Category: Uncategorized
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Using GenerateBlocks in Block Part Templates
GenerateBlocks is a great WordPress plugin that adds some very flexible, power user blocks to your Gutenberg editor experience. It’s one of our go-to block plugins for most block sites we build. However, it has one major problem. Any blocks created outside of a post or page, like in a template part will not work.…
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WordPress Development Environments
Assuming example.com as the site in question. Local Assuming you are working from MacOS, our local development is done using something like Laravel Valet. So your local site for a given project will be example.test Dev This environment is ideally on the same server as production, but can potentially be anywhere. The dev git branch…
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Block Theme Image Optimization
File Size An image has no business being over 1Mb in size. This is a red flag. To check, open your inspector > network and filter by images. Load the page and sort by decreasing size to view your largest images. If you’re unsure, use this app to check for the best file size while…
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Ditching Local Dev with WordPress Block Themes
When I first joined Motto as CTO years ago, the developers would have a development server, either in the local network or remote, to which they would FTP transfer every file edit they needed made. This obviously wasn’t ideal because: It was slow. Download file, edit, upload, reload website was way too many steps to…
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Default Starter Plugins for Block Based WordPress Themes
This is a running list of all of the plugins we install in each new WordPress block theme from scratch. Some things are always needed but not included in WordPress core. This is a collection of those plugins our team and yourself can use as a checklist for every new WordPress website. Rank Math Formidable…
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Transitioning from Classic Theme Development to Full Site Block Themes
Differences from Legacy Theme Development There are some major differences in the way we will approach block theme development. Here’s an outline of the key differences: No More Build Steps Previously, in order to take advantage of technologies like SASS, modern JS, or just performance optimizations, we would have a build step in our theme…