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A Field Guide to Speculative Loading in WordPress
Here’s a fun one: your WordPress site might already be reading your mind a little. Not in a creepy way – well, maybe a little in a creepy way – but in a “hey, I bet you’re about to click that” kind of way. If you’re running WordPress 6.8 or later, there’s a decent chance…
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A Field Guide to Responsive Block Styles in WordPress 7.1
WordPress 7.1 added responsive styling to the block editor. Basically, you can now define how a block looks at different screen sizes without writing a line of CSS. It’s one of the longest-standing requests in block-theme land, and it landed alongside a few related pieces: configurable breakpoints, pseudo-state styling, and – importantly – some new…
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Mistakes Happen… But They Should Only Happen Once
No one has ever asked about my management philosophy in an interview. They really should. When companies hire a people leader for engineers, the questions center on what the person knows: frameworks, architecture, their tech stack, things like that. That’s fair enough; a manager with no understanding of what the team builds will struggle to…
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Weekly Huddle #1: Welcome to the Jungle
//: Weekly.Huddle.1 Welcome to the Jungle Welcome to the first edition of the “Weekly Huddle” – a chance for me to share some of the fun things I’ve found over the last week. These emails will be chock full of knowledge, tutorials, resources, and other things to help you be a better WordPress user and…
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How to Add Rainbow Text To WordPress
I’ve been tinkering with the theme on this website, and I’m been very happy with how things have come out. I have a soft spot for gradients, especially with the ‘punk’ color scheme I’ve been using on my branding. One question I get, consistently: “How can I achieve the rainbow gradient text effect”? It’s actually…
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Fight for the User
Every year, 30,000 new products hit the marketplace. Products that have been properly researched, documented, engineered, and marketing. Products that every CEO and product manager will swear up and down is “the big one”. 95% of those products, by statistic, are destined to fail. It’s scary, as a product manager, to know that you are…
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WordPress: A Future of Many Flavors?
If you’ve been following along in the WordPress space lately, you’ll know that there’s a lot of discussion around WordPress – not of code, nor of content, but of how the software itself is managed. To put it simply, there are three parties involved: Matt Mullenweg, who the founder of both the WordPress Foundation and…
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How to Update WordPress Themes and Plugins on WPEngine (Without the Repository)
Skip to the Tutorial My head is full and my heart is sad tonight. Thousands of WordPress users are left in a strange scenario today as Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and founder, pulled access to the WordPress Repository for thousands of users on WPEngine. WPEngine is officially cut off from all updates – plugins, themes,…
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Governance in WordPress – and Open Source Software
WordPress has had a hell of a week. The roller-coaster high of WordCampUS 2024 ended with Matt Mullenweg’s bizarre and seemingly out-of-left-field rant against WPEngine – which finally culminated in legal actions. The weekend’s activity has left the WordPress ecosystem with seemingly more questions unanswered than answered. A quick search of Twitter or other similar…
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Your Next Block Theme: WDS-BT
One of the things I love about working at WebDevStudios is that we don’t hoard our knowledge like dragons. If we find a great way of doing something in WordPress, we do the best we can to find a way to get it in the hands of other developers, users, and even other agencies that…