I know that this is a WordPress-focused site. But I also know that programming is as central to WordPress as writing. So I thought I’d share this fun little article that simply and clearly lays out the (classic) “Hello world” program in 30 different programming languages. It’s fun to get a quick sense of how much “boilerplate” each language requires, how it chose to say “show on the screen,” etc. And because of the simple format of the post you’ll not be confused about it. Great job to the post’s author Al Muhimen. 🙂

In just about two weeks (depending on when you read this 🤓) the WordCamp that I (David) have been helping to organize for a few years—I actually forget if I helped in 2017 🤷‍♂️—is happening. That is it’s WordCamp Denver 2020 time. Because of that whole bother about COVID, we’re going to be virtual, which does mean that if your area has good time-zone overlap with the US, you can likely attend all or parts of it live. And we’d love to have you!

We’re so grateful for all our speakers, the support from WordCamp Central (which eased getting streaming working quite a lot!), and to the local Colorado folks who’ve attended for years. I should be a fun and interesting time, so please consider grabbing a (virtual) ticket and tuning in.

Aside from the obvious events, we’ve got a few “curve balls” I think should be quite fun, interesting, and distinctive 🤓

I really love this little tour from Iain Poulson at Delicious Brains about the WordPress database. There isn’t a lot in this that I didn’t know or couldn’t guess. That may well be true for you too. But if you don’t feel like you know WordPress’s database well (or even if you do) you can’t really compete with how simple and approachable its whole format it. By simply listing each of the database’s table and explaining what each column does, you can’t read this article and not have *profoundly* deepened your understanding of WordPress’s database and how it works. So please give it a look 🙂

It being the year of COVID (to say nothing of America’s very recent confrontation with our persistent problems with racial injustice) means that WordCamp Europe—now very online and starting tomorrow—had slipped my memory and attention.

If that sounds interesting to you, please at least consider giving it some attention. WordCamp Europe has been one of (or maybe the) most popular WordCamps in recent years. It’s a great gathering of WordPress people from all over, and a real celebration of what the WordPress community is and can be. And at this time in the world, I can certainly use more community celebrations. I’m sure the organizing team will do a fantastic job!

A quick little uplifting story I missed a few weeks ago: as the COVID-19 lockdowns were setting in worldwide, more and more people were doing web searches for “wordpress.” Or so reports Alex Denning, the original creator of WPShout, and a reliable man in my book.

While I could pull more interesting tidbits from Alex’s analysis, I want to encourage you to click through. So I’ll just share this last one:

There has been a ~20% bump in WordPress searches with high purchase intent in the last month.

Another catchy little diddy bankrolled by my friend Zach Katz over at GravityView:

I could put other words here, but they would only demean the importance of this video. 🤓

I mentioned in my recent article about Git Subtree that I think the whole workflow is probably better managed with Composer. And that while I abstractly think that Composer is great idea for WordPress projects, I don’t particularly feel ready to use it in earnest.

That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in studying the topic though. And for that purpose I think you can do a lot worse than this fairly-complete and opinionated guide to the process from Vladimir Apostolski over at Time2Hack.

I will admit: I’m still not totally sold. And especially the Laravel Envoyer stuff made me even less sure I want to solve these problems this way. But I really appreciate someone smart walking through how they do it. And I won’t stop looking 🤓

To be clear: I am bad at CSS and the last person you should listen to when you want to learn how to do it better. (My friend Lara Schenck comes to my mind as someone you SHOULD listen to about CSS: https://notlaura.com/.) Anyway, the point is that I was excited to learn that the min(), max(), and clamp() functions are starting be well-supported by browsers. Because it means I can write *even less* CSS. And I’m about as enthusiastic as this very-polished YouTube tutorial is about them:

I also loved this comment from Joel D Canfield:

This, I’ve dreamt about for so so long. Not back in ’94 when I started coding HTML3.2, but it’s definitely been years.

There are a number of different reasons I wanted to share this article about the programming language “Hack” here on Shout. The first one is just that I found it an interesting and pleasant conversation of the use and benefit of the (poorly named) PHP-like language that arrived in the world when Facebook’s PHP performance bottlenecks started to bother them too much.

The other reason I share it: I didn’t realize that Hacklang (officially “Hack” but good luck search the internet for that ;p) was used by anyone who wasn’t Facebook. There was a brief craze for the PHP-compatible Hack-running HHVM a few years back in the PHP community. But then HHVM (and with it Hack) quickly fell from my consciousness when its promised PHP-compatibility lost out to the PHP community’s newfound vigor to make the language itself faster.

But this story about how (and why) Slack is using Hacklang really caught my eye for that reason. We use Slack all the time, so knowing that it’s got some Hack not PHP in it make me think a little more (and again) that I want to give that language a second look. (As if I’ve not already self-assigned more homework than I can ever complete 🤪)

Here’s last week’s live Q&A webinar for buyers of our premium WordPress development course Up and Running. It’s a wide-ranging session on the practicalities of WordPress development.

We’ve got one more weekly webinar coming up (tomorrow, April 24), so if you’d like to get your questions answered live, check out Up and Running!

I enjoyed this little “essay” from Leo over at Design Bombs. First, it was great to read as an introduction to the new Gutenberg-block-making tool I didn’t even know was out. The article does a great job giving you the snippets and outputs so I’m able to fall easily, without breaking a sweat. As someone who has gotten a little rusty on Gutenblocks, it was really fun to work with the code virtually.

The other reason I share it though, is that I felt like this tutorial was notably and interestingly more narrative than most I see. And I appreciated how much Leo wrote about what he knew and didn’t quite frankly. Anyway, here’s his intro, which is a good summary of both the style and content:

I have finally started creating blocks for Gutenberg, the (not-so-new anymore) editor for WordPress. Since I have not coded with JavaScript in several years, and have not ventured into React yet, I had been wondering how easy it would be to create a new block.

As luck would have it, a new tool to scaffold Gutenberg blocks was released just a few days before my work started: the @wordpress/block package (also called @wordpress/create-block), which allows to create a new WordPress plugin containing all the necessary JavaScript, CSS and PHP files to register a block, with zero configuration.