Hello
I spent a lot of time this week inside the block editor, with FSE-themes and testing various things. Especially in regards to multilingual support & Polylang and to evaluate whether this setup will be feasible for an upcoming client project. This will probably be the first (client) project we deliver with a FSE/block-theme approach and I’m very much looking forward to build it.
Apart from client work, I was still tinkering with a custom like block for my photos (hopefully live by next week), made some homemade gnocchi for the first time, which turned out delicious, and started to think 2024 could be the year I’m gonna try fermenting my own miso paste at home (stay tuned 😎). But I digress, here’s what I’ve read this week.
Frontend Development
✍️ Variable Font Course
I would love to create my own font someday, and a variable font would be even more exciting. This course teaches everything you need to get started, just in case I should find some spare time somewhere, to go down yet another rabbit hole.
📝 Safe rules for visual design
Anthony Hobday collected some “Visual design rules you can safely follow every time”. Of course, rules are meant to be broken from time to time. But if in doubt, following these rules should make your designs better.
Anthony Hobday – Visual design rules you can safely follow every time
WordPress
⚙️ WP options pages using React and Gutenberg
Daniel Post wrote about using React & Gutenberg to build WP options pages. Generally I’m not a big fan of using React for everything, but I guess in a WordPress context, it can make sense to use the components available anyway. Apart from the tutorial, I really dig the code examples on Daniel’s site and I might need to steal this blurry-highlight-code-lines-effect that he built!
Part 1: Creating a WordPress options page using React and Gutenberg
Part 2: Creating a WordPress options page using React and Gutenberg
🤔 Manage a declining plugin
Cameron Jones develops the “Mongoose Page Plugin”, which lets you embed a facebook page on your website. At it’s peak it had an impressive 30’000 active installs, slowly going down to 20’000 recently. People became more privacy concerned and “embedding fb-pages” just doesn’t seem to be that much of a thing today. But, while it’s declining, it’s still 20’000 active users, so I totally get that he struggles to decide what’s the best way going forward. An interesting read even if you don’t develop plugins yourself.
Cameron Jones – How Do You Manage A Declining Plugin?
💡 New and updated in 6.4.0
Did you know that there’s a link in the WordPress Code reference to show you everything that has changed in a certain version? I didn’t – thanks again, Deryck!
WP.org – New and updated in 6.4.0
Other
❤️ Kathleen Regular Font
What a lovely idea: Dave Martin took the handwriting of his late mother and turned it into a custom font and wrote about the process.
Dave Martin – Kathleen Regular Font
Have a great weekend ✌️