Well this has been a fun week. I came into the year sitting on a video/blog post, but I couldn’t decide whether to publish it or not. I’ve been trying to focus more on educational content, and this post just felt too opinionated to publish.

In the end, I did publish it and I’m so glad I did. While the comments weren’t entirely positive 😬, they mostly were and the post resulted in a large influx of YouTube subscribers, tons of interesting conversations, and a potential collaboration (more on that below).

Latest Article

The article and video tackle the current debate of “page builders vs Gutenberg” and are a direct response to Kevin Geary’s recent video/post: I Tried Building a Layout With the WordPress Block Editor And it Didn’t Go Very Well. In my response, I talk about some places where we agree/disagree, and I screenshare my approach to building a layout in the block editor:

✏️|🎥 The block editor is still not a page builder
My thoughts on why the block editor is NOT a page builder. Along the way I talk about alignments, widths, semantic elements, block styles, theme, page builders, and more.

(So far I’ve even seen one response video to my response video, which was wild.)

And that potential collaboration? Well, if you have thoughts on improving the WordPress block editor, send them to me and Jamie Marsland (the great Pootlepress) and we may include them in an upcoming video we’ll be teaming up on.

Conference talks

I’m stoked to announce that I’m presenting next month at WordCamp Phoenix. The session is titled Custom Block Development… Using Other Blocks and we’ll do a quick live-coding of an actual custom block. If you can’t make it live, there should be a livestream the day of the conference.

I shared a sneak peek of what we’re building (along with the full repository) last week.

Last year Aurooba Ahmed and I co-presented some custom block development at WP Accessibility Day. Our talk is now available to watch online:

🎥 A Recipe for an Accessible Accordion Block
Presented at WP Accessibility Day 2023

Links from around the web

So normally I’d paste a few links here, but I recently published a thread of good links on X/Twitter, so I’ll just send you there:

🔗 A quick thread of blogs to help load up your RSS reader.

The WordPress ecosystem has really been cooking recently.

(Bonus link)

So… I’m not quite ready to share this link publicly, but I figured I’d include it here as a preliminary soft-release. Here’s the background:

My goal this year is to create a more comprehensive library of content for developers interested in the block editor, full site editing, and “modern” WordPress. As part of that, I’ve started organizing it into one master “curriculum”, so I could outline the journey of a developer and maybe see where the gaps are. This is the rough draft outline of that curriculum. It’s my (in)complete textbook of block editor-related content.

See anything missing? Let me know and I’ll see if I can create some content for it!

Have a great January and hope to see some of you in Phoenix!