Hello 👋
Unfortunately, the front conference – which would have happened next week in Zurich – had to be cancelled because not enough tickets were sold. It’s sad that so many great conferences seem to be having the same struggles to keep afloat. Marc Thiele wrote about it as well in the “State of Events” and you hear similar stories from other small events everywhere. I really hope this is not the end and that there will be another front conference again next year!
These past weeks, I kept myself pretty busy with lots of different projects, one of which being baking bread for 500 people for a pop-up restaurant – I might write more about that experience soon-ish. Now, next week the work for WordCamp Europe 2025 will kick off by a visit to the venue in Basel with many of the local and lead organising team, and I’m very much looking forward to see everyone again.
Frontend Development
⚡️ Don’t Use JS for That
Kilian Valkhof took the stage at JSConf and showed how you can (and why you should!) use CSS for many of the things you needed JavaScript before. It’s a great demo of what’s possible in todays browsers and he also explains very well why it’s better to do it this way.
YouTube – Don’t Use JS for That: Moving Features to CSS and HTML by Kilian Valkhof
🚀 What is progressive enhancement, really?
Progressive enhancement is such an important, yet often misunderstood concept. Here’s Andy Bell trying to explain what progressive enhancement actually is and I think everyone working on the web should read this.
Piccalilli – It’s about time I tried to explain what progressive enhancement actually is
😕 A book apart closed shop
Sadly, the book publisher “A book apart” closed shop a while ago. The rights to the books luckily went back to the authors, though, and many of them decided to publish their books online for free. Ryan Trimble collected a list of all the books he could find so far.
Ryan Trimble – A book apart books
WordPress
👍 On the User Experience of Gutenberg
Brian Coords wrote this article about the current state of Gutenberg and made some great recommendations about what he would love to see the development team focus on. I fully agree with him, especially about the need for improvement with the navigation blocks.
Brian Coords – The Gutenberg User Experience
👨🎨 An Introduction to Section Styles
Section Styles were introduced in WordPress 6.6 and I had a bit of a hard time to understand their purpose, or what exactly I could use them for. This article by Fränk Klein finally made it click for me.
WP Development Courses – Section Styles: Efficient and flexible styling for block themes
🤩 Twenty Twenty-Five officially introduced
WordPress 6.7 will include a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Five, which was officially announced just a few days ago. The first view looks amazing and I’m looking forward to play around with it as soon as it’s ready!
make.wordpress.org – Introducing Twenty Twenty-Five
Other
🛝 What we lost when kids stopped playing on the streets
A great article in the Atlantic about how we transformed our cities when we started planning and building them for cars only. It is not only the safety of children that we (quite literally) throw under the bus this way, but we lost a lot more, like social connections to your neighbors, a sense of belonging and community.
I am thankful that we still do have parts of Zurich that feel like they are actually built for humans and not cars first. The housing cooperative we live in is even completely car free, and we can see and feel the benefits of this every single day.
The Atlantic – What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street
Have a great rest of the week! ☀️