[ad_1] Jukebox #7 – Ajit Bohra on Gutenberg, Full Site Editing and React Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:46:59 Subscribe Share About this episode. On the podcast today we have Ajit Bohra. Ajit is a keen advocate of WordPress, having used it and committed to it, for many years. He’s a full stack developer working at Lubus which is based in Mumbai, India. His team works with WordPress as well as offering solutions built with Laravel and React. He’s on the podcast today to offer up his opinions about the near future in WordPress and why he’s confident that the project is moving in the right direction. To make matters easier to digest we break up the podcast into three distinct sections. Starting off with Gutenberg we discuss where the Block Editor is at right now and what Ajit sees as the benefits of a Block based approach to content building. We go into some concrete examples of why Ajit thinks that the Block Editor is preferable to the Classic editor as well as discussing some of the projects that he’s been working on to enhance the editing experience for his team and the community. We also talk about the pace of development and whether or not it’s keeping up with the expectations of WordPress users. We then move onto a detailed conversation about Full Site Editing which is going to play a pivotal role in WordPress’ utility going forwards. The power that it will offer non-technical users to build out their entire site is an exciting prospect, but right now it’s still a work in progress. Ajit talks about why Full Site Editing is needed to compete in the CMS market as well as how Block Patterns will make site building much easier in the future. Finally we get into the subject of WordPress’ need to move towards a future in which React is playing a vital part in the software’s Core. Why does Ajit think that the project needed to move away from a PHP based platform; after all, it was easy to work with and people had become very familiar with how to build sites using their PHP skills. It’s a case of having to keep up, and as Ajit says, he thinks that you have to unlearn to learn. We briefly discuss the resources which Ajit used to up-skill, websites that he frequents and courses which he recommends should you wish to take the plunge. In parts the audio is a little choppy, in fact this is a second pass at recording this episode, but I felt that the message contained within was well worth publishing despite that, and I hope that you do too. Useful links. Ajit’s Twitter account Lubus BlaBlaBlocks Beginner Javascript ES6 Javascript 30 React for Beginners The Net Ninja YouTube channel The Beginner’s Guide to React Epic React Is WordPress Development Really All That Hard To Get Into Today? Transcript Nathan Wrigley [00:00:00] Welcome to the seventh edition of the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast all about WordPress, the software, the events, and the community. Every month, we’re bringing you someone from that community to discuss a topic of current interest. If you like the podcast, please share it with your friends. You might also like to think about subscribing so that you can get all the episodes in your podcast player automatically. And you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player, or by going to WP Tavern dot com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. You can also play the podcast episodes on the WP Tavern website, if you prefer doing it that way. If you have any thoughts about the podcast, perhaps the suggestion of a guest or an interesting subject, then head over to WP Tavern dot com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. Use the contact form there and we’d certainly welcome your input. Okay, so on the podcast today, we have Ajit Bohra. Adit is a keen advocate of WordPress having used it, and committed to it, for many years. He’s a full stack developer working at Lubus, which is based in Mumbai, India. His team works with WordPress as well as offering solutions built with Laravel and React. He’s on the podcast today to offer up his opinions about the near future in WordPress and why he’s confident that the project is moving in the right direction. To make matters easier we break the podcast up into three distinct sections starting off with Gutenberg, we discuss where the block editor is at right now and what Ajit sees as the benefits of a block based approach to content building. We go into some concrete examples of why Ajit thinks that the block editor is preferable to the classic editor, as well as discussing some of the projects that he’s been working on to enhance the editing experience for his team and the community. We also talk about the pace of development and whether or not it’s keeping up with the expectations of WordPress users. We then move on to a detailed conversation about full site editing, which is going to play a pivotal role in WordPress’ utility, going forwards. The power that it will often non-technical users to build out their entire site is an exciting prospect, but right now it’s still a work in progress. Ajit talks about why full site editing is needed to compete in the CMS market, as well as how block patterns will make site building much easier in the future. Finally, we get into the subject of WordPress’ need to move towards a future in which React is playing a vital part in the software’s core. Why does Ajit think that the project needed to move away from a PHP based platform? After all, it was easy to work with and people have become
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Full Page Patterns Are Still the Missing Piece of Block WordPress Theme Development – WP Tavern
[ad_1] It was the early days of the Gutenberg project. Many on the Theme Review Team and those in design circles were trying to wrap their heads around this new concept called blocks. In particular, we wanted to know how it could be applied to theme development. There were many discussions on the pros and cons of the early editor. Overall, there was a bit of cautious excitement in the air, our optimism tempered by a buggy version of alpha-level software. The block system could potentially solve one of the biggest hurdles of theme development: inserting default/demo content for a full page into the editor. I cannot remember who initially explained the idea, but it was a lightbulb moment for many at the time. The general concept was pre-building a custom homepage or any page design that users could choose visually. It would all be done through a standardized block system, and we would no longer need to rely on piecemeal theme options, third-party plugins, or attempt to work around the review team’s “do not create content” guideline. No one really knew how this would work in practice, but we understood the theory of how it would make the life of a theme developer much simpler. In October 2019, Automattic developer Jorge Bernal opened a ticket titled Starter Page Templates. His team was working on a template selector for mobile apps, and the WordPress.com Editing Toolkit already had the feature. The goal was to bring it to the core platform, allowing third-party theme designs to build on top of it. Starter page templates idea initially shared in the ticket. Because the term “template” is overused in the WordPress space, I will refer to these as “page patterns.” This naming convention was coined by Noah Allen, a software engineer for Automattic, in the ticket. It makes sense because we are actually talking about a page’s content rather than the wrapping template. The Genesis Blocks plugin is one of the best ways to understand the page pattern concept. It has a Layouts button at the top of the editor that, when clicked, creates an overlay of designs to choose from. Selecting a full-page layout from Genesis Blocks. These designs are split between sections and layouts. Sections are the same thing as patterns in core WordPress: small, reusable pieces of starter content. Layouts are full-page starting points for users to create various types of pages. The StudioPress/Genesis team was not the first to market this concept. However, they have created a well-rounded user experience on top of the WordPress editor. You will find similar experiences via GoDaddy’s onboarding process for its managed hosting service. The Redux Framework allows much the same, and Editor Plus offers templates and patterns from the Extendify library. That initial excitement has waned a bit. It felt like that early promise was a dream that would never be a reality. Theme authors, especially in the commercial space, have long offered home-brewed solutions for the one-click insertion of full-page content. Whether via a ThemeForest project or a popular theme on WordPress.org, there are endless examples of everyone solving the same problem. One might even argue that these custom inserters are so ingrained into theme agency systems that anything WordPress offers at this point will not appeal to those who have already brought their solutions to market. Where the core platform has failed to meet user demands, our development community has stepped up. Some of you may be thinking that the current block patterns system works for this. Yes, and no. Theme authors could shoehorn full-page designs into it, but the user experience is lacking compared to third-party solutions. Patterns today are one of the best theming tools available, but they fall short of what is needed to see this thing through. The foundation of this feature exists via the Patterns API. From the theme author’s perspective, they merely need a method for flagging a pattern as a full-page layout, separate from the others. However, the UI and UX flow need an overhaul. The flyout panel for the current inserter does not cut it, especially on large screens. A fullscreen overlay has become the de facto standard among other systems. Users should also have another option between selecting from an existing page pattern or starting empty upon creation. “I think this would be so useful to have in the core,” wrote Ana Segota of Anariel Design in a recent comment on the ticket. “I created 2 FSE themes so far and also our latest premium theme is made with block patterns and this is exactly what I thought and talked with few people about. It would be great when a user opens a new page, to chose design/page patterns however we called it and it starts editing it right away. Most of the users just want to add a page, choose a layout and start adding their content.” Of course, this is not a revelation to the average theme author who works with end-users daily. Inserting or importing entire page designs into WordPress is one of the most common requests. WordPress is almost there with its current patterns system. We just need to take it to the next level. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress Theme Development: Core Concepts (Full Guide)
[ad_1] Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system. An editor’s note before we dive in: 2021 is an exciting year for the future of WordPress themes. For the first time since… kind of forever (that is: the start of WordPress itself)… what themes look like could change pretty dramatically. But today, in April 2021, that future is still a little unclear. And even when that future is clearer (and less likely to change) it’ll still be vital that WordPress developers understand “classic” WordPress themes for a long time. After all, as seasoned WordPress freelancers are well aware, WordPress sites can live for a long time with little more than security updates. So we’ve updated our classic and still vital little free course on WordPress themes as they are in early-2021. Enjoy! Understanding this Free WP Theme Development Course This is an brief introduction to the core concepts of WordPress theme development and comes from the Third Edition of our “learn WordPress development” course Up and Running. We’ve worked hard over the years to write some of the best tutorials on WordPress development, and give them away to readers here at WPShout. Up and Running is our effort to consolidate all that teaching into a single step-by-step resource for people new to the world of WordPress coding. Hopefully, it’s also a little easier to navigate than the mess of links that is this (or any) modern website. This post consolidates a few of that chapters from Up and Running together. While the course is much more exhaustive on both WordPress theme and plugin development than this is, we’re sure this will give you a very solid foundation to start from. The three important concepts of WordPress theme development we’ll cover here are: The WordPress Template Hierarchy Processing Posts with The Loop Adding Functionality with functions.php We’ll take you through each one on the linked articles at the bottom of every section. Those are a very accurate representation of what you’d find in Up and Running. Although on the real course site, it’s a little easier to keep your place. We have a completion-tracking WordPress plugin for that 🤓. Like you’ll find in Up and Running, all of the linked chapters here have a Summary Limerick and Quiz to reinforce what you’ve learned at their end. 🙃 Core Concept 1 of WordPress Theme Development: The Template Hierarchy The first thing that’ll help you get a sense of WordPress theme development is getting a sense of what all those theme files do. Some of them may be obvious to someone who has done a fair amount of web development, like style.css being the place for your CSS styling rules. But most the work you do in WordPress theme development comes down to understanding the WordPress template hierarchy. WordPress template hierarchy underlies a lot of what’s useful and complicated about WordPress. WordPress themes involve a bunch files. And understanding those files is the key to understanding WordPress development. All the files in the template hierarchy have a few things in common: They have names that end with .php They contain a version of “the Loop” inside of them (see the next section for more about that) They mostly contain HTML and some PHP code Those three bullet points are the core of what makes up the WordPress hierarchy. But there’s a lot more to understand. And that’s what our article all about it tries to help you with. Reading it will get you along the way to being a full-fledged WordPress theme developer: The Template Hierarchy in WordPress Core Concept 2 of WordPress Theme Development: The Loop in WordPress and What it Means For this one, we’ve taken the time to create a custom post. Like the other of these post’s, this is a chapter from Up and Running. The Loop is one of the things that first scared me (David writing this) about WordPress development. The core thing was that it all sounded so ominous. Whether people called it “WordPress loop” of “The Loop”, I knew that WordPress had that complicated concept involved. Later, after I’d programmed more, I realized that this was just a basic “while” loop, a common construct in almost all programs. But before that, it really intimidated me. If you feel like you’ve got it from that description alone, you might not need to read our full article about what the WordPress Loop is and what it means. Other than the syntax which is distinct to WordPress, it’s not much more complicated than that. But if you’ve never done much coding, you probably should be sure to read the whole article. WordPress theme development is really dependent on getting a handle on how “the Loop” works in WordPress. You’ll hear people talk a lot, as you get into theming, about being “inside the WordPress loop” and outside of it. The article covers all of that and more. If you’ve not read it yet, please do: Understanding The Loop: WordPress’s Way of Showing Posts Core Concept 3 of WordPress Theme Development: Adding Functionality with functions.php Plugins are a big topic in WordPress, and I’ve sometimes heard people describe this next focus as “the plugin of a WordPress theme.” I don’t necessarily agree with that description. I also think it actually add confusion to the issue. That said, inside of your WordPress theme’s functions.php is indeed where you write
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