Weird WordPress and Am I Blue?
Hey friends,
What month do fires hate?
NO-EMBER 🙅🔥
(oof, that's pretty bad...)
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
WordPress is weird now... well, maybe weird is the wrong word.
Let's just set aside the recent drama between it's creator, Mr. Mullenweg, and WPEngine and look at what it's like to work in WordPress now.
But first, some nostalgia. There was a period of my career where we built EVERYTHING in WordPress. The flow was similar to what you'd experience now building a Craft CMS site: define your data structure, create the necessary fields, build up templates and component parts with PHP, HTML, and CSS with JS sprinkled in for interactivity. That pattern held for over 10 years.
I took a step away from WordPress as the Gutenberg editor was really coming to the forefront. But now, stepping back into it, it's like coming back to your alma mater after a long time: some of the same things are still there but everything else has changed. It's a totally different experience to develop in WordPress now, especially if you follow the "WordPress Way".
WordPress is now closer to Webflow than it is Craft. It's a visual site builder. If you use WordPress's core blocks, you do not have access to the HTML markup — you live with what it gives you. You don't get to create classes, you write long selectors to target generated markup.
This is not to say that it's bad — it's simply a different way of working and a different order of operations. Everything flows from the editor, and the experience is optimized FOR the editor, not the developer. In many ways this empowers the editor to be the ruler of the system — they now are capable of doing things that would have previously required a developer to carve a path for.
So like I said, it's strange to be back. It's hard not to react to change and think, 'Man, this sure isn't like how we used to do it' and grumpily stomp around. I want to give this new WordPress Way a fair shake and make sure it's not ME that needs to do the changing. (Which it usually is, it's usually me that needs to change.)
Interesting Web Bits 🍿
- Feather is an intriguing drawing app that promises to let you 'draw in 3D'.
- Am I Blue? is a cute little game where you try to match a color by mixing three colors. Kinda tricky!
- A simply wonderful CSS doodle from Aragakey.
- They say physical buttons are making a comeback.
- An interesting analysis of title drops in movies
- Tetris turns 40 this year! A little crazy to think about, but they built a site to honor it's 40th birthday.