Buddy Webinar #14: WordPress Block Development

Over two weeks ago, I had the pleasure to join Maciek Palmowski (WordPress Ambassador at Buddy) to record the 14th episode of Buddy Webinar. We presented how to automate block development to elevate your WordPress projects to a higher level. This is what we covered:

  • How to start WordPress block development.
  • How to leverage JavaScript developer tools for WordPress plugin and block development.
  • How to automate your development workflow to maximize confidence in the codebase and monitor its health.
  • How to configure a pipeline in Buddy to automate the development process.
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How to Start Block Development with Scaffolding

Can you believe that it’s been two years already when Gutenberg got included in the WordPress core? In the meantime, the block editor has matured significantly. Using blocks steadily remains the primary approach to enrich the way users create content with WordPress. Some new exciting options let you defer the decision to build custom blocks. Those are among others  Block Directory, block patterns, or the preexisting reusable block feature. Indeed, they speed up the process of publishing posts and pages. However, I don’t plan to discuss here these types of capabilities.

Instead, I want to focus on the case when you decide to build a block. You might ask, why would you want to do it? Before anything else, it can be just for fun or to learn what the block editor has to offer. Later, it usually doesn’t take much time to discover that the WordPress core is missing a service integration you want or a layout element you often use. In the future, possibilities will become endless when the block-based full site editing rolls out.

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Growing JavaScript Skills with WordPress

This is a written version of the talk I gave at the JavaScript for WordPress conference on July 12th.

WordPress has always been recognized as a very welcoming platform for developers at any level of expertise. The block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0 release is not only an entirely new editing experience for users, but it also redefines the way plugins and themes are developed.

In this post, I want to explain many of the architectural decisions that have sought to make the transition as smooth as possible for those familiar with WordPress development. I will discuss all the tooling that the Gutenberg project uses behind the scenes to benefit from the massive growth of the JavaScript ecosystem. Finally, I’d like to demonstrate how you can leverage the same software in your projects using the @wordpress/scripts npm package to improve your skills.

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Starter kit and reusable scripts

The JavaScript ecosystem has reached a very interesting point in its history. There are members of the community overwhelmed by the learning curve required to start a new project and based on that they express JavaScript fatigue. There are also contradicting opinions announcing renaissance of JavaScript because it became truly general purpose language and dominated front-end development. So the question is, how to take advantage of all existing tools but at the same time change the first impression in a way that makes the following joke irrelevant:

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