Let me lead by saying that working at GoDaddy has been the best job I’ve had to date. Although I am incredibly thankful for the empowerment and opportunity GoDaddy has given me, the time has come for a change.
With that said, today officially marks my first day as Head of Product at Extendify. 🚀
(more…)Do you publish online? If so, this one is for you. I’ll show you how I created a publishing checklist that is automatically added to the top of every post I draft, to ensure I follow my publishing workflow.
This way, before I hit that ominous blue publish button, I know if each publishing task is properly accounted for.
I recently released a set of blocks to improve the editing and publishing flows within Gutenberg: Markdown Comment and Todo List. We’re going to leverage both of these block plugins to add a publishing checklist to the top of each post.
(more…)This is part one, of three, in a series on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes to accompany the Full Site Editing effort.
If you like this, read on about standardizing font sizes, and standardizing site spacing. Each of these are what I would consider design foundations of a website, of which should be functionally standardized.
I know —you’re probably thinking that by standardizing anything theme related, we’ll have unoriginal WordPress themes that lack creativity… but what if I told you that standardization would do just the opposite, and more.
(more…)This is part two, of three, in a series on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes to accompany the Full Site Editing effort.
(more…)This is part three, of three, in a series on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes to accompany the Full Site Editing effort.
(more…)I’m currently full on in the process of building a full site editing Block Theme to replace my blog’s current theme, Tabor.
While diving into this project I’ve explored a few areas where I can improve my personal publishing flow. The first was bringing editor comments into Gutenberg with my Markdown Comment block, and today I am releasing a second in that same vein: the Todo List block.
(more…)Extending the editor with block styles is a quick way to add, or remove, styling defaults to any Gutenberg block. Among adding block patterns and variations, block styles are a clever way to standardize creative elements of a site running on Gutenberg. I suspect that in time, block styles will become a core component of block themes, alongside block patterns, as they both enable creativity and flare.
And while it is relatively simple to add block styles using PHP, removing them is not quite as easy — especially block styles added by WordPress core (or any added client-side).
Enter Javascript… and I promise, it’s not as daunting as you might think.
(more…)In this era of WordPress Block Themes, there are a number of familiar — yet very new — areas of theming that we need to get up to date with. One of those is the concept of block templates.
You see, themes have been able to provide templates for quite a while, but block templates are very different on two main accounts:
In a world where Gutenberg is slowly taking over more and more of the WordPress experience, that experience is not baked into, nor limited by, a theme. Instead, the WordPress experience is empowered by the theme.
And while this is a lot to take in, block templates are an immensely powerful concept that will level-up WordPress publishing.
(more…)I know I’ve said this before, but building Gutenberg blocks has honestly never been easier. Better tools, more detailed documentation, and clearer examples are finally here – paving the way for developers to quickly dive into the art of block building, and in particular, building block plugins.
So what’s the big deal about block plugins?
In short, this relatively new classification of plugins empowers WordPress users to publish with “blocks on demand.” I wrote a primer on block plugins last week if you’re interested in the “why” behind block plugins, but ultimately WordPress users running Gutenberg will be able to just about instantly add any new block block to any page. Very cool. Very empowering.
(more…)While I’ve long been a fan of block collections, most notably with CoBlocks, I do see immense value in block plugins for use within the WordPress Block Directory. Quickly searching for and installing a block right from within the Block Library is quite a clever and empowering experience — one that I believe will eventually become the de facto way to discover blocks.
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