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Daily Dose?
It occurred to me that I’m so bad at thinking up witty little bits to post on Bluesky that I’d probably do better writing a five-hundred-word piece literally every day and then “skeeting” (as they say on Bluesky, though I have no idea why) the address and topic. I’d have something to say, sort of.…
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PeakZebra’s central architectural ideas
While your first encounter with PeakZebra may catch you a little off guard, especially if you’re coming from a WordPress background, the ideas behind it are actually very straightforward. Which is what makes them powerful, of course. Particularly in the WordPress world, there’s this notion of an add-on called a “forms package.” A forms package…
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Best WordPress Blocks Plugins to Push Your Gutenberg Imagination
Gutenberg arrived on the WordPress scene five years ago by now, but plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. Still, five years: so you might think everyone would have it all figured out by now. But no. And plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. For one thing, there’s…
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How to display blueprints
What PeakZebra offers is more than a theme. Actually it’s a lot more, but the “lot more” actually is varies from one blueprint scenario to the next. And a given blueprint could actually look a lot of different ways. Yes, what you’d normally call the “theme” is tied pretty closely to what the site does,…
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The first LiveTheme goes live
I’ve gone back and forth a ridiculous number of times about what, exactly, PeakZebra should be. What was the offer? What was PeakZebra going to sell and how was it going to sell it. I’ve had to learn a lot of self discipline when it comes to avoiding the distractions of new shiny ideas and…
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Thinking Logically
The early hurdles for PeakZebra mostly had to do with getting tables to display in a sweet, full-function way on the front end. My take is that we completely crushed that particular challenge. The next hard thing was harder, though. It was the complex problem of how to create custom logic and computation within an…
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Bits, pieces, and components
I’ve known in the back of my head all along that, while there was a place for the multi-field form blocks I was building to capture things like customer names and addresses, the “pure” way of attacking my block-based application building project was to create a bunch of generic fields. This is what existing WordPress…
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Two upcoming app templates
At roughly a week into my September “sprint,” the contents of the next update are becoming clearer, so I thought I’d share some details. First, there will be a very lightweight CRM application, which I seem to be calling LitelyCRM. It’s absolutely aimed at providing a base to build on, not at providing the full…
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Onboarding
I’m banging away on what I guess you could call the second sprint of PeakZebra blocks (except that it’s just me, so it’s a pretty thin scrum), but it’s hard to work on applications like CRM (built from blocks) without thinking about onboarding. Onboarding is an enormous opportunity for WordPress, just because so many (including…
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Quite the laundry list
As mentioned in previous blogs, the arrival of the WCUS conference was a self-imposed deadline for me to actually launch PeakZebra as a set of app-building blocks, even if it was a soft launch. While I did meet the minimal requirements for the goal I’d set, it’s also fair to say that it turned out…
