This week: lightweight WordPress themes, Full Site Editing, a podcast from Kinsta, Figma and WordPress Design Library, and much more.
I’m Igor Benić, a web developer interested in expanding my knowledge through various projects and educating others on what I learn while working. In my free time I am trying to grow my side projects and create a product business through WordPress plugins.
As Full Site Editing is approaching, it’s obvious that the new block editor; Gutenberg, is going to be an important part of most products in the WordPress ecosystem. We can already see that some products have integrated the new block editor as their builder. First that come to mind are MailPoet, FluentCRM or NewsletterGlue for building newsletters and GravityForms for building forms.
There is an interesting plugin that changes the Comment textarea into the Gutenberg editor where you can use specific blocks. The repository is still active and I invite to try it out (and developers to read the repository).
Gutenberg Blocks are stored in a custom WordPress store using the @wordpress/data package. You can create your own stores to be used in Gutenberg editor or in a separate JavaScript app. A series of tutorials about the data package is all you need to get started.
Something that can be useful when building a product for Gutenberg is a way of extending existing Blocks. Gutenberg uses hooks in JavaScript in a similar way WordPress already uses them through PHP. Check this tutorial for examples on how you can extend them yourself:
Chris Wiegman shows how to create a lightweight WP theme. It’s worth reading as the rules presented here are universal, and we should abide by them.
Anders Norén described how the landscape of themes in the WordPress world has and will change in 2021. And all thanks to Full Site Editing, which will simplify it a lot.
A New Era for WordPress Themes
This week Delicious Brains has released WP Migrate DB Pro 2.0 – a great database migration plugin.
The main difference is using React and considerable changes to the interface.
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.
April Williams from WebDevStudios shows how to work remotely and not go crazy.
FluentCRM has won Plugin Madness 2021. I must admit it’s a surprise, especially since it is quite a new plugin.
Kinsta has launched its own podcast – Reverse Engineered.
CC Search, an image search engine licensed under the CC0 license, has just joined WordPress.org.
Many companies publish so-called Transparency Reports, in which they publicly describe what goes on behind closed doors. Justin Ferriman is against such practices since he believes that the released data can be used against those companies.
Here’s an excellent guide on how to design graphic interfaces of web applications.
James Koster shows how to use the WordPress Design Library in Figma. We highly recommend it.
Chris Lema explains why the comparison pages of our product with the competition are so essential.
We can watch all videos from the Expand 2021 conference on YouTube.
Jonathan Sulo from Servebolt explains how to replace the plugins that slow down the page the most.
The Block Patterns directory will be released along with WordPress 5.8.
Jem Turner shared her six methods that make programming Gutenberg-based websites so much easier.
Upcoming events:
WordSesh 2021 will take place on May 24-28.
WordCamp Europe 2021 Online will take place on June 7-10.
The second edition of WordFest Live will take place on June 23.
WordCamp Japan 2021 Online will take place on June 20-26.