Dev Blog

Unit-testing your WordPress plugin can be challenging. Luckily there are tools out there making it a lot easier. In this post, we will be covering the following tools: PHPUnit, Mockery and BrainMonkey. Together these tools can be a powerful tool to ensure the technical quality of your plugin. Before we started using these tools at …

To perform tasks in our repositories, we use a JavaScript tool called Grunt. With Grunt, you can use packages from the npm repository, or you can build your own. Searching on the npm repository will give you an extensive list of grunt tasks ready for use. Workflows With Grunt, you run tasks, which need to …

Welcome to part four 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 how we can use them to better integrate with other plugins, in a reliable and safe way. In the previous chapter, we migrated over from our own bare bone …

This week, we released our first digital story; Diversity, inequality, and prejudice; a sociological exploration. This is the first in what will, hopefully, become a small series of stories that really define our mission, company culture, and broader vision. With these stories, we want to explore the possibilities the WordPress block editor has to offer …

As a tester in a continuous development cycle, you know that you test your application not only before a release, but also on a daily basis. You'll want to automate most of your basic (though very important) short repetitive test cases, which consume lots of your time when testing manually. That way, you can focus …

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 …