Most everyone in the WordPress world knows the basic image formats: use JPEGs for photos, PNGs for screenshots, and maybe WebP if you’re a Google-loving-hipster. Or at least, that’s my summary of the situation. (Some other playful/controversial opinions: .bmp is for dinosaurs who love MS Paint, GIF is a weird name we fight about for what should really be silent video files.)

I didn’t know a lot of the technical details of all those image formats. Nor had I realized that people were (maybe obviously) working on newer image formats. All that in more is the topic of this post over at Cloudinary from Jon Sneyers. His writing is fun, his biases are clear, and you’ll probably learn something about an important detail of the internet 🤓

I’m quite confident a lot of WPShout readers are doing at least a little bit of “client work.” Whatever way you do that—even if you don’t do it using WordPress—problems can crop up. Which is why I really appreciate this little article from Jennifer Bourn.

She covers a number of the facets of how to deal with conflicts that come up, including this thing that some conflict-avoidant souls (like me) may find a little surprising:

The good news is that client conflict isn’t always a bad thing.

Managing client conflict the right way can turn a negative situation into a positive one. Your response can solidify your position as leader of the project, reinforce your expertise, and build greater trust with your client. Plus, by addressing potential conflict immediately, you can salvage client relationships worth saving and end those that are toxic before they devolve into a situation that could harm your brand.

She goes on to enumerate ways you can handle conflict poorly, as well as some of the ways that you can healthily cope in a difficult situation. Definitely give it a read.

As a perennial CSS newbie (who kind of had skills a decade ago) I appreciated this short article from Robin Rendle about when (translation: how little) you should use the float: left that was so common when I last really did CSS.

To summarize, you can (and should) keep using float for what it is originally designed for: embedding small things like images inside of text which flows naturally around them. But all the other layout used people put them to for years? Skip it and that annoying clearfix stuff we all had to do.

The most interesting thing from the article—which Robin also seemed surprised by—is that haven’t actually need to do that clearfix stuff for a while, all because of a little property on display called flow-root. To learn just how that works, you’ll have to click through 🤓

I use Google a lot. You probably do too. But have you ever thought about tricks that’d make you better at Googling? I honestly don’t much of the time. And that’s partly down to just how good “normal Googling” is, and also my laziness.

Anyway, I really liked this little post from Marko Denic because it almost certainly will make you better at using the tool to the utmost. I was familiar with things like the site:wpshout.com trick. But I had no idea that Google supports * as a wildcard placeholder in a phrase. For that and other things you might now know, do click through to give the post a scan. (I’m not being diminutive; this post is clearly purpose-built as a quick-scan vs an in-depth reading journey 🏕)

I share this story from Marc at atthis.link for two reasons: that it is itself interesting and useful, and because I’ve also been using RSS lately and enjoying its respectfulness.

First, Marc’s article is itself a useful summary of why RSS is better than Twitter, Facebook, et al. He also highlights a few things I hadn’t realized or thought about, like the ability to set up an RSS subscription to YouTube channels and (sub)Reddits.

But more importantly to me, I’ve been using RSS a little more regularly in the last few months, and I’m loving it. I’m using Feedly, largely on my new iPad.

I was a heavy user of RSS around the time Google Reader was ended (too soon). But the Fever app by Shuan Inman I was using stopped getting active support around the same time that my life got busier. So RSS just kind of fell by the wayside.

But as Marc says, RSS is the internet at its best. A loose confederation of people without lock-in to specific business models of monetization or greediness for attention. (Yep, that’s a lightly veiled reference to Twitter, Google, and Facebook 🤓)

For those unfamiliar with RSS, the great news is that WordPress automatically provides RSS feeds. You don’t need to do anything to support people reading your site that way 🥳

I think it’s a good practice for us WordPress Pros to at least keep an eye on what’s going on the world of websites outside of our chosen CMS. A quick and effective way to learn about other ways people learn WordPress is this little article from Steve Benjamins at SiteBuilderReport.

A quick summary of my takeaways:

• Webflow — which is something I’ve heard a smattering of good things about — seems to be growing a lot.
• Wix has more overall users, but is on a smaller percentage of popular sites than Squarespace.
• After Shopify, the second-most-popular ecommerce platform was “Ecwid.” Which I had never heard of.

(Hat tip to the Post Status Newsletter on this)

Here we are sharing news of a podcast so new that you probably can’t even easily subscribe to in your podcast player. (Or at least I failed. Because they’re still mid-podcast-directory approval, it seems.) But I just listened to the first episode and I think it’s definitely worth keeping in on your radar.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, WordPress Executive Director, started a podcast. I’ve admired Josepha’s work in WordPress and leadership for a while, so I for one am pumped to get to hear more from her about anything, especially including WordPress. So I think this podcast is great. And if you want a lot more nerdy details, be sure to check out Justin Tadlock’s reporting on the topic. The first episode is a cogent summary of the themes Ms. Haden Chomphosy pulled out of the State of the Word talk Matt Mullenweg gave in December.

I’ve been using PhpStorm for PHP + WordPress development for gosh, at least 5 years now. For those who aren’t familiar, PhpStorm is a PHP-specific IDE (“integrated development environment”; read: text editor with lots of special features) from JetBrains. JetBrains make other tools you may have heard of like PyCharm, WebStorm, and IntelliJ IDEA.

Anyway, the thing that this little article from Iain Poulson made very clear to me—and I did already suspect—is that I’m using just a fraction of the relevant and cool features that the tool has to offer. I figure at least a few people out there are rather-lazy PhpStorm users. Or maybe are wondering if the tool would be worth the investment for them. If you’re either of those types, give this article a read.

It’s hard for me to pass up cool-looking tricks, and this is no exception. This sweet little post from Suzanne Aitchison is just three different little CodePens that show off relatively-realistic looking effects that mimic real-life paper. Would I be able to recreate a similar thing in 3 hours of trying? Probably not. But that doesn’t make it less worth my time to stare at them for a bit. ;p

Long time readers will know that I consider myself a CSS outsider. I learned how to do it about 10 years ago, and have just enough skills to get by today. So I read with interest Sacha Greif’s “The State of CSS 2020” document. While I found myself a little annoyed by the document’s “design fanciness” (particularly what I perceive as scrolljacking), the results were quite interesting.

On a quick-tour, the takeaway of “really learn Tailwind” is hard to miss. That said, I also found the “CSS in JS” discussion useful, and I was pretty cheered by the “overall satisfaction” chart that caps it all off (and is this post’s “featured image”). People are loving CSS! What an age! 🤓

If you saw my post from last week looking at full-site editing you might wonder what it’s like. And if you’re lazy/busy like me, you probably haven’t yet made a point of giving it a run-through on your own. So I really appreciated that WPShout friend Eric Karkovack took the time to install and write up the experience of fooling around with the Q theme.

I recommend you give the whole post a read-over, as he covers a number of thoughts and ideas around full-site editing I’d not considered. But this particularly caught my eye:

One thing to note is that, at this point, it appears custom templates will need to follow the WordPress template hierarchy naming conventions. That is, the slug of a custom template should match the name of its corresponding purpose within your theme (without the .php at the end).

For example, if you want to build a template to be used on your home page, its slug should be named front-page. Want to target the About Us page (yoursite.com/about-us/)? A template with the slug of page-about-us will do the trick.

I guess maybe the death of WPHierarchy.com isn’t presently imminent. 🤪

You may have seen the headlines about how WordPress.com is coming for all the freelancers. For those that didn’t see it, WordPress.com (owned by a company called Automattic) recently announced that its “premium website building service”  is now officially accepting customer applications for “websites starting at $4,900 USD.”

People who specialize in websites in this price range, understandably, are feeling a little threatened by the move. I saw a number of stories about it, but I particularly enjoyed the focus on recapping opinions that David Bisset used in his “Note” over at Post Status. So if you’re newly-aware of the whole thing, I recommend you start there. 🙂

This article from Justin Tadlock over at WP Tavern caught my attention over holiday break. While Justin’s been talking about full-site editing themes for a while, Armando was the first of these “future of WordPress themes” that I took a look at.

And that is… different. Somewhat to my chagrin — I am, remember, a lover of that weird and wonderful programming language, PHP — there is not really a lot familiar in Carolina Nymark Armando theme. The use of PHP in the theme is very stripped-down from what it has been in the past. For those not scared by such things, here’s the Github repository for it.

If you look around, you’ll notice that the only sign of the classic WordPress template hierarchy in the root directory of the theme is an index.php file. And that all that file does is sometimes show an error message.

As to how it does work, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Mostly because I don’t fully understand it yet. If you’re interested in digger deeper in the arriving-later-this-year future of WordPress themes, its worth knowing that Carolina also has a whole site about full-site editing. Definitely worth at least a little study 🤓

Without knowing this news, MailPoet came up organically last night in a discussion we were having at the Fort Collins WordPress Meetup. Someone was looking to send an email newsletter from WordPress, and MailPoet was the option a few of us had heard of for that. (No one had used it.)

In light of that discussion, this headline caught my eye. Automattic acquisitions have a way of solidifying the success of other brands in the WordPress space, so I take this as a vote of confidence in the quality and value of MailPoet. I also thing the tie-in the story on the WP Tavern suggests with WooCommerce is both sensible and reasonable. I think this is probably a good move for Automatic.

(In this paragraph I might wax philosophical about how all of the WordPress ecosystems is eventually acquired, but I’ll keep it short. I have mixed feelings when independent things are bought my bigger companies. And in WordPress it’s the same as everywhere else.)

Have you used MailPoet? Love it? Hate it? “It seemed OK”? I’d love to hear it all in the comments 🤓