This week: WordPress and Headless, the analysis of Black Friday, Surge plugin, Block Patterns, and many more.
Jonathan is an open-source developer and writer living in Cape Town, South Africa with his wife and two sons. He still remembers how his first contribution to open source was never actually accepted, but the bug bit, and he’s been doing his best to give back ever since.
He works at Delicious Brains as a Senior Technical Writer, where his days are filled with preparing content to help other developers do their best work.
As a fully-abled, cis, caucasian male in the tech space, I am keenly aware of my privilege. And one of the things that I love so much about the WordPress community (and one of the main reasons I stick around) is that almost everyone does their best to be open, inclusive, and welcome to diversity.
That’s not to say it’s perfect, nor that it can’t be improved upon, we can always learn and grow and do our best to see things from someone else’s perspective. But more and more I see people doing great things to help the rest of us be more aware of the importance of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.
Jill Binder recently posted an enlightening article on why diversity is important both to WordPress and our local communities. Jill has been running diversity workshops for WordCamps for a number of years now, with the aim of assisting more diverse speakers feeling comfortable to apply to speak at WordCamps, and this article is a great introduction to the benefits of thinking about being inclusive at your local events.
Allie Nimmons and Michelle Frechette are both WordPress users and contributors, but they also run Underrepresented In Tech, a site “designed and built with the goal of demystifying diversity”. Between then Allie and Michelle bring a unique perspective to diversity and inclusion. In their latest podcast episode they interview Josepha Haden, the executive director of WordPress, about first-generation WP users, going back to basics, diversity, inclusion, and all things related to making WordPress better.
Speaking of Michelle, she also shared her experiences as a handicapped person attending events, and it’s a stark reminder of the simple things able-bodied folks take for granted. Always looking for the positive in things, Michelle covers some of the minimum requirements for accessibility, which is a great guide if you’re planning in-person events that you want to make accessible to all.
Miriam Schwab has completed the second part of the article on WP and headless and this time, her major focus is on the analysis of many myths.
David Gweyer has released the first version of his theme.json generation tool.
Alex Denning has thoroughly analyzed over 300 Black Friday discounts.
Black Friday in WordPress is unstoppable, and this is what we learned in 2021Justin Ferriman explains why it’s a bad idea to avoid the Black Friday sale.
Helen Hou-Sandí ends her 10-year adventure at 10up. She communicates her reasons and talks about plans for the future.
Konstantin Kovshenin has released Surge – a new page caching plugin that is exceptionally simple to configure.
Roy Tanck has run some performance tests with Surge.
Jack Kitterhing unfolds how wizards can help configure more and more complex plugin settings.
Rich Tabor demonstrates the workings of Pattern Block and how it differs from Block Patterns.
SpinupWP has offered a REST API allowing to manage your website without logging into the admin panel.
On WP Minute John Locke provides insight on how to optimize our website for Google and why it’s good to seem like a big brand.
Daniel Olson gives some examples of the CLI Shifter uses.
Joe Casabona has started a new project – WP Learning Paths. It offers resources on how to learn WordPress.
rtCamp shares its experiences in the field of hiring employees.
Bento is a new component library for AMPa.
Upcoming Events
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The WordPress Career Summit will take place on April 8, 2022.