A grand total of 77,609 responses from WordPress users and professionals collected by Automattic between 2015 and 2017. The stats for 2015 and 2016 have been shared at the annual State of the Word address and 2017 marks the first time they have been published on WordPress News.
I posted just 2 months ago about Foxhound and how I found it pretty cool, but also curious that it was one of very few themes around that combine the WordPress JSON API and React, even though they seem like a perfect natural fit. Like a headless CMS, almost.
I recently learned about a browser feature where, if you provide a special HTTP header, it will automatically post to a URL with a report of any non-HTTPS content. This would be a great thing to do when transitioning a site to HTTPS, for example, to root out any mixed content warnings. In this article, we'll implement this feature via a small WordPress plugin.
One of the sessions from the Chrome Dev Summit, hosted by Das Surma and Daniel Walmsley. It's not so much about WordPress as it is about CMS powered sites that aren't really "apps", if there is such a thing, and the possibility of turning that site into a Progressive Web AppSite.
I find the CMS + PWA combo interesting because:
If this topic doesn't trip your trigger, there is a playlist of all the sessions here. Dan Fabulich watched all 10 hours of it and summarizes it as:
Google wants you to build PWAs, reduce JavaScript file size, use Web Components, and configure autofill. They announced only a handful of features around payments, authentication, Android Trusted Web Activities, Chrome Dev Tools, and the Chrome User Experience Report.
I've only just been catching up with the news about Gutenberg, the name for a revamp of the WordPress editor. You can use it right now, as it's being built as a plugin first, with the idea that eventually it goes into core. The repo has better information.
It seems to me this is the most major change to the WordPress editor in WordPress history. It also seems particularly relevant here as we were just talking about content blocks and how different CMS's handle them. That's exactly what Gutenberg is: a content block editor.
Rather than the content area being a glorified <textarea></textarea> (perhaps one of the most valid criticisms of WordPress), the content area becomes a wrapper for whatever different "blocks" you want to put there. Blocks are things like headings, text, lists, and images. They are also more elaborate things like galleries and embeds. Crucially, blocks are extensible and really could be anything. Like a [shortcode], I imagine.
As of WordPress 4.7 (December 2016), WordPress has shipped with a JSON API built right in. Wanna see? Hit up this URL right here on CSS-Tricks. There is loads of docs for it.
That JSON API can be used for all sorts of things. I think APIs are often thought about in terms of using externally, like making the data available to some other website. But it's equally interesting to think about digesting that API right on the site itself. That's how so many websites are built these days away, with "Moden JavaScript" and all.
I recently came across an article by Rory Cellan-Jones about a new technology from Jigsaw, a development group at Google focused on making people safer online through technology. At the time they'd just released the first alpha version of what they call The Perspective API. It's a machine learning tool that is designed to rate a string of text (i.e. a comment) and provide you with a Toxicity Score, a number representing how toxic the text is.
The system learns by seeing how thousands of online conversations have been moderated and then scores new comments by assessing how "toxic" they are and whether similar language had led other people to leave conversations. What it's doing is trying to improve the quality of debate and make sure people aren't put off from joining in.
As the project is still in its infancy it doesn't do much more than that. Still, we can use it!
Eric Portis joins me to dig into the world of responsive images.
We start at the basics. Responsive images are specifically images in HTML and exist because of a desire for better performance. Images are probably the biggest culprit in the overall weight of websites. If we can avoid sending too many pixels across the network, we should. After all, a screen that is only 720 pixels wide doesn't need a 2000 pixel wide image, even if it's a 2x display.
CSS-Tricks itself is a WordPress site, and one in which WordPress is a perfect fit for. Between things like the login and permissions system, blogging, pages, custom post types, forums, eCommerce, and more, CSS-Tricks makes use of a huge swath of what WordPress is capable of.
We kicked a poll off three months ago asking y'all what kind of local development environment you set up for running WordPress locally. At the time of this writing, we got 2,623 votes, so a decent amount of significance here. Especially because the question was phrased:
If you're running WordPress locally (i.e running PHP, MySQL, and a web server), how are you doing it?
Presupposes that you are running a local environment. (Please do that.)