I write about accessibility, developer growth, and building software that works for everyone.

How to add custom formats to WordPress’ block editor inline formatting toolbar

The inline formatting toolbar includes format options like bold, italic, inline code… The best part is you can add custom formats.

In a recent project, I used custom formats for different bold formats. The client’s visual identity has two main colours, so in headings, you can use the common bold in the same colour of the heading — black-ish — or use one of the two brand colours. This adds some variety to content-dense pages.

How to create two or more custom blocks in one plugin using @wordpress/create-block

Tutorials on creating custom blocks usually use creating a single block as an example. This makes sense because you may need to create only one custom block, and having a plugin with a single custom block is the best way if you want to share it.

There are many reasons to have several custom blocks in a single plugin, like making a shareable collection of blocks for a type of site or having all the custom blocks for a client’s site in a single plugin.

Everything Everywhere All at Once: How WordPress works

When you want to add a simple function to your WordPress, you can place it almost anywhere, and it will work.

Every time you load a page on a WordPress site, WordPress executes many different things, and they follow an order, but the order when some code is executed doesn’t depend on where it’s placed.

How one single parameter can improve database query performance in WordPress

There is a specific performance problem with queries in WordPress that has a quick fix, but it is not well documented — maybe because it has a hard-to-understand name and function.

This performance problem has its origin in MySQL. There is a query modifier named SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS which returns the total amount of rows if the query had no limit.

How to add dynamically generated images for social media cards using WordPress

Images are important when someone shares a link to your blog because it is displayed in a larger and more eye-catching type of card. This is great for blogs with great photography like fashion, travel or cooking blogs, or if you have an artist on its payroll.

Areas and alternative template parts in block themes

Template parts are not new to block themes. In classic themes, there were partial templates, that do not include the entire page and are reusable.

However, block themes’ template parts are not limited to a set of predefined templates. To create a new one we just have to:

How do styles work in block themes?

The main change in block themes is a JSON file that defines preset options and default appearance settings. WordPress then creates CSS based on this file and the choices we make in the editor.

The number of options that can be defined in the JSON file is growing, to the point that most design decisions can be made that way. Does this mean themes do not use CSS anymore? Not at all.

Why do WordPress’ block templates no longer use PHP and what does it mean for building themes and sites

In a classic theme, templates are PHP files where we can use WordPress’ predefined functions and our own together to get, manipulate, and show data. In a block theme, templates are HTML files, so we can not add PHP functions.

For example, dynamically adding the current year to the footer of a classic theme is a straightforward process.