October 13, 2023 — WordPress is a powerful content management system, but certainly isn’t the ideal solution for complex business functions and secure data management. These functions are often left to dedicated CRM and ERP solutions that are external to the website.

There’s good reason for organisations wanting to use WordPress for their primary website. It means they are able to manage their own public facing content easily, and with 40% of all websites on the internet using WordPress, it’s a good choice when choosing a platform to standardise on. However there is often an element of their line-of-business web applications that is user facing (such as a customer portal) and ideally it makes sense for these to be presented seamlessly via the website. Integrating between WordPress and other platforms has traditionally relied on methods such as iframes, APIs and custom developed plugins.

Inherently, most of these integration methods come with their fair share of security and/or usability issues and considerations. They can also be a pain to maintain.

In the pursuit of a secure, flexible, and maintainable solution, we explored a novel approach—leveraging Single Page Applications (SPA) built with frameworks like React and Vue.js. This approach provides a seamless user experience because the content is rendered seamlessly in WordPress as HTML, and as it is environment agnostic it works equally well in the Block Editor, a Page Builder or a traditional WordPress template.

Get ready for real-life examples and a practical demonstration of how this can be achieved, and more importantly some of the challenges you might encounter (and how to overcome them). From managing how to best style these for consistency with your existing style sheets, to learnings about how it can impact SEO and user experience – not to mention how we solved some of the challenges of dynamically adjusting navigation (and other items) when users authenticate or log out.

Whether you are a seasoned developer or new to WordPress integrations, this talk will equip you with practical knowledge and inspire you to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with external web applications (custom or not) and WordPress.

October 13, 2023 — Learn about the evolution of Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics since its introduction in 2020.

User experience and performance are now commonplace discussions. The web’s evolution demands it.

This talk offers a Core Web Vitals 2023 deep dive, examining their maturation, significance, and related data through the lens of WordPress practitioners

September 30, 2023 — This talk explains how to make the most of the code review process.

Topics include:

– giving and receiving feedback
– focusing on the right things
– handling conflicts
– review of a real-world case study
– recommended tools and techniques

Good code reviews create a positive, collaborative culture that leads to not only better code but a happier and more productive work environment. Learn how to embrace code reviews as opportunities for improvement.

Whether you’re taking on a new project or just checking a pull request, code reviews can help with quality control, bug catching, and knowledge sharing.

September 30, 2023 — This lightning talk for WordPress developers offers an example of how the WordPress.org API was used to create a plugin comparison website.

August 31, 2023 — WordPress has been upping its HTML game, and the new HTML API is enabling new ways of reliably working with and modifying HTML.

Maybe you know this vicious cycle: ever-expanding regular expression patterns, HTML edge cases, and growing complexity of matching code ends up obscuring what you set out to do in the first place, and still isn’t reliable. Let’s talk about how this game is changing, what we can do today, and what is coming in the near future.

We’ll start with some quick demos of using the new HTML API interfaces, then briefly discuss some of the limits of the new systems, and finish with a time for questions and discussion, so bring your curiosity.

Topics to be covered

– What can the HTML API do today?

– What will the HTML API be able to do with the 6.4 release?

– When is the HTML API not appropriate?

– How fast and efficient is the HTML API?

– How reliable is the HTML API?

July 26, 2023 — Styling blocks: empowering users with CSS custom properties

It’s important not to be too prescriptive when developing blocks, and to allow users to have as much control as possible over the look and feel of the blocks on their websites.

In this edition of WordPress Developer Hours we talk about CSS custom properties (also known as CSS variables) and look at how you can leverage them in blocks to give users more control over the styling and presentation of their sites.

First up, Michael Burridge presents a solution to a common problem, i.e. how to allow users to have control over the styling of inner elements in blocks which have complex markup. While it’s relatively simple to allow users to style a block at the root level, this presentation looks at how you can assign the values stored in block attributes to CSS custom properties and use them to apply user-defined styling to child-elements in both static and dynamic blocks.

Then, for the second presentation of the session, Justin Tadlock shows you how to integrate CSS custom properties into your block stylesheets that play nicely with themes. The technique used integrates block plugins and theme.json while still giving preference to user choice.

Whether you’re just starting out with block development or have built dozens of blocks already, this WordPress Developer Hours session is for you, and you’re sure to learn a ton.

July 24, 2023 — In this talk we will address the current state of development of blocks for the WordPress editor, addressing the fundamentals, motivations for implementing the editor, preparing possible development environments (with and without JS compilation and React), use of the @wordpress/create-block package, styling and more. The intention of the lecture is not to be a course or workshop, but a guide for those who want to start exploring the creation of blocks.

June 30, 2023 — This Developer Hours session showcases extensibility methods that empower builders to extend and customize the WordPress editing experience.

– What is Editor extensibility and why is it important
– What extensibility methods are currently available in WordPress and how to use them
– What is missing in WordPress in terms of extensibility, particularly related to blocks and the Editor

May 24, 2023 — In this presentation Adam Zielinski, a member of the development team that created WordPress Playground, introduces this exciting new implementation and also demonstrates it. He explains the technologies that make the magic happen, and runs through a variety of scenarios and use cases.

April 18, 2023 — This Developer Hours session features a live product demo of the Interactivity API presented by Michal Czaplinski. Michal is one of the developers on the team that brought the Interactivity API to fruition. Following the demo Michal, answered questions posed by the attendees.