A client wanted a Pinterest-style WooCommerce gallery, which used to mean Masonry.js or fragile grid math. The CSS Working Group settled on display: grid-lanes instead, and it is still rolling out behind flags.
My niece walked into the office and asked what I was typing. Explaining HTML as bricks and CSS as paint was harder than I expected, and it showed me where I had gotten sloppy in my own work.
A WooCommerce homepage carousel was wrecking Core Web Vitals. Dropping the JS slider for CSS animation-timeline and view() cut the script weight and pulled the LCP score back into the green.
A client lost 70% of their reach in a week when a social platform changed its algorithm. This is the case for keeping your content on your own WordPress install, including how I organize it with custom post types.
A client with fifteen editors kept losing work to overwrites, which is exactly what Phase 3 collaboration is meant to solve. Here is what else the 7.0 planning covers: React 19, block validation levels, block bindings and the AI Client API.
A client wanted the cycling word effect from a SaaS homepage. A custom block would have meant migrating their existing headings, so I extended the paragraph block instead using the Format API, WP_HTML_Tag_Processor and the Interactivity API.
Gutenberg 22.2 lets you define button hover and focus states in theme.json instead of a separate stylesheet, and it accepts YouTube or Vimeo embeds as Cover block backgrounds.
WordPress 6.9 finally lets you style core form elements from theme.json, treating textInput and select like buttons and headings. It doesn’t cover focus states yet, so here’s the hybrid theme.json plus CSS setup that works today.
A designer lost a gig sending a PDF and Behance links. The fix is a real WordPress portfolio site built on a custom post type, so your work stays clean, portable, and independent of the theme.
What happened when a client’s multi-block plugin got unwieldy: how we reorganized the blocks, automated registration, and split out shared assets so it kept scaling.