Ideas, Advice and Inspiration for the Open Source Builder Journey

Custom Templates and Layouts Tip: Daisy Olsen

website | @DaisyOlsen

Hello, I’m Daisy Olsen. I’m a developer advocate focused on the WordPress project, and I’m excited about block themes and how they will make creating WordPress themes easier than ever before. One thing that I think will be super helpful for WooCommerce builders in particular, will be the ability to create custom templates, to build cool layouts for sales landing pages using a combination of WooCommerce and core blocks in the block editor. To enable this feature in your theme, all you need to do is create a file named theme.json, that’s J-S-O-N, in your theme’s route directory with just a minimal amount of information.

Specifically, we will set a version and some layout settings. This file being present in your theme will enable the template editor, which you can use to create custom templates for posts and pages that can help you to feature your products in different ways. While the theme.json file can do a lot more than this, adding the file with is a small amount of information can be a great way to get started on the road to creating a block theme. If you would like to learn more, I hope to see you in the hands-on building your first block theme workshop that I’ll be leading at WordCamp Europe on June 2nd. Thanks.

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Partnership Tip: Jonathan Wold

website | @sirjonathan

Hi, I’m Jonathan Wold, one of the co-hosts of Do the Woo. And if you are a WooCommerce builder and you’ve built a product for the WooCommerce space, one of the frustrating things that you can deal with is like, how do you get people to know that it exists? We work and live in this big decentralized ecosystem, which is fantastic for a lot of reasons. As a builder, though, if you’re creating products in this space, it can be challenging. Like, how do you get in front of the audience? How do you connect with the folks who care about the problem that you’re trying to solve with your product? My suggestion for you is to think about how you can grow through partnerships. How can you find other people, other companies, organizations in the WordPress, the WooCommerce space that serve the same audience that you’re serving?

Ideally, they’re helping solve a different problem, but a complementary problem. And the idea at a high level is to look at how you can do partnership deals with them. Figure out ways to find aligned interests and create something together that provides benefit to that audience. And that ends up being a way for you to get in front of that audience. Solve a problem for them and have the benefits of being able to create a win for yourself, for the audience and the partner that you’re working with. So if you’re creating the product in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and you’re feeling some of the frustration of not being able to get that product in front of as large an audience as you’re wanting to, think about partnerships as a way of being able to do that. Thank you. And if you’re interested in learning more on this topic, come join me at my session, Growing in WordPress Through Partnerships. It’s in track two on day one at WordCamp Europe, and the local time is 2:00 PM, and would love to see you there.

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Custom Meta Tip – Ryan Welcher

website | @ryanwelcher

Hi, I’m Ryan Welcher, a developer advocate sponsored by Automattic. One question I see a lot is, “How to expose custom post meta in the block editor when using a custom post type?” Historically, a theme or plugin developer could register a meta box to display and manage custom fields. While this is still possible, those meta boxes are displayed at the bottom of the screen, which may not be the best user experience, depending on page length and other factors. My recommendation would be to use the slot fill system to create the interface in the block editor. At a high level, the slot fill system exposes locations where custom UI elements can be inserted using the register plugins function from the at WordPress slash plugins package. There are a number of locations available to choose from, but my go to for this use case is the plugin document setting panel.

This is located in the document setting sidebar just below the status invisibility panel or the template selector panel if using a block theme. Once the UI elements are in place, for example, a text box, you can use the use entity prop hook from the at WordPress slash core data package to be able to retrieve and display the post meta as well as take the user input and update the post meta. The last piece of the puzzle is to ensure that your post meta has been exposed to the rest API using the registered post meta PHP function. For a working example of this, have a look at the WordPress slash Gutenberg examples repository on GitHub. Thanks for listening, and hope you come and join me at my lightning talk, called Extending Gutenberg With Slot Fill, or my workshop on creating a pre-published checklist for Gutenberg.

WP-CLI Tip: Milana Cap

website | @DjevaLoperka

Hi, I’m Milana from XWP and one of the representatives for the WordPress documentation team. One of my greatest crushes is WP-CLI and anything terminal, really. After using WP-CLI on a daily basis for years, I wonder now how WordPress developers ever managed to do anything without it. I often hear the same arguments against using terminal and that’s typos and trying to remember commands and parameters. So here’s a little tip for that. WP-CLI has a tab completions, which means you can start typing commands and after three characters, just hit tab and the terminal will complete that word for you. If you can’t even start the command, after typing WP press tab twice, and you’ll get the list of all available commands. Another thing for easier remembering is that after WP command, the next command is usually a noun or an object you want to work with. After that comes the work, what you want to do with it.

My favorite global parameter that can be used with any command and sub command is prompt. It will prompt you with all available parameters for the command, so you don’t have to memorize or type any of those ever again. You can try and test it by typing following command anywhere inside WordPress install. WP user create hybrid hyphen prompt. Press enter and watch the magic. Another useful feature are aliases. This is WP-CLI level configuration, and it allows you to create aliases for each WordPress install you are working on, local or remote. Combined with SSH connection via keys, it can be a powerful way for fast managing any remote WordPress sites from your local terminal. And I could go on about WP-CLI for days, but we don’t have that time. Let me just say that with WP-CLI, you can do things out of the box for which no plugin is created yet. And we’ll do some of those things at WordCamp Europe, in Porto. So I hope you’ll join my WordPress Through the Terminal workshop. Thank you and see you soon.

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Project Delivery Process Tip: Vito Peleg

website |@VitoPeleg

Hi there. I’m Vito. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Atarim.io. We help web agencies and freelancers collaborate with their clients through an automation system for the service delivery. And I’m really excited about speaking at WordCamp Europe this year. This has been one of the top five items on my list when I first started the company, to speak specifically at WordCamp Europe, so I’m really excited to see everyone and to take the stage over there. What I’m going to be speaking about is how or why a basic three to five day project usually takes between four to six weeks when a client comes on board. So the standard within our industry is that a basic website, three to five days on our own, without the client, would take four to six weeks with a client. And this is one of the biggest challenges in my opinion of our industry, because without flinching, we’re adding more than 400% to the time that it takes to deliver any project, whether it’s a basic website to an e-comm website, all the way to more complex projects. 400% more is the standard, just because of the collaboration.

Now, I’m going to share exactly the reasons why and how we can tackle this challenge, but I’m going to give you one tip here that I’m sure that if you’re going to apply or implement within your process, within your delivery process, it’s already going to change things for you. The tip is two to five days frames. What I mean by that? A lot of times when we need assistance from the client, or we need something that they will do, we would frame this request as, “You have until next week,” or let’s say we’re gathering content, “This should take about two to four weeks to accomplish,” right? But when we are saying this, when we’re signaling to the client that it takes two to four weeks to deliver the content, that’s what they think. And as business, not because they are dumb or anything like that, just because they don’t know.

It’s like if a doctor would tell you that you have three weeks to live, that’s what you would believe them. But what we don’t understand is that first of all, it doesn’t really take two to four weeks to create content for a website. So what I like to use in our process and after working with more than 20,000 agencies and freelancers over the past few years, is suggest two days and a weekend. This is a rule of thumb. So you don’t have to use this exactly as is, but it just frames the mind to what we’re trying to signal to the client. What we’re doing by saying, “Two days and a weekend,” is that they need to think about when. Over the next two days and a weekend, you need to deliver X. What is this going to do? It’s going to encourage the client to open their calendar and try and figure out when, over the next two days and a weekend, they are going to complete the request that you have made, as opposed to suggesting that you have two to four weeks, and they’re like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to do this sometime over the next two to four weeks.”

And because it’s not scheduled, and because it seems like a two to four week project, which as business owners, we know that no one really has two to four weeks of anything to perform a task, then it just never gets done. So the quick tip for me to you is think about two days and a weekend as the framework for requesting actions from a client. Now, just a quick other one that I would give here is that you want to build momentum into the project. So the faster that you execute on the request that you need to do, the faster the client is going to respond with their requests. And even more than that, if you can get to the initial deliverable as quickly as possible, and I’m talking about not days or a week, but within minutes or hours, then this is going to signal to the client that you’re kicking off the project with energy, and there should be momentum to the project, and they should step up to the plate and deliver at the same velocity. So I’m excited to see you all at my session at WordCamp Europe. You can also visit us at our booth, at the Atarim booth, and also visit Atarim.io to systemize your workflow with your clients.

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Web3, a Suite of Technologies Tip: David Lockie

website | @divydovy

Hello, my name’s David Lockie. You might know me from agencies like Pragmatic and Angry Creative. I’ve recently joined Automattic as the Web3 lead, and coincidentally, I’ve got a talk coming up at WordCamp Europe 2022, entitled Web3: Trends, Opportunities and Challenges. So I wanted to translate that into a few tips for you all now and hopefully see you at WordCamp Europe. So the takeaway is that web3 is happening as a suite of technologies and includes a number of trends that are likely to disrupt WordPress in one way or another. And they translate into specific challenges and opportunities for us, some of which are actionable today. And it’s worth bearing in mind that web3 is coming down the road alongside other very disruptive technologies, like artificial intelligence and 3D. So augmented reality, virtual reality, et cetera, and together, they suggest this paradigm shift for the web towards more immersive experiences, and I guess the metaverse is the straw person vision of what that could look like.

My own take on web3 is that it’s part of the digital transformation of humanity itself. And by looking at web3, we can zoom out from our WordPress centric perspective and think more broadly about the importance and role of open source technologies as public goods for our global civilization. In terms of practical web3 things that I think are worth doing right now, whether you are a developer, a user or just interested in technology, exploring immediate integration opportunities with WordPress, so that could be accepting payments with cryptocurrencies, for example. We can also go and experiment with technologies and applications that are emerging in that space. So NFTs, defi, content gating with tokens, infrastructure, creative tools. There’s a whole bunch of stuff happening out there. Some of it’s really interesting.

Further, we could focus down on NFTs a little bit. I think they offer a really interesting opportunity that speaks to the strengths of the WordPress ecosystem. And finally, I think we should start a dialogue within WordPress to increase awareness of these technologies and start to harness the power of the WordPress ecosystem to imagine how WordPress might evolve over time to incorporate some of these to increase the resilience, the reach, and the value of the ecosystem that we live in day to day. I really hope that you’ll come and listen to my talk, WordPress and Web Trends: Disruption, Challenges, and Opportunities. That’ll be in track one, at 12 midday on Saturday, the 4th of June. Hope to see you there. Thank you.

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Agency Advanced Safety System Tip: Nev Harris

website | @thenevharris

Hey, it’s Nev, from nevharris.com, and I have a tip for you. But first I have a story, and it’s going to answer a question that’s been burning in your mind every time you walked in a plane. You sit down and you look out the window and it’s round and you think to yourself, “Why isn’t it square?” Or maybe you’ve just been getting on planes your whole life and they’re always square and you never thought of that. But now that I bring this up, you’re thinking, “Yeah, Nev, why aren’t the windows square?”

Well, here’s the reason. Now, if I say, think of a plane manufacturer, if you’re from the States, you’re probably going to say Boeing. If you’re from Europe, you might say Airbus. But what you won’t say is de Havilland. Now de Havilland was the first company to really come out with a commercial airline jet, and it took six hours off the trip across the Atlantic, and it was going to be the future. And they were going to dominate it, except for the fact that their planes would fall apart over the ocean and kill everybody, multiple, multiple times. See, because the fuselage would just break open and start disintegrating over the Atlantic and it was the ’50s and they didn’t have black boxes and all that kind of stuff. So they really didn’t have any idea what was going on with these planes. But there was these consistent disasters.

The problem was metal fatigue, and the metal would fatigue at the corner of these square windows. Now, de Havilland, they made these windows square for aesthetic purposes because they looked better than round windows. But what they didn’t realize, because they didn’t have the stress test data to analyze this, that metal would fatigue at these points and then at altitude, after a while, in the middle of the Atlantic, the fuselage would start breaking apart. Now, if they did have the stress test data, they would’ve realized the problem immediately and multiple planes and regretfully tons of lives wouldn’t have been lost.

Now, no one is dying in our business, thank God. But our profits can be dying a slow death if our costs start creeping out of control and we don’t realize it, so there is a disaster with our profits.

Now another story here, and I’m going to tie them all back together, is this just happened to me a couple weeks ago. I’m driving through the rain. And it was hard to see out, and I live in an area with a lot of deers, a lot of trees and everything like that. And a deer jumped in front of my car and I didn’t see it because of the rain. But all of a sudden my car slams on the brakes because it detected the crash before I could’ve, before any human could’ve. Because my car has what’s called, in Mercedes, terms an advanced safety system. And it’s automatic breaking when it determines that there is an object in front that a human won’t be able to break in time for.

Now here’s the point to both of those stories. I’m going to wrap it all up for you right here, key point time. Most agency problems, especially in eCommerce are preventable if we’re given adequate warning, if we could see it coming. So what that means is our profit needs an advanced safety system. And what an advanced safety system for our profit looks like is numbers that we could look at to be able to see, “Oh, this trend is going slightly negative. There’s a problem.” And we could catch the problem before it crashes the whole site. Now those numbers, they vary by business, but if you could figure out most agencies, businesses, problems are preventable if they’re given adequate warning.

So key takeaway here, your profit needs an advanced safety system. Now, an advanced safety system would look like numbers that you could see that would give you an indication that something really small was starting to go wrong. And then you see this trend just starts going negative and you think, “Oh, I need to look into that. I need to maybe fix something there.” So what that could look like is if people are abandoning their carts much more frequently, or if the time between checkout goes from a couple seconds to like 12 seconds. So that’s just couple examples of things that you could look at. And that will then let you know, “Hey, look. This is a growing problem. This keeps on getting worse. It needs attention.”

So that’s my tip for you. Thanks for listening. And I hope you come see me at my session at WordCamp Europe, because I’m going to be talking about profitable pricing. Thanks.

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Data Driven Content Personas Tip: Vassilena Valchanova

website | @vasvalch

Hey WooCommerce builders. It’s Vassi here. I’m a digital marketing strategist, speaker and trainer, and I’ll be part of the lineup at WordCamp Europe in Porto this year. What I’ll be talking about is a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart, and this is building data driven content personas. I’m sure you all know what buyer personas are, so what I’ll be focusing on is building that same type of persona, but for your content marketing needs, so building these personas that represent the audience that you’re trying to reach and the people you want to engage with your content. And I wanted to share with you a quick tip, something that not a lot of people talk about, and it’s that frankly, personas often suck. And I don’t mean that people don’t try to do the work or that they’re not going in with the right expectations and motivation, but I mean that people would often just download the template off the web, fill that in and call it a day.

And what I’m here to tell you is that if you are doing that, you’re doing it wrong. What you need is a template that fits your particular type of business, your particular type of e-shop and your particular type of content. So what you need to do is by all means, start with an existing template, but really think how the information you include in it is going to drive your day to day decisions. How is deadline on that page going to inform what type of content you create tomorrow, including information about your personas. Pet is going to be important if you’re selling pet food and it’s going to be completely irrelevant if you are selling office supplies. So do you or do you not include information about your persona’s pets? Well, it depends, really. No one else can tell you but yourself. So my please is, don’t make the mistake thousands of marketers make when they’re starting to create their personas.

Figure out what information you need in there, and really include only things that are going to drive your content forward, that are going to create you build content, that helps your audience understand your brand, like your brand, trust your brand and buy from your brand. I hope this is useful. It’s not something a lot of people talk about and it’s just the beginning of my talk. So for more, I hope you join me at my session, Building Data Driven Content Personas at WordCamp Europe, in Porto, this year. I’ll be opening up day two of the conference in track one, and I hope to see you all there. Bye.

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Get the Most Out of WCEU Tip: Devin Walker

website | @innerwebs

Hey, what’s up? This is Devin Walker, creator of GiveWP and current GM at Liquid Web of GiveWP. I’m going to be speaking on a panel at WordCamp Europe 2022. Glad to be back in person. The panel’s going to be on WordPress acquisitions. Going to have a couple great co-panelists with me as well, but a couple quick tips for you looking to get the most out of WordCamp Europe. If you’re a WordPress developer or specifically a WooCommerce developer, I’d encourage you to go around to the different page builders, the different hosts and see what they’re doing to speed up WooCommerce, to speed up WordPress in general, but for WooCommerce, what are they doing to optimize the database? What are they doing to ensure that you have the best concurrency depending on different load amounts and different times of the day. Perhaps you’re going to be doing a big sale for a client or you’re custom coding a solution. Maybe there’s some tools out there that you don’t know about.

One of my favorite things to do is go around to the different booths, especially at WordCamp Europe, because I’m here in the US. A lot of you are. We see a lot of brands over there that we don’t see every day. So I’m really excited to go around and talk to them. You should be too. See what they’re doing, new with WooCommerce. Kind of give them that update about speed. Keep that in the back of your mind. We’re always concerned about making the best user experience and having a fast optimized site is one of those. We know WooCommerce can get sort of a bad reputation based on the heavy load. Different extensions can add to it, so on and so forth. So before you go to any sessions or whatever, make sure you just stop by that sponsors hall and check it out. Say hi to me if you see me around. I’ll be around. Looking forward to WordCamp Europe 2022. See you there.

Block Dev Skills Tip: Greg Ziolkowski,

website | @gziolo

Hi, I’m Grzegorz Ziółkowski from Automattic. I want to invite you to my upcoming talk at WordCamp Europe. I titled it Level Up Block Development Skills. And why do I think that this session is more important than ever? Because this year we witnessed the most groundbreaking WordPress release ever.

It’s finally possible to create teams that are entirely composed of blocks. And that also covers the WooCommerce stores, which have now a special compact mode so everything works great with this paradigm. So users can use a single functionality to change every aspect of the website. So, I will present a wide range of ways to each block editing experience with custom blocks. And I will start with no code solutions that are practical for everyone, and I will progress to more and more advanced development techniques.

And I will finish with ways to submit a newly created plug-in to the block director. And this is even more interesting for WooCommerce stores because the roadmap is very interesting for this year. And in particular, the project that’s meant for later is called blockifying the single product template, which is open a wide range of customization and using all the techniques that I want to present in my talk.

So thank you. And I hope you come and join at my session on Friday, June 3rd, at 4:00 PM. Porto time track one.

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Your Worth Tip: Paul Bearne

website | @pbearne

Hi. Paul Bearne here. I’m giving a talk at WordCamp Europe on finding your WordPress lifestyle, insider insights from a veteran coder. I’m going to take you through some of my career and talk about the various types of companies I’ve worked for. I’m going to also give you tips about how I got to work with those companies and how you might be able to get there. And one tip for now, you are worth more than you think. Hope to see you at the talk. It’s the first talk on the second day, in the second room. See you then. Bye-bye.

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