I could hardly sleep last night. Once in a blue moon, I have an idea I want to try out. While my day job as a writer means I spend far less time breaking sites through the rigorous trials and errors of building plugins and themes, some problems bug me with WordPress, the sort that…
Over the weekend, David Gwyer announced a custom server-side render component for block plugins. The co-founder of WPGO Plugins primarily built his component to speed up the rendering process for dynamic blocks within his own plugins. However, he has now released this component for other block developers in the WordPress community. Most blocks are static.…
August 11, the target release date for WordPress 5.5, is just shy of two weeks away. For developers who have not been completely on top of the upcoming release, now is a good time to start looking at how changes might affect their projects. Theme authors in particular can expect several new features and some…
Riad Benguella released BlockBook, a project that promises to overhaul how developers build blocks and more, on Tuesday. It is a development environment that allows creators to work with blocks in isolation, outside of WordPress. Developers can view individual block properties and test output from a defined block library. BlockBook is available as an npm…
Theme developers can finally rejoice. For the first time, it is now possible to pass data to templates via the various core template-loading functions. Enrico Sorcinelli announced the change on the Make Core blog this past Friday. The feature was originally proposed by Scott Kingsley Clark in 2012. Over the years, the ticket has received…
Gatsby announced its new source plugin (v4) for WordPress is now in beta. The plugin has been completely revamped to improve headless WordPress setups where Gatsby powers the frontend. It also integrates with Gatsby Cloud to provide real-time previews and incremental builds. The Gatsby team has had a long journey towards creating an integration for WordPress sites…
Flywheel has relaunched Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its free local WordPress development product. The first version of Local Pro, launched in July 2019, was heavily geared towards Flywheel customers, but the tool has gradually evolved to be more host-agnostic. This major update focuses on pre-launch features that allow developers to check links, optimize…
Hear me out before telling me how wrong I am. Over the past couple of weeks, I have read a few different articles on writing good user documentation from a software developer’s perspective. It is an area I was always told I excelled at by people who read the docs I wrote through the years.…
WebDevStudios released its custom block scaffolding tool to the public on Tuesday. It is a fork of the core WordPress script, which was rolled out in February alongside Gutenberg 7.4. The goal is to allow plugin developers to get started building without all the tedious setup required to build even the most basic block. The…
Flywheel’s Local development app has received several major updates during the past month. The most recent release brings back support for Apache as a web server choice (version 5.5.1), in response to user feedback. This was the most highly requested feature on the app’s community voting board. Although nginx is the leader in web server…
WordPress is a dinosaur. If you are a PHP programmer and have had the opportunity to work outside of WordPress in the past 10 years, there are likely one or two or a few dozen things that frustrate you when diving back into the project’s 16-year-old codebase. At a time when WordPress is gifting JavaScript…
The Gutenberg project and its eventual full-site editing feature is coming upon a major issue that will need to be solved. Block-based themes of the future are currently on a path toward a template system that will comprise of plain HTML files. While that will work for the majority of a theme’s output, the trouble…
With the release of WordPress 5.4 looming, it is time for plugin and theme developers to begin testing their extensions and making sure there are no issues. There are also new APIs for upcoming features. Yesterday, the core team released the first release candidate for 5.4. The official release is planned for March 31. This…
Adam Wathan, creator of the Tailwind CSS, published the early release notes for the upcoming version 1.2.0 update to the framework. The new version will include the much-anticipated support for CSS grids and several other useful features for app and website designers. There are no planned breaking changes with the update. Tailwind CSS is a…
It was late summer in 2018. I was an aging developer who wasn’t quite sure where I fit into the WordPress world anymore. I had spent over a decade learning the ins and outs of the platform that launched my career and also served as a hobby for other pet projects I wanted to tackle.…