Brian Coords asked a great question on Xwitter this morning about tutorials and resources for learning the tooling and processes behind modern WordPress development, such as Node.js, NPM, and Git.
One of the trickier aspects of modern WordPress development, especially with the advent of blocks, is that it goes far beyond HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and (S)FTP. It involves mastering a constantly-evolving dependency chain of scripts. From my understanding, there’s an advanced workflow you need to master to thrive in sophisticated agency and enterprise environments.
Update: I just found out that my incredibly (multi-) talented friend Nyasha Green‘s LinkedIn course, WordPress: Introduction to Custom Block Building, covers using Node.js and NPM for building custom WordPress blocks.
Her course explains what a block is and how to customize it to make your WordPress projects easier and faster. Then you’ll explore how to create your own custom blocks and how to reuse them once they’re created.
Ny equips you with the necessary foundational skills to level up in creating, customizing, and managing WordPress blocks—enhancing your ability to build dynamic, user-friendly websites and opening up new content creation possibilities on your WordPress site.
A few folks responded to Brian’s Tweet with links to bootcamp-style learning tracks with broader missions, but nothing WordPress-specific has been mentioned thus far.
Here are some general coding resources that were suggested, though:
Is there anything beyond these broad tutorials or bootcamps that can help a newbie or intermediate developer brush up on what they need for WordPress development?
Resources I’ve Found:
An Opportunity
I see 3 tracks as being critical, right now:
- Plugin dev
- Theme dev
- Whole site development & maintenance
Yes, plenty of resources already exist for these topics, but when I’ve purchased courses or tried to learn block development piecemeal, there’s always been something static about the teaching approach—whether it’s the choice of IDE or some set of homegrown bootstrap scripts that need to be installed.
These additional dependencies have often restricted me from incorporating the learning into my existing stack and workflow. What I think people really need is a comprehensive approach that explains not only how to build plugins and themes and the foundational tools required but also how to update and distribute them.
For example, when forking themes and plugins on GitHub, developers and maintainers need to understand how to steward their sites as they exist through time — things like the appropriate way to pull down submodules and push updates back to the single source of truth or out to staging and production servers — or working with other contributors on the development side.
Without a holistic series of tutorials directly applicable to a WordPress-centric workflow, we’re all having to — or expecting the uninitiated to — make significant mental leaps and stitch together disparate technologies, which can easily result in dead-ends.
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