On April 27, 2021, the fifth meetup of the technical series of the Latvian WordPress group took place. The meetup focused on the topic “Object caching practices in WordPress”. The talk covered various kinds of caching and the theory of object caching, with examples of practical use in WordPress. The proceedings of the meeting are available for download via the links at the bottom of this article.


The fourth meetup of the technical series in the Latvian WordPress group discussed the debugging of WordPress projects. Katya Leurdo gave a presentation on “Debugging WordPress – from simple to xDebug”. In other words, in the course of her presentation, she explored the use of various debugging methods, ranging from simple logging to the powerful xDebug debugger. The proceedings are available for download via the links at the bottom of this article.

However, most of the focus was on using xDebug, with a code example to show what it can do.


On March 30, 2021, the third meetup of the technical series in the Latvian WordPress group took place. The meetup “Automating WordPress project deployment with zero downtime and instant rollbacks” was held by Ihor Vorotnev, a WordPress developer with 13 years of experience, system administrator, mentor and expert at Toster, and speaker at WordCamp. The report showed the deployment principles of a complex project with zero downtime and the continuous possibility to rollback changes. The proceedings of the meetup are available for download at the links below.

During the presentation, the speaker showed hands-on examples of how to deploy a website on WordPress, including a masterclass.


The beginning of Spring was celebrated in the Latvian WordPress group with a women’s meetup. Katya Leurdo gave a presentation on “Gutenberg by a developer’s eyes – creating custom blocks”. This was the second meetup of a technical series that started in March 2021. The report shows the creation of three custom Gutenberg blocks, with code examples on GitHub. The materials of the meetup are available for download at the links below.

To sum up, the presentation included a look at the builder setup and the creation of three blocks: a test block, a single panel accordion and a block with nested blocks.


On 2 March, the Latvian WordPress group held the Profiling WordPress Sites meetup. The presentation covered the profiling of heavy WordPress sites. Our speaker (@kagg-design) analyzed the applicability of the Query Monitor plugin and profilers, including Blackfire. He gave real-world examples of site optimization, including optimization of the number of queries to the database as well as optimization of CPU time usage. The meetup materials are available for download from the links below.


WordPress in the currently latest version 5.5.3 produces a 404 error when trying to enable just released PHP 8. Why?

Officially WordPress will only be compatible with PHP 8 from version 5.6, which is scheduled for December 8, 2020. RC core version of WordPress 5.6 works correctly with PHP 8, the problem has been fixed. However, it is interesting to understand what is the source of the problem.


WooCommerce and 1C:Enterprise/1С:Предприятие Data Exchange plugin is the only working solution for data exchange between WooCommerce and 1C:Enterprise. For a long time, it does not has support by authors, what caused problems with last WooCommerce versions.

We improved the plugin, fixed some bugs, and tested its functionality under WC 3.7. Fork of the plugin is available in our repository.


In PHPUnit-testing, it is often encountered a code which depends on internal PHP functions like phpversion(). Approach to testing is described in the current article.

Let us consider as a simple examle a class which checks current PHP version and tells if it satisfies requirements.