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Common Codebase Versus Custom Deployments
These days I’m spending a lot of my time making sure the PeakZebra product works. But it’s clear to me that quite possibly the biggest challenge I have before me is dealing with the dead certainty that there will be lots of customizations made to client instance of PeakZebra. In a way, that’s PeakZebra’s secret…
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The Limits of Open Source Software
Nothing has foregrounded the fundamental bargain of open source like the past couple months of WordPress drama. I’m not here to talk about that in particular, but it has really gotten people thinking about what’s legal, what’s ethical, what you can charge for, what you can give away, and how a business will or won’t…
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Adding Logic Cleanly
With the WordPress block editor, you get a reasonably good editor for managing the pieces that make up a typical web page. And that can include things like forms and interactive charts and so on. For that reason, PeakZebra uses the block editor as the interface for any clients that want to build or customize…
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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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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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Wordcamp Phoenix Slides
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.
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GutenTour: Kadence Blocks, Part 1
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…
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GutenTour: Spectra Blocks
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…
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GutenTour: JetFormBuilder Block Collection by CrocoBlock
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…
