One thing I’m particularly proud of about Van Patten Media is our ability to move quickly. Often, clients come to us with projects that other, larger agencies might take a year to complete, while we’re able to deliver results in just months. That’s due in part to our incredible automated workflow (full of tools like wpframe) and also due to our size. Because we’re smaller, we can be more flexible...

The WordPress admin menu in action. Did you know we love customising the WordPress admin panel? No? Well we do! A lot, in fact. One of our favourite customisations is tweaking the admin panel menus. We’re all used to the usual few menus: “Posts”, “Links”, “Media”, etc. But if you think about it, many of those options aren’t relevant to your website, and certainly aren’t relevant to your clients. Fortunately, there’s...

Smart caching is a powerful way to ensure your websites are as fast as possible. Letting your users’ browsers save copies of images or stylesheets and reference those on subsequent page reloads means less download time, fewer wasted server resources, and happier users. In the age of CDNs that price by the download, smart caching is even a great way to save money. But what happens if you need to...

It’s been a busy year at Van Patten Media. I thought I’d take a few moments to review what we’ve worked on, the cool projects we were involved with, and where we’re headed in the new year. We started the year with a long-fated face-to-face! Peter Upfold—the resident tech genius at VPM—and myself finally met in person at London’s Gatwick Airport. Peter and I have worked together for many years,...

In our last WordPress custom admin screencast, we showed you a cool custom widget. In this next part, we take a look at customising the visual editor, one of the most used areas in WordPress. Tweaking the visual editor is a topic we’ve discussed before, so you can find code examples for some of the tricks in the video elsewhere on the blog. And don’t forget to sign up to...