This week: WooCommerce, block themes, performance, accessibility, Twitter created in WordPress
Anne McCarthy (she/they) is a developer relations wrangler at Automattic who spearheads the FSE Outreach Program and champions DEI. She’s been using WordPress for over a decade, most recently as a co-Test lead and user docs champion for WordPress 5.9. When not WordPress-ing, you can find them out in nature or on a soccer field.
While you might have heard about block themes and the new era this new type of theme ushers in, you might not be ready to take the plunge just yet. Don’t worry – you aren’t alone there and providing gradual ways to adopt is a built-in part of the full site editing project. In fact, there are two new terms to add to your vocabulary around this topic before we dig in:
Hybrid theme – a classic theme that adopts a feature(s) of FSE, like theme.json or the template editor.
Universal theme – a theme that works with both the Customizer and the Site Editor.
To get your bearings, start with the official theme documentation around converting a classic theme to a block theme, which includes ways to adopt parts rather than the whole.
From there, I recommend reviewing adding full site editing features to classic theme from Carolina Nymark, which can offer more of an opinionated and in depth look at how to approach this work from a very experienced theme developer.
On the topic of Universal themes, you’ll definitely want to check out blockbasetheme.com as this offers an easy way to create a universal theme by way of a child theme.
Finally, if you find yourself digging to adopt these various pieces, I’d love to see you share your experience. To provide some inspiration, here’s a post from yours truly on sharing approaches for FSE Feature Adoption.
Also, check out the Block Themes resource list I created.
In a recent post, Cory Miller from Post Status addresses burnout. As Cory, through Post Status, is mostly associated with success, his voice on the topic is that much more important. This also shows that burnout can catch up with anyone at any time.
Woo Visions – a new series of podcasts has appeared on Do the Woo. Matt Mullenweg takes part in the first episode and talks about the growing importance of WooCommerce for WordPress.
10up let slip a bit more about what they did for the White House. Admittedly, what they squeezed out of Gutenberg is pretty impressive.
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.
Birgit Pauli-Haack has collected materials on how to restrict access to various Full Site Editing features.
In CSS Tricks, Ganesh Dahal has published a very extensive introduction to block themes. It’s a great article to start with on your journey with block themes.
Carl Alexander, Till Krüss, and Zach Stepek discuss WooCommerce’s performance and the upcoming changes to the database structure.
Nate Wrigley interviews Łukasz Pasisz and Maciek Palmowski about workflow automation in WordPress.
Konstantin Kovshenin has decided to check if converting entries from the classic editor into Gutenberg negatively impacts performance. TLDR; it does.
On PressGazette, Aisha Majid took a close look at CMSs used by the biggest news sites. It comes as no surprise that WordPress is on top.
Upstairs features Paul Lacey’s life story. It is a truly enchanting tale and many of us will probably find a piece of ourselves in it as well.
Dan Devine has posted his thoughts on Gutenberg, Full Site Editing, and the overall direction that WordPress is heading in.
Toper DeRosia lists some surprising reasons why WordPress is such a good solution for enterprise-class solutions.
Rian Rietveld has researched the online stores of popular brands with regard to their accessibility. There still is much room for improvement for many of them.
Michał Czapliński presents an interesting proof of concept on how to simultaneously compile code for React and PHP by means of the Mitosis compiler. For the time being, it is more of a novelty, but it might serve as an inspiration.
Shifter’s website offers an article on how to connect Shifter Headless to Faust.js.
Melanie Sumner wonders why developers don’t take accessibility seriously. She presents the issue in the form of a few short stories.
In his article, Maciek Palmowski demonstrates how to transform WordPress into a static page using Astro static page generator.
Convert WordPress to static using AstroOn WPMUDEV, Janette Burhans takes us on a journey back in time and shows how WordPress has changed over the years.
Kjell Reigstad has recreated the Twitter interface with the block editor. Possible? It sure is.
Upcoming events:
On February 9, Buddy and WebDevStudios are hosting a webinar on ‘Why WP agencies should use CI / CD’.
Excellent news comes from Big Orange Heart. WordFest Live 2022 will take place on March 4.
The WordPress Career Summit will take place on April 8, 2022.
WordCamp Europe is back, with plans for an organized analog version in Porto this time. On June 2-4 2022, we will find out whether it works out.