This week: Advanced Custom Fields course, Gutenberg good practices, developer expectations from WordPress, Xdebug, and much more…
Topher DeRosia is a Community Director at Howard Development & Consulting. He brings more than 25 years of experience as a web developer, over a decade of which has been spent building out WordPress sites. In addition, Topher curates HeroPress.
The topic I’ve chosen to talk about is Internet history. The Internet has been around long enough that there are people who’ve used it all their lives and still weren’t there at the beginning. I first got on the Internet in 1994, via a dumb terminal on a VAX VMS mainframe. That means I had a screen with green or orange letters (no mouse) and a keyboard. It was connected to The Computer, which was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle in a room by itself.
My first time online from home was on a 28.8 modem, over a phone line. I could download up to 28.8 Kilobytes per second. Just did a speed test at my home right now, and it’s at 530830 Kilobytes per second. Half a million. What’s crazy is that it’s slow today, I’m actually paying for a million Kilobytes per second.
I used to get Internet Magazine, and in 1996 they would list every single new server in the entire world. It rarely took more than one page.
Some of the things we did on the Internet then were exactly the same as now. Some were completely different, and are now gone from the Internet. Below are four things you may or may not recognize.
Gopher was what people used before the web. It was developed by the University Of Minnesota Golden Gophers.
Most people used a terminal based client, with a keyboard, but there were some GUI clients, and for many years plain old web browsers could access URLs that looked like gopher://example.com
Gopher was 100% menu based. If you went to a weather server you’d pick your state from a meny, then your city, then you could pick different kinds of weather reports. You could select images, and it would ask you to download the image.
When Gopher ruled the land the Internet was small enough that you could visit every server in the world in a single day. Someone ran an Internet Easter Egg hunt, and you would go from Gopher site to Gopher site, following the clues. All the servers in the entire world took part.
This is a little hard to describe for people that have never used it, because there isn’t really anything like it anymore. Some things like web bulletin boards and reddit are similar, but mere shadows of Usenet.
Imagine something like a bulletin board system with threaded conversations. Usenet clients often looked like email clients, and people could have conversations there.
What made it really different from anything today is that every server was a mirror of every other server in the world, and there were thousands of servers. This essentially meant that nothing could ever be deleted. If it were deleted from one server, it would restore it from another server.
There was a time when Usenet was the most used Internet tool in the world, and now it’s completely gone.
Google scraped as much as they could, and you can search the archives, but it only goes back so far.
Usenet also gave us spam.
The name “spam” was actually first applied, in April 1993, not to an email, but to unwanted postings on Usenet newsgroup network. Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 messages to news.admin.policy and in the aftermath readers of this group were making jokes about the accident, when one person referred to the messages as “spam”, coining the term that would later be applied to similar incidents over email. – Wikipedia
There was a time when, if you used email, you did it in Eudora. Originally only for the Mac, a Windows version was also eventually released. Built by one guy named Steve as a hobby, it was made out of love. It was named after American author Eudora Welty, because of her short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”
Eventually purchased by Qualcomm, there was a Lite and Pro version, and of course the entire world used the Lite version.
There really weren’t any other GUI based options. Mainframe systems had their own command line clients of course. Mail in VMS, Pine on Unix, but if you were on Windows or a Mac, Eudora was it.
This was the first GUI browser I ever saw. Before this it was terminal based browsers, like Lynx in the top of this post. It could do images, but they couldn’t be aligned left or right, it had to be on its own line. Only gifs were supported.
There was no CSS, so you couldn’t change the background color from that gray, or links from that blue. There was no javascript. There were no server side processing languages like PHP. It was simply a document reader.
It was only barely different from a Gopher client, but it laid the foundation for the web we have today.
Please read more about those, and feel free to follow the links inside for more Internet history. We are where we are today because of what came before, and 20 or 30 years from now you’ll be telling people about how we used the internet today.
Joey Farruggio has just published a mini course showing you how to create blocks using ACF Blocks, Tailwind CSS and AlpineJS.
10up created a page where they collected all their good practices related to Gutenberg. This is a really good job and a model for other agencies to show how we should share knowledge.
Eric Karkovack wonders what exactly plugin developers should expect from WordPress (as a platform). These are quite important considerations, because for some time there have been more and more discrepancies between these camps.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Damon Cook shows how we can create an accordion block using Advanced Custom Fields.
Rob Howard rightly points out that WordPress has been more discouraging for its superfans lately. It can be seen, for example, in Matt’s statements regarding the removal of statistics in the repository.
And it is thanks to those superfans that WordPress is where it is.
Salman Ravoof has written a very useful article explaining what Xdebug is and how to use it.
Interesting article by Eric Karkovack about how people who are not online security specialists can deal with ubiquitous malware. The entire article is perfectly illustrated by the phrase “Malware Chaos Is the New Normal”.
Did you miss WooSesh? No problem – you can watch the recordings of all the lectures.
WP Accessibility Day announced the agenda and presented all the speakers. There will be a lot of interesting talks about accessibility. Really worth spending the whole day.
During WooSesh, we could learn many interesting things, one of them was the information that WordPress.com also works on managed hosting for WooCommerce.
Have you already voted in this year’s edition of The WP Awards? If not, you still have until the end of the month. Our vote will go for ACF, Buddy and Kinsta (and a few other products).
Woogo Store is a hosting solution for WooCommerce based on the serverless approach. It is worth mentioning that underneath we can find Ymir, an application created by Carl Alexander.
WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 is now available to download and test.