Category: WordPress

  • Onboarding

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    Robert

    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…

  • Wordcamp Phoenix Slides

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    Robert

    Here are the slides from my presentation at WCPHX, Using Blocks to Build Applications. Note that most of the presentation was a live demo. I’ve included the backup slides I made in case the demo went south– a series of screen shots that captures much of what I showed.

  • GutenTour: Kadence Blocks, Part 1

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    Robert

    A lot of the third-party activity around blocks these days is centered on putting together sets of blocks, and one of the more widely used sets out there is Kadence blocks, which has a free and a pro option. For a recent project I spent quite a bit of time working with the Kadence Pro…

  • GutenTour: Spectra Blocks

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    Robert

    Let’s check out some more WordPress blocks. Third-party blocks. On our last outing we looked at blocks that work together for a specialized purpose—JetFormBuilder, which is a forms package that builds forms using a block for each field.   The people that make the widely used Astra theme have built (and continue to expand) a…

  • GutenTour: JetFormBuilder Block Collection by CrocoBlock

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    Robert

    I’ve headed out on a world tour of Gutenberg blocks. Third-party blocks. There are starting to be quite a few of them out there, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups of layout and design-related blocks. Especially for the groups of them, you’ve typically got to pony up a few bucks to license them. But one I…

  • the Dashboard Gets a CPT and wordpress child theme

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    Robert

    But wait! I’ve got more about dashboards! Dashboards in WordPress, I mean. Not the admin dashboard, but other kinds of dashboards. We need a WordPress child theme and a custom post type (CPT) to do the job right. When we left last week’s dashboard scenario, we had a flat page built using Divi. Dashboard Custom…

  • A WordPress Client Dashboard

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    Robert

    Just to be clear right up front, this is not an article about customizing the back-end dashboard that WordPress provides to system administrators. This is an article that captures my journey in creating a WordPress client dashboard to show various kinds of statistical progress to PeakZebra clients. These folks don’t care how many page views…

  • A Book Table of Contents in an eBook World

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    Robert

    If you publish a long-form content piece on the web, you really owe it to your readers to provide navigational help. That seems obvious, but most things online that call themselves books (just one way of singling out long-form material) don’t go very far out of their way. If there’s any plain-old book table of…

  • Blockchain in WordPress in 2022

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    Robert

    If you land in certain corners of the Twittersphere, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who are wildly enthusiastic believers in the power of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to change the relationship between creators and consumers. By extension, they are at least a little enthusiastic about cryptocurrency as a means to an end, though they are…

  • Theft Revisited: What Gatsby JS Should Steal from WordPress in 2022

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    Robert

    A long, long year ago, it seemed prudent to bring up a few things that worked well in WordPress that were missing in Gatsbyjs. For instance, one-click exchangeable Gatsby js themes. Some, but not many, of those holes have been filled in various ways, but others remain (and probably will remain). But time has pushed…