In the dynamic economic landscape of Toronto, where businesses must contend with various economic climates, embarking on a web design or development project takes on heightened importance. The intersection of economic dynamics with the digital realm underscores the necessity of a strategic approach that caters to businesses’ unique needs across varying economic conditions. Enter Shift8, […]

Increasing the revenue of an existing e-commerce business in Toronto can be a challenging task, as it involves competing with other businesses and attracting and retaining customers. However, there are several strategies that can help an e-commerce business in Toronto increase its revenue. Below are some steps to follow to increase the revenue of an […]

Hello! In this post we will be walking through how to interact with the WordPress Cron system. We will delve into how to establish your scheduled jobs properly using the built-in WordPress cron system, with no other external interactions such as the OS cronjob system. This will be useful for WordPress plugin developers as in […]

Hello! There is quite a bit of documentation with how to scale your WordPress site for enterprise. Additionally there are quite a few enterprise WordPress hosting solutions that allow you to “stage” your content on staging sites with automated methods to push or clone the staging site (once an internal approved process gives the thumbs […]

Hello! It often becomes a requirement for certain levels of clients to ensure service level agreements for uptime and redundancy are kept. What does this mean? Well we want to ensure that a particular site can withstand a single point of failure, which usually means we would need to expand the services across multiple endpoints. […]

Hello! What a topic : how speed up your WordPress site. There are so many elements and factors that contribute to site speed, it is my intention to cover each area that contributes or affects overall site speed, specifically with a WordPress site. Being the most popular CMS in the world means that all sorts […]

Hello! There are several key best practices insofar as how to deal with security intrusions, including but not limited to restoring from backups on a clean server. In this article, I will be going over how to create an automated shell script that completes the following actions across multiple WordPress sites on your linux server […]

One of the biggest roadblocks to starting a new business in Toronto is the upfront costs involved with opening a store or even securing office space. With today’s online economy, though, those expenses can be eliminated by opening an E-Commerce Site. These online sites provide you with a great virtual storefront that doesn’t come with […]

Hello! If you are operating a local business in Toronto, one of the most important things you need to do is maintain a web presence. Whether your business is a startup, business services or restaurant : your web presence is key to the fundamental survival and operation of your business. What does it mean to […]

  Install our Free WordPress CDN plugin by Register on our CDN dashboard and then install our wordpress pluginHello! Site speed has, for quite a while now, been a significant factor towards expectation of user experience as well as for things like organic Google ranking. When a website is slow to load, the end user […]

Hello! We are looking for a Full Stack PHP Developer to work on multiple projects for our clients. We are a digital agency located in Toronto Canada and work with small and large enterprise organizations across many sectors. We are looking for inspired and experienced people to help complement an existing technical team to contribute […]

Hello! First and foremost, why would you want to block WPScan from probing your site? Well we all know that security through obscurity is a bad practice. That said the risks of malicious activity on your site is undoubtedly heightened through many points of information disclosure that is freely available to parse and organize to […]

Hello! Working with wordpress for a while now, we noticed that many actions, whether administrative in nature or building a WordPress query on the front end, are dependent on the built-in admin-ajax.php or WordPress AJAX API. Since many 3rd party plugins depend on this Ajax API to dynamically push and pull data, it is unfortunately […]

  Need this implemented on your site? Click here and fill out our quote form!   Hello! There are many reasons why your Woocommerce store may need a system to accommodate verifying the identity of your customers. Depending on what your selling and the local or federal laws that are in place, having the identity […]

* Update : Thank you Vice for writing an article about my script! Unfortunately it seems as though facebook is actually blocking the ability for anyone to share the article. I wonder why? * Update 2 : Facebook is now allowing the Vice article to be shared, only after about 24 hours of blocking the […]

The method of designing a logo and formulating or refreshing a brand is a practice that I have become much more comfortable with over the years. The identity of a business and how that business is characterized by the world is, at first glance defined by their logo. I’ve put down our experiences collaborating with […]

Hello! XSS (or cross site scripting) attacks are a common method to maliciously execute actions against a website installation. In particular this type of attack vector is useful when dealing with a CMS like WordPress where you have administrative user accounts to target. This means that if you are able to craft an XSS payload […]

Hello! Woocommerce is a great easy-to-implement and versatile e-commerce platform. With the robust development community, expanding the core functionality can be relatively straight forward with the availability of a wide assortment of 3rd party plugins for Woocommerce. One of the things that we felt was missing, but a simple requirement, was the ability to manipulate […]

Hello! We love integrating Jenkins into development workflow. Typically Jenkins would be used for custom development projects to streamline the development “push” process in order to seamlessly integrate code changes from a testing / staging environment over to the live environment. For frameworks like Laravel or Django, this works very nicely. Until recently, we haven’t […]

Hello! One of the nice things about Woocommerce is that it is very easily customized. Actions can be removed and re-added in order to adjust the default behavior. Additionally you can override many of the default templates that come with Woocommerce and its many extensions to fine tune and adjust the way you want your […]

Hello! While the scenario may not necessarily be common in which you would want to encrypt your PHP code and execute it, it is something that I would consider an interesting discussion nonetheless. I fully support free and open source software, however if you are developing an application that manages or monitors systems or services […]

Hello! There may be some scenarios where you might want to clone your site or push files to a remote location completely and 100% using PHP as a web service, without touching the command line. There are many console or command line utilities to help complete this type of job such as rsync, scp, ncftp, […]

Hello! If you read our last post on us releasing a new WordPress Plugin for Portfolio Galleries, you would have seen us touch a bit on creating custom fields / meta boxes for your post type. One of the bigger challenges when creating the Portfolio Grid plugin was implementing the administrative jQuery to manipulate the […]

Hello! One of the projects that we are currently working on is a WordPress plugin that integrates with the Toronto Real Estate Board to pull new listings from their systems and import them into WordPress as posts. The mechanics required to connect to TREB are very basic. One might call TREB’s systems out of date. […]

Hello! Creating a unique, original and flexible navigation menu in WordPress can be challenging. There are many commercial and free plugins out there to establish navigation systems, however many of the commercial options seem to be “overkill” providing many bloated options with embedded CSS that can be difficult to adjust by a novice user. What […]

Hello! On top of developing and designing websites for clients in and around Toronto, we also do managed and dedicated web hosting. This includes managing AWS Cloud infrastructure for our clients. When implementing infrastructure in general terms, it is generally accepted to take the approach to lock down as much as possible with respect to […]

Hello! We have recently created & submitted our first official WordPress plugin : Shift8 Modal. This is a relatively straightforward plugin that integrates the animatedModal jQuery library into WordPress as an easy-to-use shortcode. Submitting our plugin to the WordPress plugin directyl took roughly 7 days to complete. WordPress has pretty straightforward (though sometimes changing) development […]

Hello! Occasionally it was necessary for us to lock down some or all of the WordPress media library from public viewing, indexing. The reasons why this would be necessary can vary from sensitive information leakage to private user information protection (i.e. custom user media files uploaded on a per user account basis). Either way, there […]

Hello! When designing websites, especially websites that have an active blog, it is often necessary to style, customize and design the WordPress search results page. When styling the search results, we typically like to modify the way the results are presented as well as append a few custom CSS container classes in order to ensure […]

Hello! At risk of making the title of this post a mouth full, I thought I’d share some of our experience with interacting with Drupal’s Form API (Specficially Drupal 7.x). There is a lot of documentation on different ways you can interact with the Form API to accomplish a wide range of tasks from collecting […]

Hello! I’m of the opinion that it is better to code your own functions, shortcode and templates to accomplish even simple things within content management systems, as opposed to downloading a free plugin to accomplish the same task. You might be asking “Why not just download a plugin? Its much easier!”. Well that may be […]

By : Suzanne Today marks a milestone in my journey to create a typeface that I can share with the world and can be my rough around the edges legacy long after I am gone 😉 . Creating your own typeface can be a time consuming but very rewarding experience. I definitely enjoy the process […]

Hello! Some may argue that sticky navigation menus (menus that are fixed at the top or bottom of the page as you scroll) are a fashionable web design style. Whether or not its a “fad”, having a navigation bar that is fixed as you scroll throughout the the site is advantageous. This is especially so […]

Hello! It is sometimes necessary to bridge different web applications together in order to transmit or receive information and process it. One scenario could be a mobile application that connects to a web service to pull or push data in order to update the app or provide “real time” services with centralized data. One of […]

Hello! Making mobile applications is much easier than it used to be. As with previous posts, we have been experimenting with Apache Cordova Framework for easily building mobile applications, leveraging web frameworks like AngularJS. Many mobile applications communicate with a centralized “server” or website that retains all the data that may be useful for the […]

Hello! A few weeks ago we wrote a post that detailed how you could leverage PHP, Javascript and jQuery to detect facial features in images. In this post we will detail how you can take the detection of facial features and modify the image in real time with CSS and jQuery. You can read the […]

Hello! Occasionally in WordPress it is necessary to push, what is primarily a blogging content management system, to its limits in order to create a dynamic website. The reason why it may be necessary to create a custom wordpress post type is in just that scenario where you need to create custom and dynamic types […]

Hello! These days with so many (buzzword) cloud services, the standard vanilla LAMP stack is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Or at least more obfuscated / confusing. Its important when building your web application to consider things like analytics, metrics, reporting, capacity planning and scaling. You need to be able to scale your […]

Howdy! With the advent of responsive web design in recent years, developing “mobile only” websites has somewhat become a thing of the past. That is to say we no longer need to maintain a separate version of a website for mobile devices as we once did. All that said, it is sometimes necessary to address […]

Hello there! We love web development here at Shift8. We also love finding ways to automate and integrate different interfaces together. For example, we have written Python solutions to integrate TREB (Toronto Real Estate Board) listings into a WordPress site. Finding a Python Library to work with WordPress There are many readily available libraries that […]

Hello! Recently we had a tricky problem with Drupal 7 and manipulating content. Our content types and content in general for a particular Drupal site has grown significantly. Ajax queries in Drupal Adding and removing content such as images or gallery items requires an Ajax query that polls the database. These queries, once your database […]

Hello! Caching is invariably the wave of the future. We have worked with many different caching technologies to leverage a website to be able to handle more traffic as well as offering a low cost vector to scale a website without investing in expensive hardware. We occasionally offer web hosting through our own web hosting […]

Hello! We have recently completely re-vamped our company website : www.shift8web.ca. We have decided to move away from a conventional CMS and towards a web framework called django. Some of the challenges encountered were from a systems administration perspective (nginx + varnish + php-fpm). Other challenges faced were migrating all our content / data into […]

We are very proud to announce the complete ground-up redesign of our corporate website! We have completely redesigned all elements, layout and style from the ground up. We hope you like the new site (we do!). Its important to restructure and redesign your website regularly. By regularly I mean every few years. It completely depends […]

Greetings! Are you a real estate agent, or a web designer working to develop a dynamic site that automatically pulls TREB (Toronto Real Estate Board) listings (or TREB IDX) from their database (with their permission of course) and import it dynamically into the site as a regular daily job? We have been working hard to […]

Typically for each client we work with designing a website from the ground up, we find ourselves evaluating one of two options : using a web framework such as DJango or going with a Traditional content management system such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Although the needs and requirements of each client are typically unique, […]

In today’s world it is almost essential, in the web design world, for a designer to wear more hats than just graphic and web design. Many projects are likely to involve some sort of custom web programming in order to meet a clients (ever changing) needs and requirements. Because web design is often considered a […]

Complete top down Branding and Logo design for our affiliated Web Hosting Company.

Hello there! We at Shift8 Web Design have decided to create a blog! Here you will find new ideas, experiences and everything relating to the Toronto Web Design community.   Stay tuned!