Hello there 👋
I hope you had a great start into 2024. I spent the first week of this year mostly still at home with the family and was only in the office two times for a few hours, mostly just to clean up a little and to be ready next week when we officially start working again.
With client work tucked away for a few weeks, and my new website redesign out the door, I thought it’s a perfect time to play around and learn something new. So I started to dabble a bit with some custom block development in WordPress and even managed to build a little plugin for a “Like-Button-Block” for my photos on here (not live yet, but soon). It’s nothing crazy really, but I loved to work on something “just for fun” but still a little outside my comfort zone.
Frontend Development
🎭 Simple View Transitions with a meta tag
View Transitions will allow smooth transitions between two pages, something previously reserved for single page or native apps. Geoff Graham shows how you can add some basic crossfade effect by adding just one new meta tag.
Geoff Graham – How to add the simplest View Transition to my site
🖌️ Variable Fonts for Developers
A very nice “collection of fun experiments, effects, examples and stuff I have learned as a developer about variable fonts.” by Mandy Michael. So far, I still haven’t used a variable font in a project myself, but love what’s possible with them.
WordPress
🪄 Sticky Headers and FSE Themes
I wrote a little bit about how I used a little bit of CSS :has trickery to use position: sticky for this sites header navigation.
Fixing Sticky Header Navigation in Full Site Editing Themes
💡 Show the “Choose a pattern” modal for new pages
If you used the TwentyTwentyFour Theme, you probably noticed the “Choose a pattern” modal that pops up and gets you started, when you create a new page. Brian Coords shows how you can register your patterns and make this modal show up by default on new pages.
Brian Coords – How to show the “Choose a Pattern” modal by default on new pages
🧩 Building plugins in context
This post is for everyone building plugins on top of WordPress. It’s not only a good idea to follow best practices and existing UI patterns wherever possible because it helps your users to recognize and be familiar with your interface, it also makes it easier for you whenever there are design changes in WordPress, as is expected in a few month with the admin redesign.
Matt Cohen – Building WordPress plugins in context
Other
🪛 Open Source Software Alternatives
A collection of open source alternatives to popular software tools. Worth bookmarking.
🚀 Have a great start into the week/year!