The State of WordPress and Perhaps Writing a Book About It

I have been preoccupied with certain features of WordPress and building plugins lately. It has been good knowledge to pick up and interesting, but I have not had so much time to work on my WordPress theme, nor on my portfolio WordPress "themed" website. Then, I haven't had time to do preparations for my bachelor's thesis neither.

So the list is probably:

• WordPress plugin work
• WordPress theme work
• Portfolio site and features
• Bachelor's thesis preparation

Which I consider my main items of attention at the moment. During some downtime I started to do a project in Laravel, and that is also an item that can be added to the "should do more of when I get around to it".

But lately I have been thinking about what I want to focus more on. There are some stuff I thought I would do related to my Portfolio site but haven't started. I thought I would create a small web shop type thing with possibility to subscribe through Stripe.

Of course, it would mostly be an exercise at this point, but potentially a real world project. One problem though is that I would need to create some material for the subscribers. It wouldn't be much of a subscription service otherwise.

So I'm thinking about what I should add. And as of recently my mind has gone to writing some sort of WordPress book. I have already posted about a few WordPress related topics on this blog but the idea would probably be to expand on those and write some more from my experiences with this classic CMS.

I don't think it would be a introduction type book "Learning WordPress for Beginners" and bring up too basic topics, because I think that is covered a lot elsewhere. But rather, a book where I try to expand on a few topics, so it hopefully can be an interesting read for someone who is already somewhat familiar with WordPress.

The question now is of course if there would be a market for a book like that and if WordPress is worthwhile to write about in 2026 still. Personally, I would say that those "cookbook" type programming books can usually be good for advanced beginners, intermediate and even expert users. And regarding the topic itself, I think WordPress is still relevant.

The reason for it being relevant could be a few things, like:

• Still being used for a lot of websites
• A "standard" type of website that is flexible and possible to tailor to the needs of the user
• Lots of plugins for various purposes helps in that regard
• A good content system that allows the users to easily change the content of the website without having any particularly advanced computer skills

I would also reason it is a good choice for a beginner developer who wants to use traditional web technologies such as PHP, SQL, HTML, JavaScript/jQuery and CSS. Sure it is not the latest and greatest, but it works and is a nice way to repeat some of that knowledge you probably already know.

Then, you can even advance into more difficult areas where WordPress is possible to adapt, such as the REST-API endpoints, writing Gutenberg blocks in React and more. You can also learn how to setup things like e-mail and CAPTCHAs. 

A lot of features that you might think should be easy to have on a website, you will realize usually demands a lot of code. A simple way to achieve those features without having to reinvent the wheel can be to use third party plugins. Often they are free, but can also have premium features. And eventually you might find out that you are missing something in the plugins that are available and then it's a good opportunity to create it yourself.

However, why I think WordPress is still relevant is mainly because it's a good content management system, as in a good system to store content: from blog posts, html pages and images, to custom post types with custom meta fields, making it possible to adapt the system to practically *anything* you want it to represent.

There is also a good taxonomy system for categorizing the data, using both hierarchical and nonhierarchical taxonomies.

Last but not least, there are good opportunities to create a nice front-end that is SEO compatible, because it uses simple server rendered technology. While it's not a Single Page Application typ website, if that is the requirement, headless WordPress can be used for back-end and the front-end framework of your choice as front-end.

This can serve as a good start before moving on to more complex and dedicated back-end framworks.

It's always difficult to say what the future may hold. Especially at times like these where AI builders and other sites and software becomes available for creating websites but WordPress has survived longer than people might have expected and I don't think it's popularity will decrease for a particular group of people, who enjoy the option of being able to easily modify the system.

Code preview

In this post I'm trying out to add "code" text block, for better overview of code.

This might work...   

  Your code here

Or this... using: https://codeformatter.blogspot.com/

 function hello() {  
 echo "world";  
 }  

Another option seem to be to embed gists from Github.

No syntax hightlighting though... to be continue.

The Difference Between Hierarchical and Nonhierarchical Taxonomies in WordPress

The Difference Between Hierarchical and Nonhierarchical Taxonomies in WordPress with regards to slugs and public (frontpage) access.

I'm mainly writing this as a reminder for myself but this is how I believe it is organized and I believe it could be helpful if someone ever run into the same issue.

So the main different between hierarchical and nonhierarchical taxonomies in WordPress is that hierarchical taxonomies are the typical "category" taxonomy and nonhierarchical taxonomy is a "tag" taxonomy.

When you set 'hierarchical' => 'true' or 'false' in the taxonomy settings, you define this behavior which also impacts the access to the taxonomy on the front-end of your WordPress site.

For hierarchical taxonomies, like categories, you may name it like such:

'custom-category'.

Now you can access it: example.com/custom-category

And the template for this is archive-custom-category.php in your theme folder.

The template for the single is single-custom-category.php.

Now you could assume, it is the same way for the nonhierarchical taxonomy.

Lets say you have a nonhierarchical taxonomy called "custom-tag".

But trying to access example.com/custom-tag/ will yield a 404.

Why? Because the taxonomy is nonhierarchical and it doesn't have an archive page.

However, you can access example.com/custom-tag/tag-term

which will list all posts associated with the taxonomy that are also "tagged" as "tag-term".

(This is also possible for hierarchical categories: example.com/custom-category/category-term)

Now, you might still want to have a /custom-tag/ "archive", and to achieve this is to create a "page" that you call "custom-tag" with the slug "custom-tag". Leave this page blank.

Then create a template in your theme folder with the name: page-custom-tag.php and set the page you created to use this template.

In the template you need to create some code that lists all your posts for the various tags, using the WP_loop and some filtering.

Now you can visit: example.com/custom-tag/ and have it list all your posts assoicated with the custom tag taxonomy.

WordPress Custom Taxonomies and Permalink Structure

As I was doing some development of a WordPress plugin where custom post types were being added and also add and use a custom taxonomy, I bumped into the problem of getting "nice" and "flexible" permalink structures in WordPress. If you find this topic confusing, read the whole blog post as it will hopefully be more clear to you when you get through a few of the examples.

If you are new to the subject, WordPress uses a flexible taxonomy structure so that you can create your own taxonomies, similar to how you can create your own custom post types. The standard taxonomies in WordPress are "category" (which is a hierarchical taxonomy) and "tags" (which is a non-hierarchical taxonomy). More on this later.

Initially I thought it would be simple to add a structure like such: example.com/post-type-slug/custom-taxonomy-category/

So for example: if you have created a custom post type called "books", you may want to have a custom taxonomy called "genre". The structure I wanted was:

example.com/books/genre/fiction

and then you could add more categories like:

example.com/books/genre/nonfiction

example.com/books/genre/biographies

and so on.

(Maybe just example.com/books/fiction would be quite cool ...) 

I thought this would be easy to achieve but apparantly I couldn't find any sources that supported the claim that this type of more flexible type of structure was possible to create: but rather the opposite. WordPress doesn't seem to support this, but rather rely on having all slugs for everything on one "level":

example.com/books/ is fine

example.com/genre/fiction is fine

As you can see: as long as you don't try to "build" on that "category" taxonomy-slug, it will work and you will need to separate the custom post type slug and the custom taxonomy slug - since they're presumably in the same namespace.

So how would you distinguish "genre" from a "custom" taxonomy for pages with the same name?

For example if you created a different custom post type called "movies" and wanted a custom taxonomy for that as well, also called "genre": then I believe that would not work (if they have the same slug) and they could not have the same slug name, occupying the same namespace.

The solution I found was to simply prepend the custom taxonomy slug with "book-": "book-category":

example.com/book-category/

example.com/book-category/fiction

and so on.

The slug for custom post is still books:

example.com/books/

and the posts will follow this structure primarily:

example.com/books/bookpost

Although example.com/book-category/fiction/bookpost will redirect to  example.com/books/bookpost.

So as you can see custom posts share the namespace with other custom posts for taxonomies and the standard taxonomy "categories" which exists for "pages" and "posts", and "tags".

Since a constraint was to not introduce additional plugins, I chose this option, in trying to understand the namespace and by doing so knowing how to avoid duplicate taxonomy slugs. Another option would be to use one of the permalink structure plugins that exists. There are a few, but the one that worked best for me was wp better permalinks.

There are a few others, some free and some at a cost. They can be worth checking out but wp better permalinks was the easiest one to use in my case.

With this structure, you can get a nice permalink structure which in my view, is a bit easier when you want to organize things.

Okay, so I said I would get back to hierarcical and nonhierarchical taxomonies. When should they be used? Well, "categories" are a typical "hierarchical" taxonomy. Using that you can sort your posts into nice categories, which can be multilevel, as in a tree structure: top level categories and sub categories beneath them. Nonhierarcical taxonomies, like "tags", doesn't have any levels, it's just one "flat" level, where you add "tag words" to your posts (which is also a way or sorting your posts).

The permalink structure would be something like this:

example.com/book-tag/funny

example.com/book-tag/sad

and so on. On a more practical side, given that you are just going to use one level of "hierarchy" then "hierarchical" taxonomys (like categories) have a quite "fixed" UI where you edit the posts: the categories will show up with checkboxes which you can check, in order to assign a post to a category. Tags on the other hand has an auto-complete type function, where you will have to type (if the tag doesn't exist yet) or start type the whole tag name in order to assign it to a post.

Not a big deal, but I prefer the category UI. You can of course also use both hierarchical and nonhierarchical taxonomies for your custom post type at the same time. Now this makes it a bit more "meta data" to add to each post but they will be "doubly sort-able", if you like those kinds of things.

Whereas "category" can be used for fixed types like "fiction", "nonfiction" and so on, "tags" can be used to add more "content related" keywords, like "funny" or "sad", or whatever you think is a good keyword for your post content.

I hope this blog post clarifies some things about (custom) taxonomies and permalink structure in WordPress. There's some additional details about things like SEO, redirects, what templates to use and how a query_var-version of permalinks also can be used as an URL. But hopefully I will get back to that in a later blog post. 

A Rapid Review on Website Accessibility

I hereby present to you a rapid review on accessibility in development of websites, with the title: Automated Testing for Website Accessibility.

Now, a rapid review could be said to be a method for providing a "quick glance" (overview) at a particular requested topic. By finding evidence in the sources (primary sources perhaps), the goal is to create a type of review, more slim than a full literary review, using perhaps only a single or a few selected databases.

If you are more interested in the rapid review approach in the field of computer science and software engineering, see the reference to Cartaxo in the end of this blog post, which I was provided with in the course I took about scientific method and where I wrote this rapid review.  

This was my first try at the approach, and also first time to use a thematic analysis (which I will write more on eventually, and have already written a few initials thoughts on, which I intend to elaborate further on).

So with that disclaimer in place, I now present my completed rapid review, which I hope might be useful for practitioners and interesting to researchers.

As I recently wrote in my bachelor's thesis proposal, the aim of this rapid review was to give a useful overview of the current (as of 2025) of what tools are being used in accessibility website development and testing, and by applying a more quantitative approach (frequency analysis), yet of a limited sample size: give some indications on what tools are being used, primarily in accessibility research, and their 'popularity'. 

This was explored in RQ2: What types of automatic accessibility testing tools are there? where the following figures can be found.

 

The most frequently used tools in the studies.

 

 Fig. 2. The ten most frequently used tools in the studies. See appendix for a figure of all studies.

A similar analysis was carried out on the WCAG versions being used in these primary sources (studies), which again, in this limited sample size, indicated that there might be a "lag" in the adoption of the latest WCAG version. The following figure was included in RQ1.

Fig. 1. The different WCAG versions in the studies, as accumulated number of studies per WCAG version over time (year).

Research question 1 (RQ1) was summarized as: What is possible to test and how effective is automated testing? Besides my analysis of WCAG versions, I looked into various measurements such as coverage, completeness and correctness.

Besides from these more quantitative measures that were discovered in the studies, concepts like test-ability and effectiveness were also explored. 

Test-ability, as in: What is possible to test? And, how effective are these automatic WCAG based testing tools?

Finally, some more qualitative aspects were examined in research question 3 (RQ3) that dealt with best practices: What are common best practices of using automatic testing tools?

Where some of the key takeaways was: do not solely rely on automated testing. And combine tools. (See sources in the rapid review).

Again, repeating the disclaimer: as this is a limited study the conclusions and the results may be limited as well. And this is merely a bachelor level study, yet I thought it might be an interesting source for both practitioners and researchers.

In either case, I learned a lot myself and will hopefully write my bachelor's thesis in a related area. But as for now, I enjoyed the methodology and implementing it in the work so to speak; as well as working with the analysis.

You can find a link to the rapid review here.

If you wish to cite this rapid review, I'm unsure if it's possible, since it's not peer-reviewed nor published on any official university source. It is only my own personal publication, so to speak. Therefore, something like:

Larsson, Nils, Rapid Review: Automated Testing for Website Accessbility, 2025, written in the course Computer Science C: Scientific Method at Mid Sweden University, published on the compartdev blog on September 20, 2025.

Other related references

You can also watch the video on performing a thematic analysis using PDF sources and open source software on this link, which I used when I wrote this rapid review: here.

B. Cartaxo, G. Pinto, and S. Soares, “Rapid Reviews in Software Engineering,” Mar. 22,
2020, arXiv: arXiv:2003.10006. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2003.10006. 

Building a responsive flexbox navigation

The research has been standing still for a while. My initial idea was abandoned and I opted instead of going into some more familiar domains: front-end design. So instead pursuing my idea of topic modeling and content (and text) analysis, I have instead steered into the area of accessibility and usability. At least for now.

However, in my rapid review, I will need to perform some sort of content analysis; namely thematic analysis. But, it will be a manual type of thematic analysis.
Well that was good and all, but as I was writing about accessibility I realized it has been a while since I actively pursued front-end design.

Therefore, I have been preoccupied with freshening up a bit on the topic and continuing to explore the possibilities of responsive designs. This brought me down the rabbit hole including researching things like Cassowary, constraint programming and adaptive design, as well "progressive enhancement" and "natural breakpoints".

Finally ending up with the conclusion that flexbox seems to be the breakthrough technology that is sufficient to deal with a lot of the design issues that can occur in web design.

With that realization, I have been repeating and re-learning some of the concepts of flexbox and decided to design a responsive flexbox navigation.
The navigation, can be considered fundamental in any design. So I think it's a good start for any design.

Then, of course, how content is structured can also be considered important, especially when it comes to things like usability, accessibility and SEO. But also for aesthetic reasons.

Building this using only vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript felt like a good way to practice and "code through" some concepts that I believe are important, whether you'll use vanilla methods or frameworks.

There are still some work to do, but the majority of work on the navigation now seems to be done. Some added bonus would be using CSS animations, but I think I will finish the first rendition first, being more simple and without "all that bling".

 

 

A responsive flexbox nav

 

Social computing, Computational Social Science and Sociology and Methodology in Computer Science part 2

Yesterday I wrote some conclusion and something of a summary on my thoughts. Today it was time to "kavla upp ärmarna" (roll up the sleeves) and get going - doing - *something*

Well lets call it research, as research in its truest sense, I suppose - literally searching and reading about essentially *everything* yet *nothing* and a sort of "throw something at the wall and see what sticks" type of method (not to be confused with throwing a strand of pasta at the wall and if it sticks it's ready to eat - not the single pasta strand you threw but the whole batch of pasta you presumably made (now that would be funny if you only cooked one strand of pasta)  - you can view it as a SAMPLE representing the WHOLE (population)).

See, research is about statistics, that is my ultimate conclusion perhaps.

Okay, enough with the shenanigans. It was time to work, work on that search query I suppose - so I included all sorts of Booleans and grouping and whatnot; but ultimately needed to go back and just look at individual words and terms. Any long search query is bound to be somewhat cumbersome, if you want to really understand what is going on, I think. But for demarcation|delimitation, it really is what you need.

At one point - I realized that the only 20 hits was actually all there was about this particular topic.

However, lets get back to the topic; I suppose, if I have anything cogent to say about this topic, which has not been said before (of course not): now: qualitative methods are old school - analog and manual. But, there is a way out of the misery, and that is by involving computers, naturally!

However, you still need to know what to do with this godly power of computation: first you can go easy with word frequencies and such... then it's time for: latent semantic analysis and latent dirichlet allocation - you can also stumble into stuff like probabilistic latent semantic analysis and latent semantic indexing.

Then it's time for machine learning, or if it was perhaps already included in the previous (may be the case): Supervised Machine Learning (SML) and get into that sweet Bayesian statistics.

Let the computer do the job, and sit back and enjoy. I guess. Well, you need to prepare the datasets and do the training and install a bunch of software and well, learn some new math and statistics including but not limited to linear algebra *gulp*. But other than that, just sit back and relax; the transistors will do the work from now on.

Well that would have been the case unless I had a manual method lined up for a literary review; which will likely need to obey certain rules. However; this meta study now has its subject or topic, which is all of above. I think it's a massive study but lets hone in on the particulars; which I believe will be related to the method (quantitative) to some extent and the analysis (content|thematic analysis).

Well it's a mixed methodology I suppose; but treating the data, which is qualitative? With a qualitative method (thematic analysis, using content analysis methods?) I guess you can go wrong here. There are divides which needs to be clarified I can *clearly* see. But I think that is what is interesting. Perhaps.

We will see, it looks more philosophical than anything else, but might do for a meta analysis I guess.