Daryll Doyle

AuthorDaryll Doyle

Daryll is a Staff Engineer at 10up. With a deep passion for web development and open-source technology, Daryll is the original author of the SVG sanitization plugin Safe SVG, which boasts over 900,000 installs from the WordPress.org plugin directory and is now proudly maintained by 10up. Throughout his career, Daryll has demonstrated expertise in SVGs and WordPress, sharing his knowledge through public speaking engagements, including a notable talk at WordCamp London 2018. Beyond his professional life, Daryll enjoys spending quality time with his family and diving into research on Developer Experience, constantly seeking ways to improve the workflow and productivity of fellow developers.
10 months ago

Why AI Writes Better TypeScript and How You Can Make PHP Play Along

By Daryll Doyle
14 Min read
26November

AI writes TypeScript with calm confidence but feels far less predictable in PHP. After digging into why, I realised the difference had nothing to do with the model and everything to do with structure. TypeScript gives AI clear signals. PHP often gives it none. In this post, I break down why that matters and how you can bring that same clarity into PHP and WordPress today.

11th April 2024

Why Code Reviews Break Down, and How to Bring Back Calm

By Daryll Doyle
10 Min read
11April

On a long-running headless multisite project, our code review process slowly spiralled out of control, with 100+ open PRs, slow turnarounds, constant context-switching, and frustrated engineers. We fixed it by reframing how we think about reviews, creating a clear hierarchy, and making readability the foundation. This is the story of how we made code reviews calmer, faster, and far more...

1st August 2019

Setting up and using Repress

By Daryll Doyle
14 Min read
2 comments
01August

In my last post, I discussed the general tech stack that I’ve been using lately for Headless WordPress builds. One of the main components of this stack is Repress. Repress is a small library written by Ryan McCue from Human Made that works with Redux and allows you to access your WordPress REST API data easily and with minimum fuss. It contains a number of higher-order components (HOC) that...

21st July 2019

Headless WordPress and the REST API

By Daryll Doyle
4 Min read
1 comment
21July

Recently I’ve spent a fair amount of time building up React websites using WordPress as the data source. This has been a very interesting period of learning for me, coming from a PHP background and as such, I’m going to write down my thoughts on the process in the hope that it can help others approaching this task!  Why go headless? In my case, the reason for going headless was...

10th March 2019

Google Maps Smooth Zoom

By Daryll Doyle
2 Min read
3 comments
10March

I was working on a project this week that required me to zoom in to a marker on a Google map. That’s easy, I thought, there must be a method for doing that within the V3 API. I was wrong. Apparently Google are fine with adding a panTo() method for smoothly panning to a marker, but the setZoom() method re-draws the map canvas and jumps straight to the zoom level you set.“ There are a...

1st March 2019

CORS with the WP REST API and IE11

By Daryll Doyle
5 Min read
01March

A bit of a background, I’ve recently been working on a reasonably large, headless, multilingual WordPress build. The frontend and the backend needed to be hosted on separate domains, so we decided to build this site using the following technologies: Backend: WordPress via the REST API JWT Authentication for the API WPML for i18n ACF Pro for custom fields. Frontend: React Redux i18next All...

19th September 2018

How to properly include inline SVGs in a WordPress theme

By Daryll Doyle
4 Min read
3 comments
19September

SVGs are used all the time in WordPress themes and for a good reason, they are scalable, small in size and if we include them inline we can change colours etc without needing another image. There is one thing that bugs me when I see this though, especially with user uploaded SVGs; the way they’re included in the theme. There are 3 real ways that I’ve seen it done: Using...

29th April 2018

Securing SVG Uploads in WordPress

By Daryll Doyle
17 Min read
1 comment
29April

This is from a talk I gave at WordCamp London 2018. Introduction These is briefly what I’m going to try and cover in this post. We’ll start with what an SVG actually is, moving on to the issues with SVGs on the web, why they’re dangerous and what dangers they present. I’ll then look at how we can sanitise them where we’ll cover some of the issues with sanitisation...

14th June 2017

Merging ACF Field Group Tabs

By Daryll Doyle
1 Min read
14June

Advanced Custom Fields is great but sometimes, especially when re-using field groups across templates, the admin area can get a little overwhelming. Tabs help but not when you’re using multiple field groups. To get around this I used to use this plugin for merging ACF tabs. It worked very well but hasn’t been updated in around 2 years and therefore doesn’t work at all on the new...

Daryll Doyle