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 search 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.

I really enjoyed this little (video-heavy) post from Bud Kraus about some cool and harder-to-find features of Gutenberg. I’ll even cop-to the fact that I only kind of knew one of them. Which I am a little embarassed by. But tell you because it means YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT THE POST.

My somewhat overblown need to be noticed noticing will say that I wish the post-production process of his videos hadn’t distorted them. They appear stretched-vertically to me in an unpleasing way. Whew! With that out my system I’ll get back to telling you the good. That if you’re looking to really master the whole Gutenberg ecosystem, you could do a lot worse than learning a few of these simple “hidden gems” Bud has shared.

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 two more weekly webinars coming up (the next one is this Thursday, April 16), so if you’d like to get your questions answered live, check out Up and Running!

I feel like I’ve heard this “block pattern” idea in a few different places for a while. But I’ve always taken extra interest in WordPress technology once Justin Tadlock writes about it. So I think I’ll want to install Gutenberg 7.7 somewhere soon to see the next level of Gutenberg. Because Justin got me a little hyped about them too, just as he is:

No more complicated theme options. No more shortcode soup. No more hours of frustration wondering why you cannot build that custom front page shown in that carefully-crafted theme demo.

I may be a tad optimistic. Block patterns will require massive buy-in from the theme and plugin developer community. While core WordPress will ship several popular patterns by default, they will in no way cover the breadth of design that is possible when theme authors put their artistic skills to work.

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 three more weekly webinars coming up (the next one is this Friday, April 10), so if you’d like to get your questions answered live, check out Up and Running!

For those who haven’t been knocking around the WordPress sphere for a long time, there’s a possibility that the name “Chris Coyier” and CSS-Tricks isn’t so well known. Chris is great, generous thoughtful guy, and if you’ve got a front-end interest at all, you really should be following CSS-Tricks. To a degree rare in the world CSS-Tricks is just a consistently useful, modest, and modern place to read about all the parts of WordPress development, CSS very much included (though hardly the only topic).

I was tickled that we here at WPShout got cited in this guide he’s put together for people looking to learn WordPress development in 2020. My friend Jeremy swears by a guide Chris put together over a decade ago, now lost to history in the sands of rapid technology changes.

But I really link Chris’s guide because it strikes me as uniquely fully existing in the year 2020. A lot of content like this (ours sometimes included 😳) misses the latest updates. So it’s good to learn but not the-latest-and-greatest. Anyway, even if you already fancy yourself a WordPress developer I think this guide will maybe teach you a thing or two. Enjoy 🙂

WordPress 5.4, “Adderley,” launched yesterday, March 31, 2020. It’s a very Gutenberg-focused release, with two new default blocks—Buttons and Social Icons—plus a lot of other improvements to the block editor.

There are also some non-Gutenberg changes, including one that made me smile: apply_shortcodes() is now an alias for do_shortcode(). Hey, an effort toward naming consistency! Should apply_actions() be next? (That’s not currently a thing, right?)

Overall, it’s nice to see the WordPress Core team continuing to be all-in on developing Gutenberg, and to see that project slowly get more performant and feature-rich. Gutenberg certainly wasn’t perfect at launch, but it’s nice to have something in Core to invest in, polish, and develop over the months and years. The only alternative—hoping that the proliferation of third-party solutions will nail WordPress content creation for enough people—has significant downsides. The big question to me remains when, if ever, someone (probably not the Core team) will find a smoothly-working way to put Gutenberg on the front-end, which is where normal users want to be working.

Read all about WordPress 5.4 in the linked announcement.