March 9, 2023 — Color is often a barrier to making your websites open and accessible to everyone, but it is an easy way to make strides that make a difference.

In this session, we see examples of assumptions designers and developers make and how to test, correct them, and what best practices and tools are available to add to your toolset.

Presentation Slides »

March 9, 2023 — Several WordPress community theme developers and designers come together to discuss the Community Themes Initiative. The goal was to lay the groundwork and hash out ideas around building block themes collaboratively to submit to the official WordPress theme directory.

March 7, 2023 — Customer testimonials are extremely valuable for any business to grow. Testimonials highlight the positive experiences of existing customers, but they can also provide insight for prospective clients who look online before purchasing a product or service.

In this tutorial, we will look at adding a testimonial pattern and installing a new block to your site from the Block Directory.

March 6, 2023 — Join us for a discussion about migrating a shortcode or widget based plugin to blocks. Learn from your peers and from experts. This is also an opportunity to share any hurdles or pain-points you’ve encountered and discover how to overcome them.

Perhaps you’ve already migrated your plugin to blocks, or have at least attempted to do so. If so we would like to learn about the difficulties and pain points that you encountered during the process.
Perhaps you’ve yet to attempt such a migration, in which case we’re interested in learning about what’s holding you back. Is the documentation confusing? Is the learning curve too steep?
Perhaps you have a plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory that still relies on shortcodes or widgets to render content, and which has yet to be migrated to blocks. Plugins that render their content via a shortcode or widget are ideal candidates for conversion to blocks.
The block editor has been incorporated into core for nearly 5 years now and usage and uptake are growing day by day. It is therefore more important than ever that plugin developers embrace the block paradigm.

This is one of a series of AMA sessions to provide plugin developers with the opportunity to connect with one another. This is a chance to share the challenges you’ve faced, or are facing, in creating a block implementation of your plugins.

We also hope to share advice and guidance, and to be able to point you in the direction of the resources you need to help you move forward with your block development projects, whether it be documentation, tutorials, or information about best practices.

Anyone interested in plugin development is welcome to participate. You don’t need to be a professional developer or have a specific level of experience.

Let’s see how we can improve the developer experience for all those who come after us on their block development journey. We can’t wait to speak with you.

March 3, 2023 — A recording of the WordPress 6.2 live product demo presented by Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and moderated by Nathan Wrigley.

March 3, 2023 — In the “Using the WordPress REST API” tutorial you were introduced to the WordPress REST API, as well as the Backbone.js client to interact with it.

In this tutorial, we will look at how you can interact with the WP REST API further, but adding and deleting data.

Presentation Slides »

March 3, 2023 — Earlier this year, we looked at the theory behind developing WordPress plugins and themes securely. We covered how to develop a security mindset, and the guiding principles of secure development, and looked at the five examples of these principles, Sanitizing Data, Validating Data, Escaping Data, Nonces, and User Roles and Capabilities.

In this session, we will look at how these principles are applied in real-world examples, by understanding common security vulnerabilities, how they can be exploited by would-be attackers, and what you can do to prevent them.

Presentation Slides »

March 2, 2023 — Have you ever wanted to update your site’s design, but wondered exactly what that would entail? It sounds so daunting, so maybe you’ve wanted to watch someone else do it first before you tried? If so, then this online workshop is for you!

Come join this informal live stream where Ben will update his personal blog’s design while answering questions from attendees. In this multi-part workshop, you’ll get to see the full process of updating a site’s design, including:

* Creating a local staging site of a live site and transferring updates between the sites
* Updating a site’s theme from Twenty Twenty-Two to Twenty Twenty-Three
* Editing templates and template parts in the Site Editor

This is Part 1 of a multi-part series.

March 1, 2023 — Learn more about the history of Internet Art and the influence of WordPress on the Internet Art movement.

Presentation Slides »

March 1, 2023 — What’s a block style? What’s a block variation? Is there a difference between the two? When should you create a variation instead of a custom style?

In this Online Workshop, we will answer these questions and more. Block styles are a great way to modify the visual aesthetic of blocks, and block variations are one of the most overlooked tools for building customized block-based editing experiences in WordPress. Learn how to use this powerful functionality in your own projects.