Multidisciplinary maker specializing in the intersection of product, design and engineering. Making WordPress.
I recently worked with Ben Dwyer on an exploration to surface a WordPress block theme’s existing colors and typesets within the site editor. He made a video detailing the effort—give it a watch, it’s pretty cool.
What I like best is that any theme using variations inherit this capability right off. Folks can then choose any combination of color or typography among the variations.
What do you think?
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My friend and colleague Anne McCarthy recently published a guide on what’s landing in this next iteration of the command palette. This next iteration of the WordPress Command Palette is looking so nice. New commands, a polished interface, and more accessible — what more can you ask for?
And if you’re a plugin developer, lean into Riad Benguella’s WordPress Command Palette API post to add your own commands, and peruse the core commands, straight from the source. Some days it feels like WordPress 6.3 just landed, but 6.4 is shaping up quite nicely. Onward!
I made this video to showcase building a dynamic Gutenberg block with the help of artificial intelligence using ChatGPT.
I run through how to scaffold a block using the wordpress/create-block package, structuring a dynamic block, building the block, and using ChatGPT to write an accompanying PHP function.
As WordPress blocks—and therefore patterns—continue to expand in scope, the need for a simplified editing experience is more present than ever. Sure, the new tooling is nice — like fluid typography, new spacing controls, element hover color support, padding, layout, etc — but it’s also quite a lot to take in.
Cue the new template locking mechanism for making only content blocks (text and images) editable within a pattern, landing in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release.
It’s long overdue, but I’ve recently set up a richtabor/blocks repository on Github that links to the source code for the WordPress blocks that I currently have published — including a few that are yet to be available on WordPress.org.
Every single block I’ve added, I built out of a need of my own. I wanted to be able to add a simple publishing checklist to posts, so I created the Todo List block. And I like to leave editor notes throughout my posts with the Markdown comment block, so I don’t forget things.
I’ve long been a huge fan of block patterns. So much that I see patterns becoming the primary method most of us lay out pages within the block editor. And with the recent release of Gutenberg, and upcoming release of WordPress 5.9, patterns are getting a lot of attention. There are a number of Pattern API improvements on the way, but one I am most interested in, is the addition of the Pattern block.
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’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.
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. This article is one of a series of posts I’ve shared since I’ve started diving into building a full site editing block theme for my blog.
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?