This is a compilation of four videos I've done over the last few months for a sponsorship with Automattic. It's mostly about Jetpack, a WordPress plugin I quite like and that we use here at CSS-Tricks), but also touches on setting up WooCommerce to create a personal store.
Hey! Chris here, with a big thanks to WordPress, for not just their sponsorship here the last few months, but for being a great product for so many sites I've worked on over the years. I've been a web designer and developer for the better part of two decades, and it's been a great career for me.
I'm all about learning. The more you know, the more you're capable of doing and the more doors open for you, so to speak, for getting things done as a web worker. And yet it's a dance. Just because you know how to do particular things doesn't mean that you always should. Part of this job is knowing what you should do yourself and what you should outsource or rely on for a trustworthy service.
With that in mind, I think if you can build a site with WordPress.com, you should build your site on WordPress.com. Allow me to ellaborate.
WordPress 5.0 is quickly approaching, and the new Gutenberg editor is coming with it. There’s been a lot of discussion in the WordPress community over what exactly that means for users, designers, and developers. And while Gutenberg is sure to improve the writing experience, it can cause a bit of a headache for developers who now need to ensure their plugins and themes are updated and compatible.
One of the clearest ways you can make sure your theme is compatible with WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg is to add some basic styles for the new blocks Gutenberg introduces. Aside from the basic HTML blocks (like paragraphs, headings, lists, and images) that likely already have styles, you’ll now have some complex blocks that you probably haven’t accounted for, like pull quotes, cover images, buttons, and columns. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some styling conventions for Gutenberg blocks, and then add our own styles for Gutenberg’s Columns block.
One of the many things we use Jetpack for here on CSS-Tricks is all of its features related to social media integration. For example, Jetpack can automatically share published content to different social media accounts simultaneously, add sharing buttons to your site's theme, and allow for social login on the comment form. There is even more than that, but let's dig into these three as we use them.
WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce solution for WordPress sites. If you're like me, and like working with WordPress and have WordPress-powered sites already, WooCommerce is a no-brainer for helping you sell things online on those sites. But even if you don't already have a WordPress site, WooCommerce is so good I think it would make sense to spin up a WordPress site so you could use it for your eCommerce solution.
WooCommerce is a powerful and flexible eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Wanna sell subscriptions or memberships? WooCommerce can do that? Digital downloads? Yep. Appointments and bookings? Sure.
But the meat and potatoes of eCommerce, so to speak, is selling a physical product and shipping it and WooCommerce does that great as well. That's exactly what we do on CodePen's store. We aren't exactly in the eCommerce business as our primary thing, so we wanted something easy to handle. We're already using WordPress for our blog, documentation, and podcast, so using it for the store was a no-brainer.
Our T-Shirt printing company, RealThread, also does fulfillment. But it wasn't a matter of picking a technological solution that fits their needs. They already support WooCommerce, partially I'm sure because WooCommerce is so popular. We've used ShipStation in the past to do our own fullfillment directly. That's also what RealThread uses, so we just configured out ShipStation integration plugin to work for them.
This screencast goes into all that.
Over the past six months, I've become increasingly interested in the topic of web sustainability. The carbon footprint of the Internet was not something I used to give much thought to, which is surprising considering my interest in environmental issues and the fact that my profession is web-based.
Jetpack sponsored this video, which goes into what Jetpack is and can do for your site.
These are my words though! I'm a big Jetpack fan and I run Jetpack on all my self-hosted WordPress sites. It does a ton both feature-wise and performance-wise.
In this video, we look at a WordPress site I recently spun up where Jetpack was essentially the first plugin I installed. (more…)
