June 10, 2025 — Have you heard about the WordPress Speed Challenge created and hosted by Jamie Marsland? This exciting event has gained lots of attention on YouTube and has also featured at WordCamp Europe and WordCamp USA. The WordPress Speed Build Challenge is a high jeopardy competition designed to showcase the power of Full Site Editing in WordPress. The two contestants: Jessica Lyschik and Nick Diego will have 30 minutes to recreate a famous website using only Gutenberg blocks. This challenge highlights the versatility and ease of building professional websites without extensive coding. This high-pressure competition tests participants’ ability to quickly adapt, think creatively, and demonstrate their technical skills within a timeframe. The website to be recreated is kept a secret until the start of the challenge, adding an element of surprise and excitement. Perfect for developers, designers, and WordPress enthusiasts, it’s a fun way to test skills, learn new techniques, and celebrate the capabilities of modern website-building tools.

December 17, 2024 — In the final Developer Hours session of 2024, we took a closer look at WordPress Playground. This tool allows users to create fully functional WordPress instances directly in their browser, with no installation or setup required. Beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground offered powerful capabilities, from testing plugins and themes to running demos and even supporting app development. No matter how you engage with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer.

The session explored tools and workflows for plugin and theme development, demonstrated how to use Playground for testing and support, highlighted key improvements introduced in 2024, and offered a preview of exciting new features planned for 2025.

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December 3, 2024 — In this session of Developer Hours, we took a deep dive into the advanced usage of tools like create-block and wp-scripts, along with a few others. We focused on solving common challenges and showcasing techniques that went beyond the basics, even for developers already familiar with these tools.

The session featured practical examples and insights to help participants work more efficiently, especially when building blocks, block themes, and Editor extensions. While the discussion covered more advanced implementations, it remained accessible to developers of all experience levels, with plenty of resources provided.

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November 19, 2024 — The Block Bindings API, first introduced in WordPress 6.5, allowed the connection of custom fields (or any data) to Core blocks. However, this was just the beginning. Substantial improvements had been made by WordPress 6.7, enabling block attributes to be directly bound to custom fields from the Editor using an intuitive UI and a newly available public JavaScript API.

In this Developer Hours session, an overview of the Block Bindings API and how it works was provided, including major changes in the API since WordPress 6.5. The session demonstrated how to use the new Editor UI for binding attributes and work with the new JavaScript API. Whether you are new to Block Bindings or have already started using them in their projects, the session offered valuable insights for everyone.

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October 29, 2024 — WordPress 6.7 will be released on November 12, 2024, introducing the new Twenty Twenty-Five default theme. This session of Developer Hours is a review of the theme’s development and design, led by theme developers Carolina Nymark and Juanfra Aldasoro.

The presentation provides a technical demonstration of Twenty Twenty-Five, highlighting new capabilities such as section styles and typography presets—features never before seen in a default WordPress block theme. We also reviewed the structure of the theme files, naming conventions, and how the many patterns and block templates were built.

Session resources:

– https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/08/15/introducing-twenty-twenty-five/
– https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentyfive

October 10, 2024 — Block Visibility allows users to conditionally display the content of any WordPress block according to various conditions, such as date, user permissions, location, and screen size. With over 20,000 active installs, the plugin integrates seamlessly with the WordPress Editor and has become an essential tool for building block-based WordPress sites.

In this session, Nick will share the development and design philosophy behind Block Visibility and demonstrate how to effectively use WordPress Core components and design patterns. Attendees will gain practical insights into extending the WordPress Editor and enhancing block functionality, which they can apply to their own projects.

September 24, 2024 — The new WordPress Site Editor UI simplifies managing Pages, Templates, and Patterns with easy filtering, customization, and field selection. This enhanced experience is powered by the DataViews component and is part of WordPress’s move toward better collaboration.

Data Views offers a flexible way to display data as tables, grids, or lists, with options for filtering, sorting, and more. Even though it’s still being improved, you can already use the DataViews component in your projects and plugins.

In this Developer Hours session, we explored:

– The fundamentals of the DataViews component
– How to add a React app to a custom WordPress admin page
– How to display a custom dataset using Data Views

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September 10, 2024 — WordPress 6.7 will include a new template registration API, letting you register custom block templates in your plugins. This long-needed feature lets you create default front-end output that plays nicely with themes while also being customizable from the Site Editor by users.

In this Developer Hours session, we looked at:

– The basics of registering templates for your plugin.
– Working with the template hierarchy and themes.
– Building custom templates for custom post types and taxonomies.
– Taking your templates to the next level by integrating them with custom fields, block variations, and more.
– Creating templates for entirely custom URLs built with the Rewrite API.

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July 23, 2024 — Building custom blocks is a key aspect of WordPress development, but it’s not always the best solution. With the recent enhancements in WordPress 6.5 and 6.6, you can often avoid creating blocks from scratch by leveraging new features alongside core WordPress blocks. It’s all about selecting the right tool for the right task.

In this Developer Hours session, we explored several scenarios often addressed with custom blocks and discussed alternative approaches, especially those that leverage block patterns and Editor extensions. Key highlights include:

– How to add new functionality to core blocks
– How to use content-only editing and the allowedBlocks attribute in patterns
– How to integrate block bindings and block variations
– How to effectively use block locking and naming
– How to create overrides in synced patterns

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July 9, 2024 — As WordPress evolves, the gap between the Post and Site Editors is narrowing. In WordPress 6.6, slots and extensibility APIs are unified in the @wordpress/editor package global variable, simplifying the integration of extensions across editors for developers. The user interface is also becoming more standardized.

In this Developer Hours session, we explored how these updates can streamline your development process and enhance extensibility like never before. You will learn how to:

– Extend the Post and Site Editor using slots and why you might want to do so
– Display content only when specific conditions are met, such as when editing a custom post type
– Update existing extensions to work in both the Post and Site Editor
– Ensure updated extensions are backward compatible with WordPress 6.5 and lower

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