June 5, 2020 — In this panel, we assessed the business decisions media companies face when considering migrations. We talked about the choices that our panelists have had to make, tough lessons learned, along with some practical considerations for executing a well-run migration.

June 2, 2019 — With much fanfare React.js has overtaken the post editor, and this is just the beginning. As we enter phase two of the Gutenberg project, we find that change has begun for widgets and even menus. While the thought of building our own editor blocks from scratch may be too daunting for many of us to want to undertake, WordPress delivers React to us in a way that allows us to add our own flavor to existing blocks. React is designed with modular units for easy reuse, and in this talk we’ll review key components of blocks and different ways to enhance or redefine blocks using the set of filters available in the WordPress namespace.

March 1, 2019 — With much anticipation, the whole WordPress community is abuzz with its preparation for the coming of the new WordPress Post Editor experience. Codenamed Gutenberg as a callback to the 15th-century invention of the printing press, which heralded easier propagation of knowledge contained in the written text, the new Editor signals a commensurate leap on the path towards democratizing publishing.

The reimagining of the editor is centered around the concept of a block and is powered by a new force in WordPress, namely React.js, a technology pioneered by Facebook and embraced by many other web giants looking to improve the user experience. Using React in the editor allows for a richer development of elements and a better representation of what their combination will look like upon rendering in the frontend browser.

The fundamental shift that React represents is its departure from a PHP approach which requires a page reload triggered by saving settings or updating a post to see the changes in the dashboard. While we’ve long had the ability to invoke javascript via AJAX to make changes without page refresh, these calls are typically limited to a single focus. React allows all of the elements in the HTML structure to react to each other based on changes made to each.

And it can do all of this with great speed and efficiency because it does not need to interact with the database, like with PHP, and each block only uses the minimal set of React tools needed for its proper functioning. Upon publishing or updating a post, React packages each block from the javascript object to an HTML element complete with CSS and saves it as a comment to the post. In this way, a user can toggle between the classic editor and the new editor without losing any information.
In this talk, we’ll review in more depth how to create a block using the tools from the WordPress Block API and elsewhere, what the code constituents of a block are, and explore how to reshape existing code to render in this new Editor environment.

Presentation Slides »

October 17, 2017 — I am cultivating a number of classes which use the Customizer API beyond the typical theme settings. I’ve also begun to build custom controls to allow for further customization of the Customizer. In this talk, I’d like to walk thru how to use the API, demonstrate the existing tools available and then show how to expand on them to better suit your specific needs.