Working with WordPress every day

Our team are constantly liaising with our clients and their websites every day of the year. It’s safe to say, for the platforms we know inside out like WordPress, there’s never usually a problem we can’t tackle. Someone on our team of experts always has a solution. Which is what happened recently when we noticed a trending issue with a plugin/theme combination called the Unyson framework – also known as Theme Fuse.

The issue was in part related to the secure way in which we separate WordPress core files from the wp-content on our WordPress platform. Unfortunately we came across a bug in the Unyson framework code, which meant that a large part of the theme was incompatible with our WordPress hosting platform. At this point, what can we do? Give up and tell our customers that this theme is unsuitable for our platform?

Absolutely not. There is always a solution.

As Unyson is released under an open source licence, the larger WordPress community, or indeed anybody with coding knowledge – can contribute to the plugin’s development. Open source code also allows anyone to review the code which keeps also helps to keep it secure (as the developer can’t hide any hidden nasties in) as well as making it free to use. We’re keen WordPress community supporters, and never want to leave our clients in the lurch, so it was time to roll up our sleeves.

After raising the bug with the author on the open source project repository Github, the theme author asked our support team to look into the issue and try to debug some code pertaining to the issue. Our support team diagnosed as much as possible before raising the issue to the 34SP.com development team, and that was where I stepped in.

The bug fix was a simple one, I needed to alter the way in which the theme looked up where it should install extensions. After a couple of hours digging through code and testing changes, I had a fix in place and was ready to see if this would be suitable to go into Unyson framework’s code.

I submitted a request with the fix to Unyson, and after a little back-and-forth with the developer to ensure the fix would not cause any other issues, the fix was accepted and merged into the production code for Unyson Framework. This will be released on around the 24th October in Unyson version 2.6.8.

If you run into any issues on our platform with possible compatibility issues, just let us know, we’ve got your back; and the larger community therein too!