October 11, 2024 — One of the biggest implementations of JavaScript in WordPress is the Block Editor. To develop blocks for the Block Editor, you need to have a good understanding of modern JavaScript, its syntax, and the tooling that’s developed around it.

In this lesson, you’ll discover some of these JavaScript technologies and how they are used to build blocks for the Block Editor.

October 11, 2024 — One of the benefits of working with WordPress is that there are often many ways to do the same thing.

While the block development examples you’ve seen so far use JSX for rendering and @wordpress/scripts for building, you can also develop blocks without using these technologies.

In this lesson, you will learn what a block without JSX or a build process could look like and the pros and cons of both approaches.

October 11, 2024 — One of the benefits of developing blocks is the ability to nest blocks within other blocks.

Let’s take a look at how nested blocks work, and how you can create them in your own block plugins.

October 11, 2024 — When planning to create a block, one of the things to consider is whether the block needs to be built from scratch, or could it simply be an extension of an existing block.

This lesson introduces the concept of block variations, which are a way to create different versions of an existing block.

October 11, 2024 — Hooks are one of the fundamental features of WordPress. They allow you to “hook” into the WordPress core, and execute your own code at specific points in the WordPress lifecycle.

This lesson will introduce you to some different hooks available in the Block Editor, and how to use them to extend the editor’s functionality.

October 11, 2024 — Depending on the requirements of the block you are building, you may need to fetch data from the WordPress database.

To make this possible, WordPress provides two JavaScript packages which allow you to fetch data from the WordPress REST API.

Let’s learn what these packages are, how they work, and how to use them to perform data fetching in your block.

October 11, 2024 — Not to be confused with Block Editor action and filter hooks, the Block editor also has something called the Block Hooks API

This API provides a way to automatically insert your block next to all instances of a specific block in block-based templates, template parts, and patterns of a WordPress block theme.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about the specific requirements needed in order to use the Block Hooks API, and how to use it to automatically insert a block next to all instances of the target block.

August 13, 2024 — Blocks have become integral to most WordPress projects. While Core blocks cover a wide range of content types and many third-party block libraries are available, you may eventually need functionality that doesn’t yet exist. If you’ve never had the chance to build a custom block or are unsure where to begin, this session is for you!

We explained how blocks are structured and defined within WordPress, giving you a foundational understanding of block.json, attributes, block supports, and more. You will learn the differences between statically and dynamically rendered blocks, along with the pros and cons of each. Finally, we introduced tools that will help you quickly start creating your own custom blocks.

Presentation Slides »

January 16, 2024 — Welcome to the first Developer Hours session of 2024 where we explored the “Build your first block” tutorial from the Block Editor Handbook.

During the session, we worked through the tutorial together, answering any questions folks had along the way. Attendees learned the basics of building a custom block, including the key concepts of block development and an overview of the common tools and packages used.

October 21, 2023 — This talk is meant to be an advanced deep dive into how we can extend the block editor to fit our needs for highly customized WordPress builds in 2023. It will go into details how to build custom blocks that interface with the query loop, using block variations, theme.json filters and much more.