News and Insights for WordPress Developers

Last month was a bit of a whirlwind, culminating in a trip to Arizona for WordCamp Phoenix. I was hoping to share a few of my favorite talks, but I’ll probably wait until the edited videos are all available. Let’s just say that I learned a LOT about PHP 8, generative AI, WooCommerce, and the…

If I’ve been a little quiet on the blog here, it’s because I’ve been busy preparing for WordCamp Phoenix, just around the corner. I’ll be giving a presentation titled Migrating your Workflow from ACF Flexible Content to ACF Blocks. (In case you couldn’t tell, that’s been a theme around here.) If you’re interested in WordPress…

Some people LOVE to start new things. They register domain names with reckless abandon. Others (like me) get hit with insecurity before they can even begin. They talk themselves out of it or fall victim to resistance. But I’m trying, people. It’s been a new year of new projects, most notably the viewSource podcast (and…

Happy Thursday! Why am I sending this on Thursday instead of Friday? Why do I assume that anyone would even notice the difference? I don’t know. I’m playing around with productivity schedules (including a return to time-block planning, Cal Newport-style) so I’ll be experimenting with different formats and schedules for blog posts and this newsletter.…

What do litter boxes, advice blogs, and conspiracy theories have in common? They’re the topic of my main post this week. Warning: it’s a fairly personal one. As I think about the future of the internet, I’m genuinely concerned about our (read: my) inability to create deeper meaning at scale or to even be able…

RSS was maybe the first “great” syndication method for writing online. It’s easy and open. Almost every blog or content-heavy website supports it. I see a writer I like and I can just add their URL to my RSS feed reader. Email newsletters are also great- they use a pretty open protocol. You still have…

I don’t know about you, but I’m a chronic New Year’s over-planner. I love the chance to set myself some goals that I’ll grow to hate and eventually ignore. This year, I’m trying very hard to boost my personal writing/blogging habit (along with the usual “more exercise, less food and twitter”).  That means I’m coming…

Happy Friday! Are you like me: a WordPress custom theme developer who has no idea how to handle the block editor? Then boy do I have the podcast episode for you! I promise that it will not answer any questions you might have, but it sure asks them out loud ! Truth is, WordPress is…

Happy Friday! Last week I spent some time digging into the block editor and trying to understand the #!&@#ing logic behind alignments and widths. I started by  venting on Twitter  but ended up writing a post about what I’ve learned. If you’re coming from the Bootstrap/Tailwind mindset for widths/containers, I recommend giving it a read:  “Normal” width websites…

Happy Saturday! It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, but I have been busy digging into all things WordPress. Last month  I appeared on the WP Builds podcast  talking about the WP Feature Notifications project– an attempt to clean up your admin notices and alerts once and for all. It’s my first attempt at contributing to…