Dev Blog

Every profession has its own terminology, or lingo if you will. So does design. For me, as a self-taught designer, I noticed that a lot of the terminology used in design is often more confusing than it actually helps me in my work. Terms like style guide, design language, design system, design kit, and pattern …

When you're creating your own WordPress theme or adapting an existing theme, pay attention to your code structure and semantics. This will benefit your website greatly: it improves your SEO because search engines know better what to expect on your site. It will also improve your site's accessibility: meaning that people who use assistive technologies, …

Design patterns Over a short period of two years, the UX department at Yoast has grown from one UX designer to the current UX team of four designers. In the early days, we were used to making UX decisions based on gut feeling and common sense. At times, these designs worked out well, but sometimes …

As plugin developers, we are continuously working on implementing features and fixing bugs. We’re not flawless, but fortunately we, at Yoast, have a QA team that tests our plugin daily, both manually and automatically. Sometimes when they find a bug, a specific commit or pull request comes to mind that is the likely cause. Sometimes …

Function components in React are awesome. They let you create a component without the overhead and extra code of a class. However, up until recently, class components did have an edge over function components. Specifically: class components could have state, whereas function components were doomed to be stateless. Now, with the addition of hooks in …

As WordPress developers, we're busy with developing features most of the time. Developing functionalities is awesome, but a lot can go wrong too, unfortunately. One way to help prevent things going awry is having your own blog. Here, I'll explain how writing for my own blog helped me understand WordPress users better and improved my …

Plugins and themes from the WordPress.org repository install as stand-alone packages; they need to contain all the code, files, and dependencies needed to function correctly. Because there is no centralized system with an overview of all the dependencies used in different WordPress plugins and themes, they all need to implement their own safety net. Dependencies …

Welcome to part three of our series on using the WordPress JavaScript API’s, in which we explore the API’s that were introduced in WordPress 5.0. And, we'll look at how we can use them to better integrate with other plugins, in a reliable and safe way. Up until now, we’ve been adding code to the …

Welcome to part two of our series on using the WordPress JavaScript APIs. In this series, we explore the APIs that were introduced in WordPress 5.0. And, we'll look at how we can use them to better integrate with other plugins, in a reliable and safe way. In the previous post, we started creating a …

With the recent release of WordPress 5.0, a new editor was introduced into the WordPress ecosystem. Based on a new tech stack that includes React and Redux, WordPress now allows for richer, more intuitive interfaces and simplifies the overall editing process. But that's not all! With the recent changes, it's also become much easier for …