Trello (Freemium)
I use Trello for everything – shopping lists, Christmas lists – you name it! Such a simple idea fine-tuned into a powerful and flexible app which is great for organising projects and task lists.

Basecamp (Premium)
Communication and project management is fully covered with Basecamp. I mainly use it to record all client communications. Searching and project organisation are powerful which means no more trawling through emails to find important conversations!

TimeCase (Premium)
A simple self-hosted time-tracking script which I have modified slightly to suit my needs. Does the job it needs to well and has a few nice features such as client logins to view time sheets.

Freeagent (Premium)
My accounting tool. I manage all aspects of accounts using Freeagent. Invoicing is really powerful with full automation which enables the hosting side of my business to run very efficiently.

Dropbox (Freemium)
I use Dropbox for all of my large file sharing. I have also integrated Dropbox with various apps to act as a cloud backup solution. Shared folders and files are essential to my workflows.

Slack (Freemium)
Instant messaging within my teams is easy with Slack. And again this tool fully integrates with loads of other services. The ability to quickly fire a meme or gif over to a colleague is priceless!

G Suite (Premium)
Aside from the most reliable emails hosting, G Suite offers me loads more tools – most of which I’ll probably never use! However Google Drive, Docs and Calendars are used every day and work great on all of my devices.

Skitch (Free)
Finally, there’s a mention for a great little tool. Having tried numerous similar annotation tools over the years. Skitch always has been the most user-friendly and quickest to use. A personal favourite for writing up quick instructional screens for website admin panels.

Do you use any of these tools? Have I missed something that I need to know about? Drop me a comment below!

The post The 8 productivity apps that save me time every day first appeared on Ashley Hollinworth / Front-end Web Developer & Designer / Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

I develop with WordPress every day, it’s still my preferred platform for building content managed websites and the community is a massive part of why that has been the case…ever since I started developing. Plugins have saved me endless hours over the years and enabled me to create functionality that I simply wouldn’t have been able to write from scratch when I first started out.

However, over the years (with a few bad experiences, a build-up of legacy sites to maintain and a growing need to make my websites fast and efficient) I have become a lot less reliant on plugins. The constant worry of bad updates and abandoned plugins is a headache is something I like to avoid nowadays!

That said I do have a small list of trusted plugins which have proved stable and very reliable and are used on most sites that I create.

Admin Menu Editor (Free)
It’s essential that my customer’s admin dashboards are clean and simple, with only essential options on there.

Advanced Custom Fields PRO (Freemium)
This makes custom fields a breeze along with extending the core functionality with loads of field types and complex logic if required.

All In One SEO Pack (Free)
My ‘go-to’ SEO plugin. Simplist and powerful without the ads and bloated UI like some of it’s competitors.

Capability Manager Enhanced (Free)
I use in conjunction with Admin Menu Editor to ensure my user accounts are locked down with the correct capabilities, without the need for functions. It also supports. all other plugins capabilities out of the box.

Custom Post Type UI (Free)
A user-friendly UI for adding and editing custom post types. A simple plugin but does exactly what it says on the tin!

Duplicate Post (Free)
A subtle plugin which my clients find useful, but I also find it handy when populating staging sites with dummy content.

Gravity Forms (Premium)
My form plugin of choice…and I have used it for a wide spectrum of forms. From simple contact forms through to complex order forms. There’s also a great range of official and community add-ons.

iThemes Security (Freemium)
Again I choose this plugin over a few big competitors. I’ve never had a site compromised with this installed, so that’s good enough for me!

WooCommerce (Freemium)
A no-brainer. By far the best WordPress e-commerce solution and now stands up against the big dedicated e-commerce platforms.

WP Mail SMTP (Free)
It’s essential that my customers receive all of their transactional emails quickly and reliably. I always use external SMTP and this plugin supports all the big SMTP providers along with the option of using a custom server.

Do you have a trusted list of WordPress plugins? Have I missed a plugin which you think I need to know about? Drop me a comment below!

The post My essential WordPress plugins first appeared on Ashley Hollinworth / Front-end Web Developer & Designer / Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

This was a pre-Xmas break frustration! When patching Magento sites with the SUPEE-10415 patch, if PHP warnings are present on the installation, then 404 errors are returned – locking you out of both frontend and backend.

So if you get as far as applying the patch without checking for PHP warnings (within var/log/system.log), then you should first of all revert the patch.

As you’ll probably know there are loads of reasons why you are getting PHP warnings in Magento, but the most common reason is an issue with one of your extensions config.xml files. You can check the validity of any of your XML files by running the following command within your app/ directory. (ref creative media)

find . -name "*.xml" -type f -exec xmllint --noout '{}' \;

In my case all of the config.xml files were fine, and a final manual check of all extensions confirmed this.

It’s useful to mention at this point that there’s another indicator as to the source of the warnings. If the PHP warnings are only present when Magento caching is enabled, then your XML files are not the culprit.

So what is? In my case, it was data within the core_config_data database table. This data is converted and run as XML similar to the config.xml files. These are run when caching is enabled (hence why there are no PHP warnings when Magento caching is disabled).

To fix, I searched the table for entries with terms related the warnings in the logs. I deleted the entries (warning: be aware you know what you’re deleting as Magento options are wiped and may need re-configuring) and re-saved any System/Configuration options which were wiped. The troublesome entries for me were extension licence data and a couple of other extension options. The entries had issues within them such as weird characters or names of incorrect functions.

After reading up on the possible causes, this troublesome data could have been created by spikes in traffic leading to corruption. I think in the extension licence entries case… this was caused by changing the Magento Base URL from dev to live when deployed.

Once all PHP warnings are fixed, you’re good to run the patch. You’ll no longer get the 404 errors and Magento will be patched successfully.

Did this help? Are you having trouble applying SUPEE-10415? Have you experienced the same issues with the core_config_data database table? Be sure to leave a comment or get in touch.

The post 404 errors after applying Magento SUPEE-10415 first appeared on Ashley Hollinworth / Front-end Web Developer & Designer / Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

So I have set myself the challenge of writing a post a day, for 90 days. The aim is to encourage a little personal development and to help me record the things I learn day-to-day.

I’ll mainly be posting about topics related to web design and development, in hope that the more I have to write about…the easier I’ll find it and the more motivated I will be to stick at it. Although they’ll no doubt be a few random posts in there if I come across something particularly exciting (or annoying!) in my day.

I’m not sure if anyone will see these posts, but if there is anyone out there and you have an opinion or idea around anything I write..please don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment.

Phew…day 1 done! Back to work tomorrow after the Xmas break, I have a feeling day 2’s post could be a grumpy one!

The post New year, new challenge, new me (cringe!) first appeared on Ashley Hollinworth / Front-end Web Developer & Designer / Wakefield, West Yorkshire.