Blocks, Accessibility, WP-CLI, and Troubleshooting at WordCamp US

Don’t Put Technical Support in the Wrong Box – Ben Meredith

Hey, I’m Ben Meredith with GiveWP and I have a tip for you: it’s entirely likely, if you’re anything like me, you’ve actually put technical support into the wrong box, mentally. You think about it like an extension of the development team; your technical support team needs to be well versed in technical issues and resolving those technical bugs, and so you’ve thought about it like an extension of the development team.

Actually, your technical support team is an extension of the customer service department and of the sales department. You’re going to attract more people to your product and to your service when you start thinking primarily about technical support in terms of tone, in terms of how you can solve customers’ problems without necessarily having technical skill at all.

So, if you’re coming to WordCampUS, definitely check out my session. It’s on Friday at 2:00 PM, and it is, “Your Technical Support Philosophy is Costing You Money and Angering Your Customers.” I’m going to go way more in depth on how you can flip the switch and start thinking about technical support in the right way. Look forward to seeing you. ~ @benUNC

Your Target Audience and KISS – George Woodard

Hey, I’m George Woodard, Agency Owner and Marketing Website Specialist at eLsqrd Media Group, and I have a tip for you, concerning attracting your target audience: make sure you follow the KISS principle, Keep It Simple Stupid.

As a business owner, you tend to want to wow your customers to draw them in, and that’s totally understandable because you want to get their business. That’s really what you’re in business for, however, often as professionals, you tend to end up talking over your customer’s head or talking directly at them.

What you want to do is start talking in a way that’s more collaborative in the approach. Best way to do that is ensure that your messaging is direct, it’s personable, it’s free of any type of jargon, and it’s focused solely on the benefits that you provide for them, even if you’re selling products or providing any productized services. And I hope that helps.

Also, if you’re coming to WordCampUS, I hope you get a chance to stop by, please check out my session. During my time, I will teach you how to build a social media posting application using WordPress and Zapier. I guarantee you’re going to enjoy it. Hope to see you there. ~ @eLsqrd

The Importance of Headings – Christina Deemer

I’m Christina Deemer, Senior UX Developer at Lede, a part of the Alley Group, and I have a tip for you: use headings appropriately.

Headings are important signposts that indicate what to expect on a page. They help sighted users quickly scan and decide what to read. And they’re the most popular method by which screen reader users navigate a page. Headings also help search engine crawlers analyze your content. As is often the case, what is good for accessibility is good for SEO. So to get the most out of your headings, add headings to your post and page content with the heading block. Changing the styling of a paragraph by making the text larger or bold doesn’t make it a heading. Assistive technologies and robots will only recognize headings if they are actual semantic headings and use descriptive headings that are meaningful. Imagine headings as a page outline and ensure that they clearly describe the content of their sections.

Structure your headings in order; there are six heading levels, H1 through H6. H1 should be the title of a post or page; there should be only one H1 on each page. Headings inside your content should be nested, so H3s should only be inside H2s. And you can use the block toolbar to change heading levels. Don’t skip heading levels just because you want the font size to be smaller. Just go over to the block setting sidebar to adjust the font size; it’s in the typography section.

And finally, you can ensure that your headings are structured properly by consulting the document outline tool in the block editor. You can find that feature hidden under the info icon, which is the small “i” with the circle around it in the top toolbar. If any of your headings are out of order, the document outline tool will highlight them in yellow, and when you click on that heading level in the document outline tool, it will take you to that heading so you can fix it. It’s such a helpful little tool, I really love sharing that with people.

If you’re interested in more tips that make your content better for all users and you’re coming to WordCampUS, please check out my session, “Embracing Minds of All Kinds: Making Digital Content Usable for People with Cognitive Disabilities.” ~ @cahdeemer

Custom Block Development – Nick Diego

Hi there, my name is Nick Diego. I’m a Developer Advocate at WPEngine where I spend the majority of my time creating content on modern WordPress development techniques, and also contributing quite a bit to WordPress itself. I couldn’t be more excited to be speaking at WordCampUS this year for a number of reasons; first, this will actually be my first in-person WordCamp, and second, there’s just so much happening in the WordPress community, especially surrounding full-site editing.

Now full-site editing was introduced at the beginning of 2022 with WordPress 5.9, which is a collection of interrelated features that allow users to edit their entire site using blocks. Features include everything from block themes and global styles to new theme-specific core blocks in template editing. Since then, we’ve seen significant enhancement in WordPress 6.0 and many more are planned in 6.1 this fall.

I think it’s safe to say that modern WordPress development is taking a very block-centric approach, and as a result, we’re seeing major plugins like WooCommerce developing their own block libraries and including functionality, increased compatibility with full-site editing. So what does this mean for WordPress builders? Well, blocks have become a fundamental component of how we build WordPress websites and the collection of blocks that we have at our disposal is important. Of course, WordPress core blocks are generally the foundation of every site and have become more and more powerful with each release.

There are also countless third party block libraries to choose from, but what if you need custom functionality that’s not readily available off the shelf or in core? Well, my tip for you today is less of a tip and more of a challenge: if you’ve never built a WordPress block before, and you’re in need of custom content for your client’s website or your own, now is the time to begin exploring block development.

I’ll be the first to say that building blocks can be challenging, depending on the complexity of your project, but getting started with block development has never been easier. In the past few years, WordPress contributors have created numerous tools to simplify the process and make building blocks more accessible to those without years of JavaScript and React training. I myself was one of them and I actually learned the fundamentals of React by building my first block plugin.

Coupled with WordPress core blocks, native block supports, and a bit of guidance, I can confidently say that every WordPress developer can add custom blocks to their tool set. To demonstrate this, I am setting a challenge for myself during my presentation at WordCampUS. The talk is entitled, “Let’s Build a Custom Block in 15 Minutes,” and the goal is to demystify the complexities of block development and WordPress and inspire you to begin building your own. I hope to see you there on Friday at 2:00 PM. Thanks so much. ~ @nickmdiego

WP-CLI Configuration Files – Milana Cap

Hi, my name is Milana Cap. I am a WordPress engineer at XWP, and one of the representatives for the WordPress Documentation Team. You might have heard about my cookies.

Last time, I gave you a few tips on how to remember and how to never have to memorize things with WP-CLI. Today, I want to talk about configuration files, not WordPress configuration, but WP-CLI configuration files. If you are hosting your WordPress installations on Apache, you most likely have the bright module enabled in your WP-CLI config file, if you want to have pretty permalinks working. This config file in your user directory is convenient for defining those things you often repeat in every project, such as subcommand defaults for example, but then we all have that one project that is different from all the others, and it needs a complete set of different configurations.

What then? Fear not, dear friend. You could set multiple WP-CLI config files in various places with the highest priority being the one in WordPress install directory. This config file will override the global one, but what if you don’t want to override all of it? What if you want to keep those subcommand defaults from an upstream config file, but also want to change some other things specific for this project? You can do that, by setting merge to “true” for the _configuration option. Find out more in config file section here. You can also join me at WordCampUS in San Diego for my “WordPress Through The Terminal” talk. And we’ll have some WP-CLI fun. See ya. ~ @DjevaLoperka

Copy Link with Highlight – Micah Wood

Hi, I’m Micah Wood and I work at Bluehost and I have a quick tip for you: so with everyone sharing information nowadays on the internet, typically we want to link to very specific content on a page. So if you are using the Chrome web browser, you can visit any webpage, highlight specific text that you want to share, and then when you right-click on the text, it will allow you to select “Copy link with highlight.” And then when you paste that link on an email or share it out, however you want to share it, when anyone clicks on that link, they’ll be taken back to that same page, scrolled down to the text that you’ve selected, and it will also appear as highlighted so that they know that you’ve specifically directed them to that piece of content.

And if you’re coming to WordCampUS, please check out my session, “Troubleshooting in WordPress,” where we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to diagnose issues that might be happening on your website. ~ @wpscholar