Tag Archives: Tavern

Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Patched in WPML WordPress Plugin – WP Tavern

[ad_1] The popular WordPress Multilingual plugin, WPML, which is installed on over 1,000,000 websites, has patched a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2024-6386) that researchers have classified as “Critical,” with a CVSS score of 9.9. Users are strongly advised to update their websites to the patched version, WPML 4.6.13. Security researcher Mat Rollings (stealthcopter) discovered and reported the vulnerability through the Wordfence Bug Bounty program, earning a bounty of $1,639. Wordfence’s István Márton explained: “The WPML plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to, and including, 4.6.12 via Twig Server-Side Template Injection. This is due to missing input validation and sanitization on the render function. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to execute code on the server.” Matt Rollings dubbed this vulnerability “a classic example of the dangers of improper input sanitization in templating engines” and has shared more technical details about this vulnerability on his blog.  In the past eight days, researchers have earned $21,037 as bounties for reporting three critical plugin vulnerabilities: GiveWP, LiteSpeed Cache, and WPML. [ad_2] Source link

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Gutenberg 19.1 Introduces Plugin Template Registration API – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Gutenberg 19.1 has arrived, introducing the eagerly anticipated plugin template registration API and updates to image caption styles. This Gutenberg version will be later incorporated into WordPress 6.7. The highlight of this release is the plugin template registration API. It addresses a long-standing issue developers have faced with conflicts between plugins and themes, particularly when dealing with custom post types, taxonomies, or virtual pages. This new feature allows developers to register block templates directly within their plugins, providing fully customizable default content layouts. Till now, developers had to use multiple filters to register templates. By building on the Gutenberg block system, this update makes it easier for themes and users to adapt and personalize templates according to their design and functional needs. Justin Tadlock has published a detailed tutorial on this feature on the Developer Blog and will host a Developer Hours Session with Nick Diego on September 10, 2024. This release also tones down the intensity of the caption background, improving the image caption styles.  Other notable changes in this version include: Improved data view extensibility Better defaults for the zoom out view Added border support for core blocks Applied elevation scale to Modal, Popover, and Snackbar components. Fixed wp-config anchors to make wp-env compatible with WordPress versions older than 5.4. The community’s response has been enthusiastic, with feedback such as “Really like this feature”, “Great one, that I am looking for !” and “Literally the greatest news I’ve heard in years (and I had a baby last year)” [ad_2] Source link

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#134 – Chris Ferdinandi on ADHD, Focus, and Working in Tech – WP Tavern

[ad_1] [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, ADHD, focus and working in tech. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there. So on the podcast today we have Chris Ferdinandi. Chris, a web developer with ADHD, has navigated both the human resources and web development landscapes. He’s here to share his unique experiences and insights on how ADHD has shaped his career and daily life, as well as offer practical strategies for managing ADHD in the workplace and beyond. We talk about the world of ADHD, exploring the challenges and advantages it brings, especially in a world designed for neuro-typical individuals. Chris talks about the abundance of ideas, risk-taking behaviour, and the lack of impulse control that can present both opportunities and obstacles. He candidly discusses how ADHD affects his ability to focus, regulate attention, and how it impacts emotions and impulse control. Chris refers to ADHD traits as superpowers, and embraces them whilst also acknowledging the real world difficulties. He discusses how ADHD individuals often struggle with hyper focus, and how interruptions can be particularly detrimental to their workflows. He suggests structuring workdays with blocked off meeting times to maintain focus upon tasks which need doing in the timescales required. We also touch upon other workplace accommodations, the importance of understanding ADHD subtypes, and navigating disclosure in professional settings. Chris emphasises the strengths that come with ADHD, and offers practical tips like starting small tasks, trying to regulate dopamine and taking breaks. Towards the end of the podcast, Chris invites listeners to engage with him and explore more resources on his website, which is linked to in the show notes, which you can find at wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well. If you’re curious about how ADHD can turn challenges into career strengths, this episode is for you. And so without further delay, I bring you Chris Ferdinandi. I am joined on the podcast by Chris Ferdinandi. Hi Chris. [00:03:21] Chris Ferdinandi: Hey Nathan. Thanks so much for having me. [00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: You are very, very welcome. Chris is on the podcast today, we just had a little chat actually about how we connected, and that’s a story in itself. We were going to do a different podcast episode, but we’ve ended up doing this one. The story today is going to be all about ADHD. I explained to Chris that I know what the acronym means, we’ll have question marks about the acronym’s appropriateness as well. But I actually don’t know how it applies to people’s lives. My knowledge of medicine and all of that is pretty poor in all honesty. So there’s a nice conversation to be had. Before we begin that conversation, Chris, I’m just wondering if you could just set out the stall, give us your two minute bio, who you are, what your relationship is with web development, and all of that. [00:04:04] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, absolutely. I’m a web developer, I have ADHD. I originally started off my life as a human resource professional, sometimes called personnel, depending on where you’re at. And I had a WordPress blog because I had really strong opinions on how HR worked, and what I liked about it, and what I didn’t, and I wanted to have a little bit more control over look and feel of that. So I taught myself web development, and eventually loved it so much that I made it my job. So WordPress literally kickstarted my career. But early in my career, I felt like I couldn’t get anything done. I was pretty sure I was going to get fired from my first job, and that kind of sent me down this whole rabbit hole of exploration, and learning about productivity and stuff. But since then, I’ve discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that work for me, that let me turn my ADHD into a superpower. One of the things I learned is that a lot of productivity advice for neurotypical folks just does not work for ADHD people. And yeah, so I’m here today talk about the joys and struggles of being a developer with ADHD. [00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it’s really interesting. I’m really pleased that you are willing to talk to me about this, and I do apologise if I put my foot in my mouth at any point. But we’ll try to get through it, and hopefully you’ll be able to educate me as the podcast episode goes on. My understanding of ADHD, as I said, is incredibly narrow. I really only know what the acronym is, and the broadest brush strokes of what that might mean. We use the term in the UK ADHD, that acronym, but I’ve also heard people say ADD. Do you just want to outline what the acronym stands for? And just flesh out a little bit how it applies to your life, and what it means for you, and how you might be different from somebody without ADHD. [00:05:42] Chris Ferdinandi: Absolutely. ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. They used to be, like I think around the eighties, nineties, they were considered two different things. These days, in most medical literature, it is all ADHD, and then there’s a few different subtypes. One of them is inattentive, which is what you would normally think

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Registrations Open for WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Registrations are now open for WordPress Accessibility Day 2024, scheduled for October 9-10, 2024. This nonprofit, free, 24-hour global event is on a mission “to demystify website accessibility for WordPress developers, designers, content creators, and users so that they can build websites that work for everyone.” Initially launched in 2020 by the WordPress Core Accessibility Team, the event is now organized by the Accessibility Team alongside dedicated volunteers from the WordPress community. This year’s event is led by a team of three Board of Directors—Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon, and Joe Dolson—supported by eight Team Leads and 19 Organizers. The conference is pre-approved for continuing education credits for the International Association of Accessibility Professionals Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) and Certified Professional in Core Competencies (CPACC) certifications. Lainey Feingold, renowned for her role in negotiating the first web accessibility agreement in the U.S., will be the keynote speaker. Her keynote address, “Accessibility is a Civil Right: The Digital Accessibility Legal Landscape for the WordPress Community,” will explore the current legal landscape of digital accessibility from a human rights perspective. The full schedule is out, with over 20 presentations on a single track. The event will be live-streamed with live captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) Interpretation. Those who miss it can watch it later on the WP Accessibility Day YouTube channel and on their website with captions and full transcripts. The event will be hosted virtually on Zoom, where registered participants can enjoy 24 hours of insightful talks on WordPress and accessibility. Attendees will also receive virtual swag and have the opportunity to win prizes.  WordPress Accessibility Day is sponsored by Knowbility, and interested community members can donate to the event through the website. [ad_2] Source link

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WooCommerce Store Owners Combat Fraudulent Stripe Charges – WP Tavern

[ad_1] For the past few weeks, members of the Advanced WordPress Facebook (AWP) group have been discussing methods of combatting Stripe Card Testing fraud. WordPress developer Jon Brown opened the topic after seeing fraudulent charges on five different websites, including four using WooCommerce and one using the Leaky Paywall platform. “All five were on Cloudflare with bot fight mode on when it first happened,” Brown said. “I’ve added CAPTCHA to all 5, I’ve enabled CloudFlare’s ‘Under Attack’ mode on the cart/checkout page.” The WooCommerce sites didn’t have a reoccurrence but the Leaky Paywall site did. Brown said the client didn’t notice it, as he had Stripe emails going to his spam folder. “It went on for two weeks until the load spike took the site offline and I noticed it,” he said. “About 1,200 successful transactions for $2.99, with 100,000 blocked.” Brown said he doesn’t understand why Stripe doesn’t recognize and block the fraudulent charges since they all follow a similar pattern using a randomized Gmail address. His client had to dispute approximately 100 of these transactions. “Each dispute costs $15 to resolve,” Brown said. “Each non-disputed refund costs $0.40 since Stripe (like PayPal now) keeps the fee. “So 100 * $15 + 1100 * $0.40 = $1940 in lost revenue to fees and that’s obviously AFTER also refunding the $2.99 per fraudulent transaction. That means $3,600 in fraud ($2.99 * 1200) just resulted in a net loss of $1940 – that’s insane.” Many other developers in the conversation have been hit with similar attacks, some with honeypots in place that didn’t prevent anything. One recommended using the WooCommerce Fraud Prevention plugin. It allows store owners to block orders from specific IP addresses, emails, address, state, and zip codes. This might help once attacks have started but doesn’t fully prevent them. Some developers had success stopping attacks using reCaptcha for WooCommerce, a commercial plugin that implement’s Google’s reCaptcha V2 (checkbox) and reCaptcha V3 to stop things like unauthorized login attempts, fake registrations, fake guest orders, and other automated attacks. “We ran into this about a year ago,” WordPress developer John Montgomery said. “It’s a way for hackers/thieves to check a list of card numbers for ones that are valid. Once they confirm the card works on a site, they can use to purchase products for real. In the end, a big annoyance but honestly not a huge deal for us in the end because we have digital products and they weren’t really interested in those.” Montgomery installed a plugin called Limit Orders for WooCommerce, developed by Nexcess, that disallows orders after a certain threshold is met. “I set it up to x orders per hour ( above any historical numbers)…so if we get say 100 orders in an hour it will shut off orders,” he said. “It’s a bit of a sledgehammer, but it did help us once already.” Although many store owners are hesitant to add any friction to the checkout process, technology consultant Jordan Trask recommends requiring customers create accounts before continuing and verify emails. He wrote a guide on dealing with card testing attacks. “The gist of the rules is blocking all countries except those you serve,” Trask said. “However, for WooCommerce, I would put in a JS Managed Challenge for the cart and checkout. “There is rate limiting built into Cloudflare that might help, but it’s more request based versus per order which is what you need based on IP potentially. If the requests come from the same IP address, you can look at limiting orders per IP since the email differs each time.” The Checkout Rate Limiter plugin, available on GitHub, offers checkout rate limiting on WooCommerce checkout based on IP address. Trask’s guide also recommends checking payment processor logs when investigating fraudulent charges: Always check your payment processor logs to verify where the charges are being created. A staging site may exist with production API keys, or your site was hacked, and the API keys were stolen. Most payment processors will have further details in their logs with additional information. WordPress developer Rahul Nagare recommends checking out Stripe’s Radar fraud protection, which uses machine learning to provide advanced protection and identification of fraudsters. “This will let you setup custom rules on Stripe to reject suspicious transactions,” Nagare said. “This used to be a free service with Stripe, but they changed it last year. I’d look into blocking all transactions with risk score higher than the average, and maybe the region of the card testers.” WooCommerce’s documentation has a section on responding to card testing attacks, which has many of the same recommendations discussed in the recent AWP thread. A CAPTCHA plugin is the first line of defense. It also recommends avoiding pay-what-you-want or donation products with no minimum, as these products are often targeted for card tests with small transactions that cardholders might miss. Swiftly refunding any successful fraudulent orders will decrease the possibility of disputes. Category: E-Commerce, News [ad_2] Source link

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Last Call for the 2023 State of Open Source Survey – WP Tavern

[ad_1] OpenLogic, a company that provides technical support for enterprise open source infrastructure, and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the nonprofit stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD, have collaborated to put together the 2023 State of Open Source Survey. The annual survey collects data from professionals to identify trends in the adoption and challenges of using open source technologies. It takes less than 10 minutes to answer the 31-question survey. Respondents are asked if their organizations have increased the use of OSS over the last year and in which categories of software they have invested the most in terms of projects, budget, and resources. The 2022 survey had 2,660 respondents. It found the #1 reason respondents are using OSS is access to innovation, followed by cost reduction and security/availability of patches. More than 36% of respondents indicated that they significantly increased their use of OSS over the past year. The 2022 survey found the biggest barrier to adopting open source software was the lack of internal skills to test, use, integrate, and support it. The last call has gone out to contribute to this year’s survey. It would be good to have WordPress software organizations represented in the results as part of the broader OSS community. Respondents who take the time to fill out the survey are entered for a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card. OpenLogic is also donating $1 for every response to the World Food Program, a humanitarian organization working to end world hunger. [ad_2] Source link

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WordPress Rebrands FSE as “Site Editor” – WP Tavern

[ad_1] While WordPress’ site editing capabilities have been in development, the term full-site editing (FSE) has been widely used but sometimes poorly understood outside of contributor groups. Three months ago, WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy proposed renaming FSE to something more user friendly. After a lengthy discussion, Haden Chomphosy has announced the decision to use “Site Editor” going forward: Landing on Site Editor was the result of two key considerations. Firstly, Site Editor offers a clear and simple description to users with a range of technical skills. Secondly, there was substantial support for Site Editor, particularly from the Polyglot community, as the term that translates most effectively into hundreds of different languages. As we heard at WordCamp US 2022, better multilingual support is an important future direction for WordPress, so choosing easily translated terms is an important step.  Site Editor also keeps the spirit of its original FSE codename as the powerful, full collection of features it encompasses. As a bonus, it also doesn’t cost us anything from an SEO or marketing standpoint, since it’s a simplification of the existing term. Haden Chomphosy said the change is not necessarily a rebranding, but WordPress’ official documentation, including Learn.WordPress videos, and many third-party resources are replete with references to FSE. The Full Site Editing Outreach Program may also need to be renamed. Haden Chomphosy said WordPress users can still expect to see or hear the term FSE around – it’s not a situation where every instance needs to erased. The recent decision to use the term “Site Editor” should be considered an official update to WordPress’ shared lexicon, and Haden Chomphosy encouraged contributors to begin updating the documentation immediately to reflect the change. Category: News, WordPress [ad_2] Source link

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Easy Digital Downloads 3.1 Adds 10 New Core Blocks, Introduces Email Summaries – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) put out a big release today, following several maintenance releases and the last major release in July. Version 3.1 introduces 10 new core blocks available to users who are running WordPress 5.8 or newer: Buy Button Order History Products Registration Form Login Form Download Terms Receipt Confirmation Cart Checkout (Beta) These blocks enable store owners to do more than their shortcode predecessors. Although the shortcodes still work, the block versions allow for much easier customization with a better UI. One example in the announcement is the Order History block. The previous Purchase History shortcode output a simple table of orders, but the new Order History block has a card style view and allows users to easily modify the number of columns and how many orders are displayed per page. Purchase History shortcode output New Order History block The other blocks have been updated in a similar fashion, with extended functionality and greatly expanded customization options. It’s important to note that the new Checkout block was released in beta. It is not turned on by default for new stores yet. Users who want to test the block will notice that EDD has reordered some of the fields to improve conversions, improved the user context detection (only showing necessary fields to users), and redesigned the payment method picker. Email Summaries is a new feature for store owners in 3.1. It sends a weekly or monthly email to the admin or other custom recipients with a store update that includes metrics like gross and net revenue, new customers, and average order amount. It can also be disabled in the admin. A few other notable changes in version 3.1 include the following: New setting to require users to login to download files Success Page has been renamed to Confirmation Page to differentiate it from the receipt More detailed views and filtering options for Reports reCAPTCHA keys added to Downloads » Settings » Misc so users can automatically enable reCAPTCHA for the lost password and the registration forms New color options for purchase buttons New “View Receipt” link in the orders table Easy Digital Downloads is installed on more than 50,000 WordPress sites. The ten-year-old plugin is continuing to evolve and become a more block-friendly tool for selling digital products. Check out the announcement post for a full tour of all the new blocks and their capabilities. Category: News, Plugins Tags: easy digital downloads Share this: Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Like this Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Hosted WooCommerce Solution Coming to WordPress.com in 2023, Following Recent Launches from GoDaddy and Bluehost – WP Tavern

[ad_1] WooSesh kicked off this week with a keynote session from WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana, who gave an overview of the current state of the ecosystem. More than 3.4 million websites use WooCommerce, according to Builtwith, including 25% of the top million online stores. It is by far the most popular solution among WordPress sites with e-commerce, capturing 93% of the market share. Maiorana covered some industry-wide trends taking shape in 2023. WooCommerce merchants are uncertain about the economy and while some are optimistic, others do not see it improving soon. Although growth has slowed since the pandemic-fueled rapid acceleration towards e-commerce in 2021, Maiorana said revenues are projected to gain steadily through 2025. WooCommerce core is entering a transformative time, as the new admin has been fully merged and Cart and Checkout blocks are now part of core (in beta). The plugin is becoming more block friendly with more than 40 blocks available now. WooCommerce has seen a 319% increase in the usage of block themes and is aiming to have full out-of-the-box compatibility with any block-based theme. The Market for Hosted WooCommerce Products Is Heating Up One of the biggest announcements from the event was that WooCommerce is developing its own hosted, turnkey solution in collaboration with hosting partners. WordPress.com will be the first to pilot the product in February 2023. Maiorana said the goal of the solution is to improve onboarding and retention with the following : WooCommerce pre-installed, activated, and hosted A pre-packaged set of essential plugins Simplified onboarding that works with partners’ systems to improve conversion Competitive monthly price to reduce churn Co-marketing and revenue share with hosts WooCommerce’s hosted solution will be in direct competition with other hosts that have recently launched their own products. In November 2021, GoDaddy acquired Pagely with the intent to deploy a new SaaS WooCommerce product. Pagely was paired with previous 2020 acquisitions of Poynt, a payment processor, and SkyVerge, a popular WooCommerce plugin development company, to create an integrated solution. Last month, GoDaddy launched an open access preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers. GoDaddy’s solution boasts the ability to sync across marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Google, Walmart, Etsy, and YouTube, with a single dashboard managing payment processing, marketing, shipping, and inventory. It is integrated with GoDaddy Payments for both online and in-person transactions, which incur a transaction fee of 2.3% + 30¢. The hosted WooCommerce preview plans range from $99.99/month – $249.99/month. At WooSesh today, Beka Rice, Senior Director of Product Management at GoDaddy, gave an overview of multichannel and omnichannel sales for e-commerce merchants during her presentation. Enabling multichannel store management seems to be one of the main selling points of GoDaddy’s offering. Bluehost is another recent contender in the managed WooCommerce hosting space, having launched its product last month. In March, Newfold Digital, Bluehost’s parent company, acquired YITH,  a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. Bluehost’s managed WooCommerce packages include a curated set of YITH plugins to help merchants extend their stores to offer gift cards, bookings and appointments, wishlists, product filtering, and more. Bluehost offers two plans. For the first year, when billed yearly, customers pay $9.95/month for a simple store or $12.95/month for selling across various marketplaces. Customers on the more expensive plan have the option to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash. At the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum, Bluehost’s offering has an emphasis on creating a user-friendly, guided onboarding experience. Bluehost conducted an internal research study last year and found that its small business customers were looking for solutions that would allow them to sell online, but many of them are first-time website creators. The company created this new WooCommerce offering to eliminate the hassle of navigating themes and the many plugins required to launch a store. Bluehost uses YITH’s Wonder theme as the stores starting theme, which we reviewed in August. “Our theme is built for WordPress, utilizes the block structure that modern WordPress websites are beginning to adopt (one of the early block-basedWooCommerce block themes) and also includes three full-page patterns for different homepage layouts and designs,” Newfold Digital SVP of Digital Presence and Commerce Jason Cross said. “This not only provides users with a modern looking store, but also allows them to continue to customize it with ease in the future. YITH Wonder comes with six different style variations that make it easy to customize the accent color combinations and typography for the site.” Bluehost’s offering is aimed at catering to the merchants who will be building the stores themselves. The company has not created its own payments solution but connects to popular payment providers such as PayPal and Stripe and offers cash on delivery and in-store pickup options. WooCommerce is at the start of its journey towards launching a hosted solution but the company also plays a different role in the ecosystem as the maintainer of the core software. In an interview with the Tavern after his keynote, Maiorana said the vast majority (+90%) of ongoing WooCommerce core development is done by the WooCommerce team at Automattic. “One important difference is that we are really focused on the WooCommerce ecosystem – including the thousands of web hosts that help support and drive WordPress and Woo adoption across the globe – as our most important ‘customer,’” he said. “And what we’re hearing from these customers is that it is challenging to compete with the simplicity offered by proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions. At the same time, many web hosts don’t have the capabilities to address things like onboarding, conversion, and retention holistically – they need our help to compete and win.” Many of the major hosting companies that serve WordPress customers, like WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Bluehost have already developed their own hosted WooCommerce solutions, although there are many smaller companies that do not offer curated plugins, themes, and friendly onboarding that may be more open to partnering with the makers of WooCommerce. “We’re also working with

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#46 – Nick Diego on Why You Should Be Excited About the Possibilities of WordPress Blocks – WP Tavern

[ad_1] [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the themes, and in this case, why you should be excited about WordPress blocks. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or go to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. You can do that by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there. So on the podcast today, we have Nick Diego. Nick is a Developer Advocate at WP Engine. He can be found, creating educational content, building plugins and themes, and contributing to WordPress core. He’s on the podcast today to talk about his passion and optimism for the future of WordPress using blocks. At the recent WordCamp US, Nick gave a presentation entitled, ‘Let’s build a custom block in 15 minutes’. It was his attempt at showing a group of WordPress enthusiasts that the barrier to creating blocks is slowly being eroded, due to the creation of new tools. These tools are creating opportunities for people who might otherwise have stayed away from block development. It’s becoming easier to create the blocks as the tools take away much of the technical burden of getting you up and running without advanced knowledge of JavaScript and React. Coupled with core components, native blocks supports, and a bit of guidance, Nick thinks that every WordPress developer can add custom blocks to their repertoire. It’s clear that Nick is all in on blocks. And during the podcast, he makes the case for why you should be too. They offer so many opportunities for what can be displayed on a page, and their capabilities are only getting better. We talk about how WordPress core blocks are trying to support developers by adding components and blocks supports so you don’t have to repeat the development work already done by others. You can build on top of previous work and thereby save yourself valuable time. It’s a fascinating chat, especially for those who are, as yet, undecided about whether they want to embrace WordPress blocks. Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Nick Diego. I am joined on the podcast by Nick Diego. How you doing, Nick? [00:04:03] Nick Deigo: I’m doing great. [00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Would you just introduce yourself? Give us a little bit of your background, who you work for. How come you’re at WordCamp US. [00:04:08] Nick Deigo: I’m a developer advocate at WP Engine. I also do a lot of contributing both on the WordPress core team and also on the training team for WordPress. [00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: He’s doing a talk, presentation. What’s it all about Nick? [00:04:19] Nick Deigo: It’s all about trying to get people excited about building their own custom blocks, and I attempted to build a custom block completely in fifteen minutes. [00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: Did you achieve it? [00:04:29] Nick Deigo: Just barely. I got the zero minute sign as I was just finishing the presentation, so I just got under the wire. [00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the principle therefore, is that if you can do something in 15 minutes, I mean, let’s be honest, you’re pretty well versed, probably had a few runs through of that. But the bit that you are trying to educate people in, is that it’s easier now than it ever has been. So there’s no excuse to not explore. Is that basically it? [00:04:50] Nick Deigo: Yeah, and I think building blocks has been a bit scary. I know it was scary for myself. I didn’t come from a JavaScript background, mainly PHP. And so I wanted to show people that there’s so many more tools nowadays that it’s not as scary to get started, and if I can do it in 15 minutes, and I came from a non-technical background. You can do it too. [00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: When blocks came around, Gutenberg was launched the first time, how did we build blocks and how has that changed? What things have come over the horizon since then to make it easier? [00:05:19] Nick Deigo: You wandered in the wilderness and looked for some documentation that maybe didn’t exist, and maybe looked at some core blocks and you kind of tried to figure it out. But today you can scaffold an entire block with one line of code in your terminal and voila, you have a block. [00:05:34] Nathan Wrigley: Is that because it’s become easier to do, or is that just that there’s more documentation? Are there actual tools? Are there pieces of software that you can download and use and things to make it more straightforward? [00:05:46] Nick Deigo: I find building with JavaScript is just inherently more challenging than PHP, but we have tools today written by contributors to WordPress that allow you to take all the hard bits and it takes care

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