Hi, my name is Jonathan.
I am a developer and writer from Cape Town, South Africa with a passion for open-source software.
I work at Automattic as a full-time sponsored contributor to the WordPress project, working with the Training team on Learn WordPress. We create educational content for the WordPress community, and my focus is on developer-related content.
This site is my personal blog, where I write about all sorts of things, but mostly with a focus on web development.
Very recently I had the misfortune of being forced to uninstall Ubuntu from my laptop and go back to Windows. I won’t get into the reasons behind this, but the one thing I miss in the Windows environment is my LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack and bash command line. Most web site hosts around the world use […]
Recently I posted on the topic of Building your own Divi Builder Modules. As a PHP developer first, in that article I focused lightly on the PHP side of things, how to setup the module code etc. Michelle Nunan from DiviSoup pointed out that it might be handy to know how to add custom CSS to […]
I’ve recently been spending some time extending modules in the Divi Page Builder. I had a few requests from clients to either make changes to an existing module or create a new module with custom functionality. As always my first port of call was a Google Search. The results, while not abundant, did eventually lead me […]
My application for a position as a Code Wrangler at Automattic, the company started by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Good day I’ve written this email in my head about 5 times, one for each year since 2010, when I first became aware of Automattic. Each time I never actually sit down, type it up and send […]
The latest versions of the Divi Page Builder includes very smart caching. This can sometimes lead to problems where users find they can’t add or delete rows or modules or use custom modules. Disclaimer: I’ve only really experienced this issue when developing module customisations. So this may not work for your specific Page Builder caching […]
A little background… Recently I was in the interesting position where plugin I had always used started giving me some hassles. For basic SEO functionality my go to install is the Yoast SEO plugin as it gives me the basic features I need and comes highly rated on WordPress.org. For my first client of the year I […]
Digital Resolutions. 2016 sees a new direction for me. For the first time since I started programming in 2004, I will be 100% self employed. This doesn’t mean that I have always been employed by a boss for the last 12 years. There were some attempts at working for myself in the past, but each time […]
As an entrepreneur, small business owner or freelancer, one of the most important skills you need to have, after being amazing at what you do, is digital marketing. The biggest learning curve I had as a developer was when I launched my Jiu Jitsu school. I soon learned that ‘If you build it, they don’t […]
So this year I was fortunate enough to attend my first Word Camp. I’ve been meddling (at best) with WordPress for the better part of the last decade, I’ve set up a few blogs and sites and even completed some custom development using WordPress as the base but I’ve never been someone who was ‘focused’ […]