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.
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 controlUsing Git or other source control tool to manage your code gives you lots of benefits:
So, if you’re not using source control, I recommend that you start integrating it in your workflow. Github has a great tutorial that will get you started in no time Challenges of using source control with block themesIn a classic theme, nearly everything a website needs to function is in the codebase:
In a block theme, this is no longer the case:
Block themes can be entirely tracked in source control except for synced patterns, which must be stored in the database. Avoid these three mistakesMy experience shows that developers make three common mistakes. The first is not setting the You can set this variable in
The second is not reloading the Site Editor after manual changes to theme.json. You need to understand that this file is only loaded once when the editor is loaded. For any changes after that to be considered, you need to reload the editor again. If you do not reload the editor, then WordPress will use stale data when exporting theme changes, undoing all your manual changes. The third is not exporting changes often enough. Whatever code you are working on, it’s important that your commits only impact one particular part of the codebase and that they are self-contained. So far, let’s say you add a 404 template. For this, you build out the In this case, I would make two commits:
Helpful toolsTwo plugins help with the development workflow. First is Create Block Theme, which offers solid theme export functionality. The second is the Pattern Manager. It is a fair warning that this plugin is no longer actively developed, but it’s still very useful. Any questions?I hope this helps you set up an efficient and reliable block theme development routine. If you have any questions, just hit reply! Cheers, Whenever you're ready, there are two ways to deepen your knowledge: Block Theme Academy: My course on how to build performant, beautiful, and easy-to-use themes using Full-Site Editing. I share expertise, proven methods, and actionable strategies learned in 5 years of building client sites with blocks. Building Custom Blocks: This comprehensive course is a proven roadmap to learning custom block development. It will teach you all the skills you need to build blocks quickly, from simple to complex. |
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.
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...
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,...
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...