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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…
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Deleting tests is a best practice
As mentioned in a previous blog post, when I started programming, testing software was a rare practice. And like a lot of folks (even if they might not admit it), when I started reading about automated testing… it felt like a waste of time for me. But as time passed and while working on different…
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Write as blocks in an encrypted collaborative environment
For WordCamp Europe Online Contributor Day, I’ve prepared a post to onboard new contributors. I’ve used notion.so for this. It’s great software, but a friend of mine rightfully commented about it being a missed opportunity to use Gutenberg. What if you could open your browser, type a URL, and immediately start typing in Gutenberg. and…
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I’m using a block-based theme
You might not know yet but WordPress is working on a project called Full Site Editing with the goal of allowing users to edit any part of their site in a single and coherent way using the block editor. The project is based on a new kind of themes called “block-based themes”. If you want…
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Journey towards a performant web editor
TLDR This post presents different performance improvement and monitoring techniques that can be used in any React/Redux application. Akin to the React Concurrent mode, it also introduces an async mode for Redux applications where the UI can’t be windowized. WordPress 5.0 included a new block-based content editor. The editor is built as typical react/redux web…