This week: the WordPress community, Full Site Editing in practice, offline WordCamps, and much more.
Guest Editor:
As a WordPress entrepreneur, designer and developer, Rich Tabor is recognized as one of the leaders in WordPress. Before recently joining Extendify as Head of Product, Rich was the Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience at GoDaddy, and founded multiple WordPress products to include Iceberg, CoBlocks, and ThemeBeans.
Connect with Rich on Twitter or on his website richtabor.com.
I’ve been preparing my slides for WordCamp US 2021, where I plan on diving into the interplay of the upcoming Site Editor, block themes, theme.json, block templates, patterns — the whole lot. You see, WordPress is on the cusp of a wildly innovative effort: Full Site Editing, and I am particularly excited to share it with you.
Full Site Editing (FSE) will absolutely change the landscape of the WordPress experience as we see it today — empowering everyday users to finally build and publish sites with full control.
Learn all about this new effort at Carolina Nymark’s site dedicated to all things FSE:
You can’t talk about Full Site Editing without diving into Block Themes. This new class of WordPress themes powers the Full Site Editing experience by laying the block-based foundation, by which FSE is based on. Block themes also set the base experience for the site, configuring global editor settings, specific block settings, and theme presets through the use of its theme.json file.
André Maneiro does a great job walking through the theme.json spec here:
Speaking of theme.json settings — I wrote a three-part series myself on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes.
By standardizing just a few key high-level entries within a WordPress theme’s theme.json file, we can finally create a class of themes that truly are interchangeable. Interchangeable in function, while remaining distinct in style.
Give it a read if you’re thinking of building a block theme:
And last, I really appreciate this write-up by Matias Ventura, the lead architect of Gutenberg, as he dives into high-level thoughts on theme.json, notably with how it shines today — and how the mechanism could be flexed in the near future.
Most notably his thinking on sending the theme style specification to the WordPress.org patterns directory to view patterns with your theme’s styles, is very intriguing.
James Baldacchino analyzed the number of searches for WordPress-related phrases. The drop to pre-pandemic levels is quite apparent.
Hugh Lashbrooke demonstrates how to form hybrid communities, i.e., those that benefit both from the digital and analog world.
Considering the times we live in, it is a must-read for conference and event organizers.
Fabian Kägy has just used Full Site Editing to convert his site to a block-based one. Additionally, he shares what he learned during the process.
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.
If you would like to this discuss about what happened last week in WordPress, join our Community on Discord.
Offline WordCamps are on the menu again. There are security measures to implement and sponsors to find as the global sponsors program will not be operational until the end of the year.
Angela Jin describes how to handle numerous, sometimes brilliant ideas that come up in the course of the project.
GiveWP took a stand on behalf of all trans lives and received a lot of vitriol and pushback.
Alfredo Navas from WebDevStudios shows how to get started with Full Site Editing.
Shaun Andrews disclosed some preliminary designs of the future sidebar in Gutenberg.
Alex Standiford encourages developers to use WP_Error.
Carl Alexander explains what serverless is and how it differs from regular hosting.
Delicious Brains has acquired the ACF Blocks plugin from Extendify.
Nate Finch explains how the workflow of development and deployment should look like in this webinar recording. He shows some interesting tools too.
Marcus Kazmierczak describes how to update Gutenberg-related packages in WordPress Core.
Happy birthday to Pagely – it’s their twelfth.
Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer created Bertha.ai, a plugin that uses artificial intelligence to generate content.
Intuit acquired Mailchimp. This 12-billion-dollar deal seems even more significant as the death of email is proclaimed almost every year.
Upcoming Events
WPMRR Virtual Summit, a conference devoted to earning through WordPress, is scheduled to take place on September 21-23.
WordCamp US returns in its online version after a short break. The event will take place on October 1.