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Debugging WordPress Scripts and Styles
With the move to more JavaScript and Styles in WordPress admin pages and editors, I spend some time debugging what styles and scripts are being loaded on a given page. (Specially important if you’re working on blocks, or JavaScript rendered admin pages) To help with that I use a small vibe-coded tool. It helps understanding…
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Mastering the side quests
Modern video games, especially the open world games all shar similar mechanics around the game’s scenario. The player has a main quest to achieve in order to finish the game, but in parallel one can explore a lot of diverse side quests that often impact the main quest one way or another. I have found…
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The anatomy of a CMS
I like to tell my developer friends that everyone should build an editor at least once as it’s central to many applications. Similarly, building a CMS is a rite of passage for developers. We use them daily. There are several options from open source solutions like WordPress, Ghost, Drupal to site builders like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify. From full headless ones like Strapi…
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A story of software refactoring: Converging the post and site editors in WordPress
TLDR WordPress has two block editors: the post editor that allows you to edit posts and pages and the site editor that allows you to edit templates, headers footers… Converging the post and site editors has been a difficult task, but we’ve completed it; read on to know the context, process, and consequences. A brief…
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The place of websites in a future dominated by AI
With the release of ChatGPT, everyone in the tech industry – from CEOs to managers and engineers – is wondering how these new tools and technologies can and will disrupt their lives. Will it make their jobs obsolete, or will it increase productivity? Should we fear it, or embrace and benefit from it? Developers often…
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Secrets of Gutenberg: The keyboard shortcuts package
If you’ve been following my blog or WordPress development for some time now, you’d know by now that the Gutenberg project contains a number of hidden gems that you, as a JavaScript developer or a WordPress developer can benefit from in your own standalone applications or WordPress plugins. One of these hidden gems is the…
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The cost of WordPress plugins on the performance of the editor
Performance metrics Building a performant editor is a very difficult task, it requires constant attention and monitoring to some key metrics. In the context of the WordPress block editor (aka Gutenberg), we constantly track the following key metrics: Loading time: The time it takes from the moment the user clicks the “new/edit post” link until…
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Introduction to WordPress’s Global Styles and Global Settings
Building a website these days is all about finding the right balance between a coherent and consistent design across the website and customizations capabilities that allows specific content to shine. Far is the era where everything was customized manually (remember Dreamweaver and Frontpage?). CSS came to be, and different iterations on top of it, guidelines…
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The WordPress block editor: a maintainer’s story
Writing software is easy, sustaining it for years is harder, and doing it for open-source software is a challenge. Here’s a story about my journey to help build the WordPress block editor from a maintainer’s perspective, a perspective probably invisible to most developers and contributors (unless you’re an open-source project maintainer). The fun part As…
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Introducing BlockBook for WordPress
tl;dr: With BlockBook, you can build, test and showcase your static WordPress (aka Gutenberg) blocks in isolation. It can also be used to test the block styles of your themes. In short, it’s going to change how you develop and style blocks. If you’re a block developer, BlockBook is a must. You can see a…