Web developer, Author, Speaker, Single mom, Baker, Music lover, Chaotic neutral
Converting static blocks to dynamic blocks
17 March 2023
I started working with custom Gutenberg blocks sometime in late 2017. Or, perhaps, it was early 2018. To be honest, the timing is a bit fuzzy because I was pregnant at the time and pregnancy brain is real. For those of you keeping track, these timeframes are well before the WordPress 5 release date of December 6, 2018.
Static vs. dynamic blocks: What’s the difference?
27 February 2023
Published on the WordPress Developer Blog** The Block Editor offers two types of blocks, static and dynamic. The difference between these two types of blocks comes down to how they are rendered on the front-end. Read on to learn more about the details, advantages, and disadvantages of each.
Writing a Custom WordPress Block
27 September 2022
This post has been a long time coming. I have talked about custom WordPress block creation for several years now, from blogging about registering dynamic blocks with block.json to speaking at various conferences about why dynamic blocks are awesome.
Overriding WP core: Dynamic blocks edition
07 February 2022
I was recently given the task of making the WordPress core RSS block look exactly like one of our custom blocks posts block. That custom block displays a series of news stories. RSS feeds are series of news stories, so this request totally makes sense.
WordPress dynamic block registration, with special guest JSON!
27 October 2021
My last blog post was about WordPress theme customization with JSON. It seems only fitting that I follow that up (nearly 6 months later… yikes!) with a new post about custom block registration and, you guessed it, JSON!
WordPress Customization: Supports and Variations and JSON. Oh my!
04 May 2021
The new WordPress editor (“Gutenberg”) has been a part of our lives for almost 2 1/2 years. Since that initial launch, WordPress has come out with so many different ways to customize block editor: theme.json, block variations, and block supports. These are three distinct features that provide different customization options. Yet, for some reason, I can never remember what controls what (or how much control each feature really has). This blog post aims to clear all that up.
Creating block.json for a WordPress block
12 November 2020
I have been creating custom WordPress blocks since Gutenberg was in beta, though the vast majority are for work. But this week, I added my very first block to the WordPress block directory. (Hooray for my Color Palette!!)
The Case of the Disappearing Gutenberg
20 June 2020
Once upon a time, there was a WordPress post editor that discovered it had turned into a simple HTML editor….
Besan Block: A long time coming
15 August 2019
A few times a year, we hold an internal event at work that we call “Serendipity Day.” We use this day, inspired by NPR, to work on projects that are somewhat work related, but have been sitting on our back burners for a while. Sometimes we use this day to research a new topic. More often than not, though, we use this day to build something new.
Featured Images, Gutenberg, and You
25 March 2019
A very common editor update that us WordPress developers make is to add options to the featured image meta box in the post editor. This is usually something like a checkbox to determine whether the featured image should be displayed at the top of a post.
A Very Informal Look at Gutenberg Accessibility
16 October 2018
We have been working all year to replatform our websites at work from Drupal to WordPress. We decided to go with WordPress for many reasons, one of the biggest being its admin UI. The WordPress edit screen, especially when compared to the Drupal edit screen, has historically been intuitive and preferred by content editors. In fact, many of my clients in the past have asked to switch their websites from Drupal (or similarly complex systems) to WordPress because of WordPress’s UI advantages.
Taming my Frankenstein monster of a website
24 May 2013
It was a disaster. My website, that is. I started my site with good intentions. All I wanted was a simple site with some basic information about me. Maybe my resume, too. After all, any serious web developer needs a website. So, I created my simple, static website and published it using Fastmail’s file services. I was already using Fastmail for my e-mail and using a single service for my online needs was completely logical at the time.