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Fränk Klein from WP Development Courses

Level Up Your WordPress Business With One Email Per Week

Every Sunday, I send out tips, strategies, and case studies designed to help agencies and freelancers succeed with modern WordPress. My goal is to go off the beaten path, and focus on sharing lessons learned from what I know best: building websites for clients. 100% free and 100% useful.

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Featured Post

What are the best practices for child theming block themes?

Hi, last week I shared a video about how to choose the best starter theme for a client project. One option is to start with an existing block theme (like Rockbase), and then create a child theme to implement your own customizations. And I got a couple of emails from readers that were running into challenges when using block child themes. So this week I want to do a deep dive into the topic of block child themes. Why would you want to use a child theme? With a block theme, you could just use...

about 6 hours ago • 3 min read

Hi Reader, "What is the best starter theme?" is a common question that my readers and students ask. The answer is "it depends". Because there are three options: You choose an opinionated design. You choose a neutral design. You start from scratch. 👉 This video dives into the details Cheers,Fränk P.S. This video is part of a new section I'm adding to my Block Theme Academy course. The focus is on best practices for building client projects. So, if you'd like anything addressed in that section,...

7 days ago • 1 min read

Hi Reader, One essential tool in your toolbox as a professional website builder is source control, also called version control. Source control is the practice of tracking and managing changes to code. This means using Git, often used along with Github to host the code. Why use source control Using Git or other source control tool to manage your code gives you lots of benefits: Versioning: By tracking every change done to a code base, you can understand how it evolved. You’ll also be able to...

14 days ago • 3 min read

Hi Reader, the Block Bindings API is one of the key features in WordPress 6.5. Because it allows you to output the content of post meta fields in Core blocks. This is what a paragraph block bound to a meta field looks like: The big downside though is that only the underlying API is part of WordPress 6.5. So if you want to create a binding, you have to switch to the code view, and manually write out the JSON that establishes the connection: Needless to see the user experience is lacking... A...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Hi Reader, In 2018, I built my first website using the block editor. This was before the new editor was in Core, so it was very early. Back then, color and font size palettes were the only customization options available. This website used both, but my approach to implementing these palettes bordered on carelessness. I just took the list of sizes and colors I got from the designs and threw them into the code. This was right before launch, as an afterthought. Things have changed a lot since...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

Hi Reader, This week I stumbled upon a very interesting edition of the Frontend at Scale newsletter. It mentions a research paper titled Design2Code: How Far Are We From Automating Front-End Engineering?. As the title implies, the researchers let different artificial intelligence tools build a frontend implementation from a mockup. Here's the winner: Not perfect by any means, but damn close. The newsletter goes into this study in detail, and finishes with a great roundup of the state of AI...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

Hi Reader, in this email, I want to talk to you about a new block theme: Rockbase. More than just a good theme, it is a sign of the change that WordPress has been undergoing. A change that not only limits itself to technology. But also to the web design market. Meaning What we deliver to our clients, and How we deliver it. What is Rockbase? Rockbase is block theme designed by Rafal Tomal. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Rafal’s work will. From 2010 to 2018, he led product design for the...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

Hi Reader, WordPress 6.5 will ship with two critical features for professionals building websites for clients. Partially synced patterns. Meta field content for blocks Let’s dive into these, what they allow you to do, and the possible use cases. Partially synced patterns Partially synced patterns let you change the content of individual blocks within a synced pattern. This allows some parts of the block pattern to sync while leaving others unchanged. Let’s look at this example: a newsletter...

2 months ago • 1 min read

Hi Reader, I still read messages like this in WordPress developer Facebook Groups and Twitter: Clients breaking sites is a common issue for developers. And that’s because block theme development is entirely different to classic theme development. In “old” WordPress, clients couldn’t change their website significantly unless you allowed them to. In modern WordPress, it’s the other way around. Clients can change anything unless you prevent them. And that’s because WordPress users have access to...

3 months ago • 3 min read

Hi Reader, Last year, I started practicing Japanese Jujutsu, one of the oldest forms of martial arts. It’s a lot to learn! Especially for somebody that is nearly 39 years old, and has no experience with fighting. But I've been able to make great progress, and find the training very enjoyable. And that's because of how well-organized the instruction is. There is a single starting point, and then you progress gradually to more advanced techniques. And even the more seasoned practitioners always...

3 months ago • 2 min read
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