Category: WordPress

  • Making and Questioning Assumptions: Falsehoods WordPress Developers Believe

    Making and Questioning Assumptions: Falsehoods WordPress Developers Believe

    When building software you need to constantly make and question assumptions. You make assumptions since you can’t operate with perfect information and waiting for that perfect information would take an infinite amount of time. These assumptions can lead to falsehoods. Akin’s 33rd law of spacecraft design: A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next…

  • Five lessons from Eight Years as a WordPress Core Committer

    Five lessons from Eight Years as a WordPress Core Committer

    Today marks eight years since I first committed to WordPress Core. Like many things, this feels like both yesterday and forever ago. Reflecting on this, I thought of five lessons I have learned from being a maintainer of what is now 43% of the internet. Have a bias toward action Learning when to move fast…

  • First Thoughts: Twenty Twenty Three Theme

    In celebration of WordPress 6.1 Beta 1, I updated the sites theme here to use the still very much in development Twenty Twenty Three. I’m still experimenting with Full Site Editing but I think this process has gotten better in the last year. I do wish I had an All Terms block – A block…

  • WordCamp US First Contribution

    WordCamp US First Contribution

    A highlight of WordCamp US 2022 for me was helping Ramon Corrales make his first contribution to WordPress Core. It started with me having some errors doing an NPM install, calling out a bug in Slack as a good first bug, and Ramon stepping up to help: We had a couple of quick in-person conversations…

  • Three life-improving tools for WordPress Plugin Development

    Three life-improving tools for WordPress Plugin Development

    While building the Post Format Block, I’ve set up a nice toolchain that I think every plugin developer would benefit from using. WordPress Plugin Development in 2021 has a lot more tools available than when I wrote my first plugin a dozen years ago. There are three that I found to be hugely life-improving while…

  • Introducing Post Format Block

    Introducing Post Format Block

    Post Formats are a somewhat neglected feature in WordPress. How neglected? Well as I discovered, there isn’t a block for it in Full Site Editing So I decided to build it and thankfully it is super easy. The @wordpress/create-block package got the majority of my scaffold for me in minutes, after that it just a…

  • Full Site Editing: Initial Thoughts.

    Full Site Editing: Initial Thoughts.

    When I switched this site back from being headless, I decided to give the new twentytwentytwo theme a go and with that, I’m having my first real stab at Full Site Editing. FSE is the hot new feature for WordPress and while I don’t think I am the target user most of the time, for…

  • On With my Head! A return from Headless WordPress

    On With my Head! A return from Headless WordPress

    Last year I switched this domain from running a traditional WordPress site to running a headless WordPress site. I built the site with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and the WordPress REST API. I had it set up to pull data from three different WordPress sites, allowing me to keep an art journal, post my art, and…

  • Brief Reflections on Seven Years as a WordPress Core Committer

    Brief Reflections on Seven Years as a WordPress Core Committer

    Seven years ago today, I typed svn commit for the first time in my checkout of WordPress core. I’ve since done it an additional 388 times. Most of those were in the first few years, but I’m glad that in the last year I’ve done it 35 times, and in WordPress 5.8 my face came…

  • Symbols of Hate at WordCamps

    Symbols of Hate at WordCamps

    Be considerate, respectful, and collaborative.Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory or harassing behavior and speech.Be mindful of your surroundings and of your fellow participants. Alert conference organizers if you notice a dangerous situation or someone in distress.Participate in an authentic and active way. In doing so, you help to create WordCamp CITYNAMEHERE and make it your own. WordCamp…

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