This week: CMS analysis, notifications to Gutenberg, the WordPress community, and much more.
Fränk Klein is a Principal Engineer at Human Made, building enterprise WordPress sites. As a self-taught developer, Fränk is passionate about developer education. His focus is on teaching Full-Site Editing to freelancers and agencies.
The version 5.0 and 5.9 releases changed WordPress forever.
Before these releases the block editor and full-site editing were somewhat abstract. But once these features shipped with Core, they became very concrete.
So it’s natural that designers and developers focus on the immediate issues. And that’s good and needed.
But having to deal with the current situation shouldn’t prevent us from keeping an eye on the future.
There is a lot of information about blocks and themes out there. And while this is good, it’s easier to get overwhelmed in all these details.
If you’re diving into full-site editing for the first time, you might just want the big picture. This is where Rich Tabor’s presentation at WordCamp US 2021 comes in.
Within the span of 40 minutes, you’ll get a complete overview of everything there is to know about building modern WordPress sites.
As developers, it’s normal to look at the source code of your favorite plugins and themes. And we know that reading other people’s code is one of the best ways to learn.
So why shouldn’t designers do something similar?
That’s what the WordPress.org Design theme thought. They created a library that allows you to explore the designs for block themes such as Archeo, Pendant, Stewart, and Wei.
With all the excitement around the new theme designs, it’s easy to get carried away.
But design is never an activity for its own sake. Design is always in the service of a larger goal.
And this is where the Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design come in handy. It’s a stark reminder of what is important when building websites.
A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you.
Jonathan Wold describes the so-called ‘free rider effect’ in the WordPress ecosystem. He focuses predominantly on the hosting companies that he finds gain the most without giving back enough.
Joost de Valk has published an analysis of the market share of the most popular CMSs. The comparison between WooCommerce and Shopify looks quite interesting.
Sam Munoz shared her thoughts on the WordPress community in a truly engaging article presenting Sam’s changed approach.
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.
SiteCare announced that it acquired their long-time competitor Maintainn from WebDevStudios.
Lax Mariappan explains how to add your own notifications to Gutenberg.
A proposal on make.wordpress.org advocates dropping annual default themes in favor of promoting style variants only. I don’t think retiring annual themes is such a good idea.
Barış Ünver tells the story of his work on the Speed Booster Pack plugin and the reasons behind such a large drop in active plugin installations lately.
Slava Abakumov proudly presents CommentsWP, a plugin used to analyze comments showing up on your website.
Brandon Ernst instructs how to create the so-called Microsites allowing for separate domain names within a single WordPress site.
David McCan describes which dynamic field plugins are currently worth using. Interestingly enough, ACF is not the only solution.
Joey Farruggio is developing a course teaching how to create code in WordPress using modern techniques.
In an interview with Matt Medeiros, Joe Casabona opens up about his conversion from web developer to podcast specialist.
The authors of Oxygen Page Builder have just produced a beta version of their new builder – Breakdance and its developer tools blew me away.
The Yoast SEO Premium plugin has been available for purchase on WordPress.com since last week.
Notifications in WordPress have always been troublesome so the arrival of the WordPress Feature Project – Notifications plugin is a pleasant turn of events. Its authors invite you to try it out and report any bugs.