I tried explaining HTML and CSS to my five-year-old niece
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.
Category: Gutenberg
Smooth scroll animations with CSS and no JS library
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.
Why an owned content strategy beats renting an audience
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.
What is actually in the WordPress 7.0 roadmap
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.
Extending core blocks with the Interactivity 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 puts button hover states in theme.json
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: styling forms with theme.json
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.
Build a real WordPress portfolio site, not a PDF
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.
Structuring multi-block WordPress plugins that scale
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.
Stop fighting WordPress: use Block Bindings instead
A client hit me up last month. They needed a slick video section on their product pages, with dynamic content and a different video for…