With the introduction of Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0, the themes and plugins of the future will revolve around this notion of ‘blocks’. But what is a block? Maybe you’ve heard you can create your own blocks…but where and how does one actually do that? Are blocks written in PHP? Are they JavaScript? Both? Do you need to know React to create a block?
In this workshop, we will take a deep-dive into the anatomy of a block, answering the aforementioned questions and more. After a high-level discussion of blocks and how they function, we will get hands-on, creating blocks of our own within a set of demo files that can function as a starting point for your own projects.
Required skill set
You should be pretty comfortable with the following:
- WordPress development concepts such as hooks, template tags, and the database structure (e.g. post_content vs. wp_posts)
- Programming concepts like variables, loops, and conditions
- Foundational (not deep) JavaScript knowledge (e.g. objects and dot notation, callback functions, checking for console errors)
- Ability to use the command line to navigate directories and run tasks
- Familiarity with npm and build tools
Technical requirement
Your should have a local WordPress installation with the Gutenberg plugin installed. You also need to have at least Node.js 8 with npm 5.3 installed.