go straight to any orders or if you want to go straight to the tax settings, if you want to go straight to PayPal configuration, you can click directly on those links and then you don’t have to go to your dashboard and then do WooCommerce and then to settings and then to wherever five, six clicks later. That’s something that’s really, really nice. There’s another one called Jetpack. Jetpack is a little simple thing that just allows you to see if another website is using Jetpack. It’s as simple as that. That’s gonna save you time in case you’re wondering, “Is this running Jetpack? Is it not?” So that’s something to think about as well.

The last Chrome extension–this has got a ridiculous name but–it’s called Wappalyzer. I don't know, there’s a link to it in the show notes, but it is a little icon that displays in your browser, up in that extension bar, and it will display logos based on what type of technology the website’s using. So if it’s using WordPress, it’s got the WordPress W button up there, or the W logo. If it’s Joomla, it’s got Joomla. If it’s Drupal it’s Drupal. If it’s got different technologies, it’s all up there. This makes it super easy when a client says, “Hey, I really like this site. Can you build a website like this?” Then you can go and you can look at the technology and see, “Is it Squarespace?”

Then it’s gonna take a lot more work, but if it’s WordPress, then you’re like, “Oh, well this is gonna be lot easier because it’s built on WordPress already, so it can’t be that difficult to set up” or whatever. So that’s another plugin. I use that pretty much every day, especially when I’m going through the checkout process on other websites, I love using this just to see if they’re using WooCommerce or, if the checkout process looks somewhat familiar, I’ll check to see if they’re using WordPress. If they are, then I know that they’re using WooCommerce because it looks and feels like WooCommerce.

So that’s another extension that you can us; so, a couple Chrome extensions that you can add to your browser. Alright, the next one is Text Expander. I live and breathe with Text Expander every day. Text Expander is a Mac only program. There’s comparable programs over on the Windows side, but Text Expander allows you to type short snippets of text that will expand into longer snippets. So, one of the things that I use probably two dozen times a day is a snippet. The snippet is a .WP. This actually, when I paste in a URL and then I put .WP, it adds the slash and the WP-admin. So I don’t have to type all that. So it just saves me some keystrokes there.

You can use this for anything. If you wanted to always get to the plugins area, you could make your URL bar for your URL, you can just have your website and then you can have a shortcut that will take you to WP-admin/plugins.phv to get you there a little bit quicker. I use Text Expander for show notes. So I type Sshow for show and then that auto expands into all of my show notes, with the different sections of the podcast. Then I can easily and quickly go through there and fill in the information for the announcements, the plugin of the week, the main topic of the show, the calls to action, all that kind of good stuff.

So I use Text Expander for a lot of things. I couldn’t think of a lot of specific WordPress things, but it does do a lot of just you can save so much in there and you can save so much time just by having these short snippets, especially if you’re developing websites for clients, like maybe you have a standard like, “Hey, what’s your budget? What’s your timeframe?” those types of standard questions. You can use Text Expander to send those emails off to those customers or those potential clients. So that’s another system in place that you can put and you can start using today.

The next one is WP-CLI. That stands for WordPress command line. I find a lot of Mac users use this, but you can actually set this up on Windows and install it on Windows. Basically, this is a command line interface that will allow you to quickly do things within your WordPress dashboard. I just kind of scratched the surface with WP-admin. I took a brief intro class when I was at our Grand Meet Up back in September. There’s just so much power in there. It’s just a matter of you need to learn and do one or two things at a time and then, once you’ve really mastered that, then okay, “Let’s see what else you can do within WP-CLI.”

So, one of the things that I use this regularly for is turning on and off plugins. This is basically you go into the command line, so you’re not using the WordPress dashboard anymore. Especially on a test site, like my test site for work has probably 100 plugins installed. Then I turn them on or off depending on what type of test situation that I need to be in that day. So it’s really, really hard to scroll and find the right plugin or whatever. So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll, in the command line, you navigate to your specific WordPress folder. So I’ve got that all set up through desktop server. I’m running locally.

Then what you do is, from there, I can say, “WP plugin activate, WooCommerce, Shipping USPS.” It automatically activates that plugin or, if I need to deactivate it, I can deactivate it right from there. It just saves you a little bit of time from going and trying to find that in the WordPress dashboard and then turning it on and turning it off. I’m pretty sure, and I’ve never really done this because I’ve always needed a couple plugins on, but I’m pretty sure you can do like, “WP plugins, deactivate all” or some sort of way that you can just turn them all off and then turn on the ones that you need. That’s another quick workflow.

You can create new posts. You can create new pages. You can look at your settings. You can toggle settings. You can do all kinds of stuff with WP-CLI. I’m just scratching the surface of the knowledge that I know with WP-CLI. I just know that each week I try to implement some new little feature so I can do things a little bit faster, a little bit cleaner, a little bit just quicker because that’s what I like to do. Okay, the next one is, this one is probably the hardest thing to implement, but it will speed up your development and just your workflow. It is your workflow. Development is a live workflow.

What kind of development server or how do you test things before you push them live? That’s a whole, big workload process, a lot of steps, but you need to work through what’s gonna work best for you. I spent probably a few years just doing things the wrong way. I’d either update my live site, like I would go in an FTP and just change things on my live site and then my dev site would be outdated and then, before I could actually do some real work, then I’d have to clone my live site down to my dev site. It was always a pain and I never knew which files changed. It would just always take a while.

Especially if I had a short little thing, like I didn’t want to have to do all of these steps just to get my dev environment all set up, so I was wasting a lot of time. So I came up with a great workflow. I’ve got a webinar that talks all through this because it hasn’t changed in the last couple years, but I basically save everything on my local install. I update plugins, I change theme whatever settings–not really settings but–I change, if I want to update the theme or change a layout or do things within the child theme. I do all that locally. Then I save each of these versions with version control.

Then with version control, I push those changes directly to my server, only the files that have changed. I don’t update single.php and then drag single.php and transmit. In FTP, I don’t just drag that onto the live server. I’ve got a process in place so I just update it, I save it, and then it automatically just pushes those changes live, which is really, really nice. It saves me a ton of time and I know that my dev site is always updated because that’s the only place that I make changes. I make changes on the dev site. I look at it. “Yes, it’s good.”

Okay, now it automatically gets pushed to the Cloud as soon as I save it as a version. I’ll probably talk about that. I’ve wanted to do an updated video for years on the steps, but the webinar that I did talks through exactly the process that I use today, which I really like and I really enjoy. So that’s another workflow. Another thing within that workflow, if you’re using Git,

Git is a version control system. Using this to mark all of your changes, that’s going to help you speed up your development because you no longer have to fear like, “Okay, I bought this theme or I’m building a child theme. I want to get rid of this code. Is it gonna break anything?” You could just go ahead and remove it and version control will let you know that, “Hey, it’s right there. You can always go back and you can see it later, in case you need that code later.”

Another piece of that puzzle is developing locally. I am a big fan of desktop server and doing everything local. So that’s just another way to have a second version of your website. So that’s the next one. That was development to live workflow. Then the last one is Alfred workflows. I apologize that these ones are Mac only because Alfred’s only for the Mac, but some of these are really, really nice and they just save you a ton of time. So, the first one is a plugin that I created within Alfred. There will be a link in the show notes to how to set this up and configure it and whatnot.

This is probably one of the hardest things that I’ve programmed or figured out, but basically it allows me – and I use this because I work on tons of different people’s websites and it’s always a pain to navigate to other portions of a website. Basically, it’s called Quick Navigate or WordPress Quick Navigate or whatever. It gives you the ability to have Alfred, and Alfred is just this thing that runs in the background. You tell it that it can be activated. I use command space and then you can start typing. You can do all kinds of things. So Alfred is just really, really powerful.

Just some of the built-in features that come with Alfred is like if you wanted to do math, I’d just do command space and then I could do 40 times 32 and it is, in case you care, it’s 1,280. So if you need quick math calculations, you can do that. I also use Alfred as a password manager, or not a password, but a clipboard manager. So every time I copy something to the clipboard, it is saved into Alfred. So if I copy and paste a few things, I can always go back and I do command shift J and then I can see all the snippets that I have used and copied and pasted in the last while.

This is great if you copy something and then you do a few other things. You copy and paste and you copy and paste and you’re like, “Oh, I needed that thing from a little while ago.” You can just go back in the history and you can find that, which is really nice. So Alfred probably should have a whole show dedicated to it itself, but some of the workflows that I use is this one that I created. It’s called Quickly Navigate WordPress. Basically, what you do is when you’re looking at a WordPress dashboard page, so anything that’s got /WP/admin, so you can be on the plugins page. You can be on the themes page, the settings page, whatever.

I’ve created this little shortcut that you do command space. You type WP space and then whatever page you want to go to. This needs configuring by you, the person that is using it, because a lot of people have different areas that they navigate to, but say, for example, I needed to go to the tax settings in WooCommerce, I’d do WP/tax or WP space tax. I just type that in Alfred and it will auto expand and take me right to that page. It’ll open a brand new tab.

So if I have a couple ideas or places I want to look on a customer’s website, maybe I’ll open it up to the dashboard and I’ll do WP space plugins, enter, and then WP space tax, enter, and then WP space, shipping. It’ll take me to all those places, open up brand new tabs for all of those things and then, from there, I can go in and start debugging. I do this a lot because customer sites are a lot slower sometimes. They’re running on subpar hosting sometimes. It just takes a while for pages to load and so it’s nice to open those back in a tab in the background. So then, when I’m ready for them, I can go get them. So that is to quickly navigate WordPress.

My friend Will, like I said earlier, he’s got a workflow that allows you to login to sites quickly. This one isn’t as popular for non-developers or non-support people like myself, but if you are saving your passwords for your clients inside of maybe Evernote or you’ve got a password protected file on your computer where you’ve got all the passwords, this one will work perfectly. How it works is you copy the user name, you copy the password, and then you copy the URL to login.

Then from there, you go into a new tab in Chrome. Then you type in, you hit command V for paste, and you will paste in the URL. Then you hit enter so that you can start logging into WordPress. Then you have set up a keyboard shortcut, and I’ve got mine set up as command option L. Command option L will actually go and find it on the clipboard. It’ll find the user name and then add that in. Then hit tab and then put in the password and then hit tab and then hit enter and it will automatically start logging me into a website, which is really handy when I have three pieces of information for a brand new website every five minutes or 10 minutes when I’m working on different customers’ tickets as they come in to WooCommerce Support.

Then another thing that you could use Alfred for to set up things really quickly is you could set up quick queries to Alfred to find a specific URL or Google doc. I use this all the time for Google docs because they’re annoying to find and it’s just a pain to figure out where they are. So maybe you’ve set up a client’s proposal. You’ve saved that as a Google doc. Then you’re thinking like, “Oh, I wonder what that is? Let’s go look at that again.” So instead of going to drive to Google.com and then looking for that specific document that you’ve created, what you can actually do is you can set up a quick shortcut.

So maybe if you are working on company Acme, their website, maybe then you just type command space to open up Alfred and then type Acme’s proposal. You can set up a quick link to automatically open up a brand new tab in either Chrome or Safari or whatever browser that you want to use and it will take you right to that page and you could save a lot of time. I use this for silly things like for the schedule for the Grand Meet Up, I was always looking at different things like that. I’ve got one set up now to check to see the status of my MacBook Pro.

I got a new computer, one of the new ones, coming in for work and I’m just waiting to see when it’s gonna come. So every day I type command space and I type Apple. Then it opens up a new tab and it takes me to see when the shipping date is for my new MacBook Pro. So that’s another thing, another tool. Alfred is just amazing. You can do a lot of things. You can speed up a lot of workflows and just things that you do repetitively and daily. So those are the shortcuts that I want to talk about. You can use your browser’s autocomplete, configure a password manager to help you login to sites faster, add some extensions to Chrome to just give you more information and help you navigate your WordPress dashboard even faster.

Text Expander can do some fun things to expand text. I use Text Expander as a dummy content generator. So I’ve got a few Lorem Ipsums ready in case I need to create a page and want to make it long. I just add a bunch of those to a page. That’s another thing you can use Text Expander for. We’ve got WP-CLI which will allow you to navigate quickly within the dashboard via a command line, which is nice. Then we’ve got establish a development to live workflow, work through the process of, “Okay, how am I gonna update my website? How am I gonna push those changes live?” All that good stuff will save you lots of time in the future.

Then Alfred workflows, whether you want to quickly navigate your WordPress dashboard, you want to log into your sites quickly, or you want to set up those quick queries, Alfred is gonna save you a lot of time. All of this stuff and the links to all of it will be in the show notes for episode number 314. I will be back next week in my office and probably we’ll talk about either the State of the Word or WordPress 4.7.

Two of those things are coming up really, really quick. I don't know if I can jam them into one show or we’ll talk about them in two different episodes, but that’s what’s coming up in the weeks ahead. I hope that you are enjoying this season of life and enjoying this Christmas season and getting ready for spending time with friends and family at the holidays. So until next week, we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye, bye.