Always a worthy read, the Field Guide for the next version WordPress—5.6—is here. The new theme, application passwords being integrated, and a load of incremental updates are the highlight features for me. Sure to be a solid release, but if you’ve got an older site you’re not paying attention to, the jQuery update remains a source of possible fear.

Anyway, read the whole post for details on that and more. WordPress 5.6 will be another solid release in what we can generously call a “weird” year, so props to all the people that have kept that train rolling 🥳

I love this little CSS stylesheet to give you a simple but pleasant little change of color on your site throughout the days of a year. James Stanley’s little project is a better-version of some of the first WordPress code I ever wrote, so the concept is very near to my heart.

The code idea is pretty simple: take a knowledge of the day of the year it is and find a set of colors that evokes the day. When I did it back in the day, I used PHP with a set of sine and cosine waves that I thought looked pleasant. Knowing more about colors than I do, this project is doing some clever “HSL” math.

I was recently talking to a friend about new projects for Writers.com. He suggested developing a writing clarity checker “like the Hemingway app.” I’d heard of Hemingway the writer, but not of an app by that name, so I checked it out. It’s very cool.

The Hemingway app takes any English text, and finds the parts of it that are densely written, that use the passive voice, that use adverbs, and so on. The web app is free; there’s also a desktop version I haven’t tried.

If you’d like a quick and easy writing quality check on your own blogging—or other kinds of writing—this is a great, free place to start.

For those who don’t know, WordPress run on PHP on the server. This has been true for all of WordPress’s life, and remains so. For the most parts, this dependence on the PHP language has been an interesting tidbit. But in the next few weeks the next major version of PHP is coming out, and it’ll have a big impact.

In a “major version” release, backwards compatibility is often not guaranteed. More than not-guaranteed, I’d even say that “breaking backwards compatibility” is usually the *reason* for a major version release. (WordPress generally doesn’t do semantic versioning, and so this system doesn’t apply quite the same in WordPress itself or its plugins/themes ecosystem as it does for PHP and most other programming-things.)

Anyway, for those of us trotting along behind, it’s good to keep some sense of what’s happening in the new version of PHP. That is precisely what I think this article from Brent Roos does a good job of: quickly moving through the big features and giving you a taste of what’s to come. Check it out!

Frequent readers my recognize me as the not-great-at-CSS person here at WPShout. So for me, this Interactive CSS Grid Generator from Layoutit! is just such a welcome relief. I can (and have) learned all the different bits of markup and orders for different CSS grid properties. But I also ALWAYS have to look them up when I want to use them.Which one goes first? What’s that one actually called? All those sorts of questions.

That what makes this tool so cool. I can stare at the Grid it’ll create, edit it with a much-simple set of interface elements, and then just pull the markup that I’ll need given the final layout I selected. It is just SO COOL! 🤯

If you’ve been around WordPress for long, you’ve likely heard of a “CDN.” A CDN, or content-delivery network, is one of the most common parts of speeding up a WordPress site, especially for visitors who are far away from where your site is hosted. But the way this works is often a blackbox to people I talk to. That’s where this great article over at web.dev from Katie Hempenius. She explains all the bits of CDNs I already knew, and much more beyond.

And throughout the writing is crisp and very clear. For those too lazy to read the whole thing—trust me, I TOTALLY understand—here’s an example of her clarity, explaining the highest-level concept—how CDNs help with site performance:

At a high-level, the performance benefits of CDNs stem from a handful of principles: CDN servers are located closer to users than origin servers and therefore have a shorter round-trip time (RTT) latency; networking optimizations allow CDNs to deliver content more quickly than if the content was loaded “directly” from the origin server; lastly, CDN caches eliminate the need for a request to travel to the origin server.

As you might have noticed, in WordPress 5.5 you can now tell WordPress itself to keep specific plugins up to do. This is a great feature and one that I’m eager to turn on for more than a few plugins on more than a few sites (that is: all plugins on most of my sites). The security boon of knowing that all the plugins on all yours sites are just always up-to-date outweighs my light concern about one of those sites unexpectedly breaking with a bad update. (That totally happens, but quite rarely in my experience. And usually I can quickly solve the issues.)

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to see Chris Hardie’s exploration of how long it takes from the the time a plugin is updated until a WordPress site will have pulled-in that plugin update. Here’s the punchline:

As we’ve seen, it can take up to 12 hours between when a plugin author releases a new version and when your WordPress site tries to install that new version using auto-updates.

In some cases, it might be much faster, even just a few minutes. In other cases, it might be much longer, even a day or two.

That said I learned a lot from Chris’s article, so definitely check it out. The idea that WordPress’s has baked urgency awareness into core updates was new to me, and also really cool.

I recently bought a drawing tablet (googling “Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphic Drawing Tablet (Medium)” should find it for you), because I had no way I liked to write out visual notes, especially timelines and complex process flows. It was one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time—I wish I’d thought of it five years ago.

The immediate question after that was: What software to use it with? That’s where Autodesk Sketchbook comes in. It’s outstanding free software, and where I can imagine Photoshop or other paid alternatives being more feature-rich in some ways, Sketchbook has been everything I needed and beautifully optimized for a pen/tablet/one-handed keyboard UI.

It works with mouse too, obviously, so you can try it out without buying a tablet and see what you think. Prepare for a bit of a learning curve initially, and note the very helpful Alt, v, spacebar, and m keyboard shortcuts.

I have to admit that one of the places I feel I most conspicuously show my age is how little interest I have these days for the latest of web-dev hype. I would consider the “JAMstack” hype train one of those things. I’m vaguely aware of it, I know that a lot of people I respect as “cutting edge developers” are super into it. But I just don’t really care. (And only part of that is because it is 2020 😝)

Anyway, I’m writing because WordPress fearless leader Matt Mullenweg picked a bit of a fight with the proponents of the “JavaScript, API, & markup” methodology. (The amorphous cloud that that sounds like is indeed what JAMStack is.) And I found this story on that from Sarah Gooding over at the Tavern a good dispassionate distillation of the conversation. The whole thing is an interesting little bit of web development drama, but one of the more-compelling quotes was this:

“Matt is absolutely right that the usability and functionality of the Jamstack is lower,” Strattic co-founder and CEO Miriam Schwab said. “The Jamstack is a great example of technology that is incredibly appealing to developers, but the actual end users – writers, marketers, business owners – cannot use it. I’ve heard many stories of major companies that have come to the decision to adopt Jamstack for all web development as a company-wide policy, only to find that their marketing team has gone rogue and is installing WordPress sites in order to get their job done.”

(BTW: While I think Sarah did a good job balancing sides here, it is worth knowing that WP Tavern has been funded by Matt Mullenweg directly for quite a few years now.)

I admit I haven’t been following the concept and execution of Gutenberg Block Patterns very closely. Primarily this is because visual design has never been with a strong suit for me, nor (consequently) something I spent much time on. It is precisely for this reason that I’m so grateful for Birgit Pauli-Haack’s “WordPress Block Patterns Resource List.”

For those as out-of-it as me, here’s a summary of how they work:

“From the average user’s point of view, block patterns are predefined sections they can use to create layouts. These layouts can be something as simple as the book section from earlier in this article to the more complex pricing columns. With these patterns available, users will be able to create complex layouts at the click of a button,” and later, “The user sees something they want to use. They click on that pattern. It gets inserted into the post.”

I’ll totally admit reading this post doesn’t mean I should be your expert on block patterns, but I sure know a lot more about them than I did. And I hope they’ll help you too 🙂

I need to A/B test lots of parts of Writers.com, and I’ve been putting it off because I wasn’t sure which tool to use. Third-party SaaS solutions and WordPress plugins both feel to me like they’ll be a bummer to implement.

A recent conversation convinced me that Google’s A/B testing tool is the way to go. It piggybacks off Google Analytics (which, of course, we’re already using) so there’s no need to paste a bunch of new JavaScript snippets, trade API keys back and forth, install plugin folders, and so on. And it looks dead-simple to use, both from what my friend tells me and from what I’ve seen so far clicking around.

If you’re like me—if you’ve been putting off A/B testing stuff for like five years because it sounds like a bummer in practice—have a look at Google Optimize.