Hi Reader, summer time in Europe means holiday season. And that means lots of time spent traveling. So why not benefit from all that time you need to sit in a car, bus, train or plane, and learn something? Which is why I'm sharing four podcast episodes I recently listened to, and enjoyed a lot. A Deep Dive into Block Bindings, APIs, and the LSX Tour Operator Plugin with Ash Shaw In this episode of Woo DevChat, hosts Zach Stepek and Carl Alexander chat with Ash Shaw from Lightspeed about the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, what you are reading now took me a long time to write. In fact I started over three times. The question I'm trying to answer is simple: What's it like to be a WordPress developer in 2024? And by extension of course trying to deduct the future from that. The challenge here is that I want to: Warn about the dangers for your career without wanting to create panic. Encourage you to grow your skills without sounding too negative about your current situation. It's not about Full-Site...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, WordPress has many useful blocks, some not-so-useful ones, and a few that really shouldn't be there anymore. Like the Spacer block. Although the Spacer Block might seem like a simple solution for adding space to pages, it has several drawbacks that can negatively impact your website's performance, design, and accessibility. Understanding the Spacer Block The Spacer block shipped with WordPress 5.0, released on December 6, 2018. Back then, it was the only block-based option for...
2 months ago • 2 min read
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2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, This week I completed all the WordPress 6.6 updates for my Block Theme Academy course. And I did something I never did before: I removed content (it's now archived on my website). Since the first version of the course was published three years ago, WordPress kept adding more and more features. And that meant more and more lessons. But technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. I'm not just interested in showing how WordPress works; I'm more interested in what you can do with it. My...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader “I think my website got hacked.” These are words that none of us wants to hear from a client. But that’s what my client Alain was telling me back in May 2023. The website in question was for a local sports club. It was one of these small projects that was supposed to be a “launch and forget”. I used a default theme with light customizations, a few reliable plugins, and set everything to auto-update. And the website had been running without any issues for years. Until that day. With...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, our clients expect their websites to be fast. And since Google introduced the Web Vitals, we now have a metric that measures performance. At least as far as Google's search and ad services are concerned. Block themes include performance optimizations out of the box, like optimized CSS delivery (you can watch this video to learn more). But there are still areas that need a knowledgeable developer to optimize them. And one of these is definitely images. Images that are larger than...
5 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, This week I stumbled upon this response to an Ask Me Anything tweet by Rich Tabor (of Automattic): This is a good question. Indeed, with classic themes, the go-to solution for this would have been a custom post type and post meta. This was the only way to achieve reliable data inputs and flexible styling options. However, with block themes, we are no longer limited by WordPress' styling capabilities. So are patterns the new default? No. We need to look at this on a case-by-case...
5 months ago • 1 min read
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...
5 months ago • 3 min read