Everything about Automation

The five cron fields, the four special characters, and the rule that catches everyone: day of month and day of week are combined with OR, not AND. Plus why WP-Cron misses schedules, and the two lines that put WordPress on a real timer.

Square, story, banner, avatar, email header. Six shapes and one idea, which is two hours of dragging things around if you do it the obvious way.

Every static graphic on a page is a snapshot of what was true when somebody exported it. There is a whole category of quiet wrongness that follows from that.

Three DNS records decide whether your contact form mail arrives: SPF lists the servers, DKIM signs the message, DMARC ties both to the From address a reader sees. What each one checks, why a passing SPF record can still fail DMARC, and where WordPress mail goes wrong.

Somebody needs two hundred name badges by Thursday. The spreadsheet with all those names already exists, and typing them a second time is pure waste.

You build the layout once, tell a few layers where to get their content, and from then on every post, product or page renders its own version.

WP-Cron has no timer and no background process. It is a list of due tasks that gets checked only when somebody loads a page, which explains missed post schedules, stalled backups, and every other scheduled task that silently stops.