Author: Mark Jaquith

WordPress/Jetpack Driver for Laravel Valet

Recently I’ve found myself using Laravel Valet for local PHP development on my Mac. I love how fast and low-maintenance it is.

One thing that is a little tricky about Valet is that you can’t really write custom Nginx configs. That means that I couldn’t use my favorite technique of routing missing images to the production site, via Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly “Photon”) CDN.

Normally, when doing local development on a WordPress site, you need three things: the codebase, a copy of the database, and the wp-content/uploads directory. But if you just redirect missing image files to your production site, you don’t need to laboriously copy all those files and clutter up your local machine.

I found myself really missing that technique today, so I wrote a driver for Laravel Valet that handles it!

You can get it here: WordPress Jetpack Valet Driver.

Page Links To v3.0

Today I pushed an update to my redirect and repointing plugin, Page Links To. Tomorrow, this plugin will have been in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory for 13 years (it was the 339th plugin in the WordPress plugin repository; there are now over 75,000!).

To celebrate its transition to a teenager, I’ve added some new features and UI enhancements.

Last month, I received survey responses from over 800 Page Links To users and learned a lot about how it’s being put to work. One of the most interesting things I found was how many people are using it for URL redirects. For example, they might have a really long URL on their own site or someone else’s site that they want to be nice. example.com/summer-sale instead of example.com/store/specials.aspx?season=summer&_utm_source=internal. But in order to create these redirects, you have to go through the cluttered and sometimes slow post creation screen. All you really need to create a redirect is a title, a destination URL, and a local short URL.

You’ll now find a menu item “Add Page Link” that will allow you to quickly add a redirected Page without having to wait for the entire WordPress post editing interface to load. It’s super fast, and it doesn’t redirect you away from the screen you’re on.