Hello
This was the first week I was back in the office after two weeks of a much needed vacation. We are in the last steps of finishing some client projects and then reserved a few days to work solely on our own projects to get them back on track, which I very much look forward to! Exciting times.
Frontend Development
↔️ Breaking Out of a Central Wrapper
A great primer on the different ways you can let elements break out of a wrapper. Like when you want to have full-width elements that are inside a less wide, centered wrapper element. I still use a technique which I got from one of the default WordPress Themes a few years back, but this post certainly gave me some ideas on how to build this in a better, more modern way.
CSS { In Real Life } – Breaking Out of a Central Wrapper
✨ Defensive CSS
Ahmed Shadeed created this series of short and practical CSS tips about building interfaces. It features a lot of stuff you probably ran into before. And all of them are packed into byte sized tips instead of long form articles, which I like.
🔥 GitHub’s Progressive Enhancement Strategy
Some very interesting insights into how GitHub makes sure their experience works for most people and on many different browsers. Even though most of it is overkill for the code I’m working on on a daily basis, it’s still fascinating to see how this is handled on such a huge site like GitHub. Guess many corporations could learn at least a thing or two from it, when it comes to progressive enhancement.
With JavaScript disabled, you’re still able to log in, comment on issues and pull requests (although our rich markdown toolbar won’t work), browse source code (with syntax highlighting), search for repositories, and even star, watch, or fork them. Popover menus even work, thanks to the clever use of the HTML
GitHub Blog – https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/
element.
GitHub Blog – How we think about browsers
WordPress
🔍 Fixing search with the Block Editor (German)
If you are using the block editor, the comments that are being inserted into your post contents to create the blocks, can negatively impact your sites’ search functionality. Basically, it can pollute your search results with lots of false positive results, if you search for a word that is also used as a block comment. Thorsten Landsiedel wrote about a possible way to fix this, which sounds promising.
Thorsten Landsiedel – Kaputte Suche im Block Editor reparieren
🎨 Block editor styles: initiatives and goals
If you worked with the block editor, and especially if you tried to customize things using CSS, you probably noticed a lot of redundant inline styles that the block editor outputs to the frontend. This is all but ideal, and I’m happy that there seems to be a plan in place to make this a lot smarter in the future. Will take a while, but looking forward to it.
make.wordopress.org – Block editor styles: initiatives and goals
💵 Is GoDaddy “suffocating” the WordPress ecosystem?
There was quite some commotion a few weeks ago, when Matt Mullenweg – apparently while having a fever – started tweeting at GoDaddy and criticizing them for not giving back enough into WordPress and WooCommerce, while profiting from them at the same time. He deleted his tweets shortly after, but by then the screenshots where already taken and the articles written. It was definitely unusual to see someone like Matt, who’s normally very diplomatic and calm, losing it like this and even calling a competitor a “Parasitic Company”. Here are two recaps about the whole thing, that I’ve found interesting.
MasterWP – Mullenweg: GoDaddy is an ‘existential threat’ to WordPress
👀 Proposal for a WordPress plugin checker
I have to admit, I’m quite bad at testing my code. Usually, I work with VS Code and some simple tools to spot PHP errors and stuff, but apart from that testing is still on my list of things to learn more about.
I would love to up our game in that regard and with our codebase(s) growing it becomes harder to keep everything error-free. The WP Performance team proposed to introduce a plugin checker, similar to the theme checker that was available earlier, which would be appreciated a lot.
Proposal for a WordPress plugin checker
🔍 Plugin Tip: Blocks Detector Finder
This plugin lists all blocks that are installed on your site and can even show you which blocks are used on particular sites. Even more useful, it can show you which blocks are still used on your site, but not installed anymore. I just stumbled upon this plugin and have only tested it quickly, but I’m sure this will come in handy again!
Plugin: Blocks Detector Finder
Other / Random
🤖 Wordalle
You probably played Wordle, the word-guessing game, and maybe you also heard of Dall-E, the AI that impressively creates images based on text prompts. Well, Wordalle is a mix of both: the game shows you images Dall-E created and you have to guess the underlying prompt that was used to create it.
🛸 WebbCompare
I’m sure you’ve heard of the James Webb Telescope that was sent to space a while ago, and maybe you’ve seen some of the first images that came out of it. This handy tool lets you compare those images to the older ones of the Hubble telescope to really show you the progress made in the last few decades.
Cheers ✌️