Category: Meetup

• Slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p1ASudMrtXy4y8iUWOSLVk78W2GGqfuza2OMxLJM9Sk/edit#slide=id.g2f44cfb4135_1_7
• Github repo: https://github.com/andreawetzel/wp-center-on-mobile/tree/main

• Article: https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/05/22/setting-up-a-multi-block-using-inner-blocks-and-post-meta/#registering-post-meta
• Blog filter: https://github.com/n8finch/n8finch-blog-filter

We had two great talks (25 minutes a piece with time for Q&A during/after):

1. Jason Lemahieu will be giving a short talk covering the process UW-Madison’s Division of Extension used for transitioning 300 websites from the Classic Editor to the Block Editor… What a journey! 😅

2. Nate Finch will be sharing using “serverless functions and services” on WordPress sites… It’s 92% less scary than it sounds! 😱

As always, if you’d like to join us on slack and need an invitation, reach out and let us know your email address.

Dave Van Abel shared some Block Editor features to build a page.

His outline and example page is at the link below:
20220726 MeetupWebinarOutline

Jeremy talked about Atomic Design patterns and how that relates to the Block Editor to build a site that works for your clients and theirs.

The slides are at the link below:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dUt0tTLxFAjbyCZd01K9-YYw1MRaWsxyPycoCukQ8dg/edit#slide=id.g112767534b9_0_69

Andrea presented a website where they have multiple authors and other requirements, which meant they needed something more sophisticated than setting up WP Users with fake email addresses!

The recording is at the link below:

https://earthlinginteractive.zoom.us/rec/share/qhoV_VNsjNBxr1BpbD2hw6WrBshiU5j8yx9neCaeveCO0d_pC5svP_25BZyUDh9P.fOIeLkTO4W5Yw2LU
Passcode: =2FEQa9X

Bekee presented her trials and tribulations while working on a client’s website to improve their Lighthouse Performance score. There are reference links in the slides, which can be viewed here.

Meeting Recording:
https://earthlinginteractive.zoom.us/rec/share/jEPk1nak8ETMoiwxwzneAFKvmp4gLjN803ujNfduGv50lBFQlpiBEViXCfqg-xDQ.iy5UZ7TD1r3fOtb5

Access Passcode: cqb*4+?q

Bekee presented how to implement and configure one of Elementor Pro’s kits:

Meeting Recording:
https://earthlinginteractive.zoom.us/rec/share/ttj5pTRMMAv2deCMVAKS-Fn73XjaG_LqOnLBECuZc5ioKo9MezvF8CbFFEvLjUW_.2id3LCcea6uV1yi3

Access Passcode: cqb*4+?q

Here are the links she shared in the Zoom chat:

Hello Elementor: https://wordpress.org/themes/hello-elementor/
Astra (there is a free version): https://wpastra.com/theme-for-elementor/

Elementor References: https://elementor.com/pricing/
https://elementor.com/academy/
https://library.elementor.com/english-pub/
https://elementor.com/help/how-to-use-site-kits/

Amit Kvint of OnTheGoSystems shared his WPML insight with us. The slides are here.

The presentation is available here.

Since its release in 2016 Elementor has become one of the fastest-growing drag & drop page builders for WordPress. In this introductory talk, we will cover what Elementor is, why it’s become so popular, and how you can use it to build stunning websites, even if you don’t know how to code.

Topics will include:
• The key differences between the popular Divi Page Builder and Elementor
• Free Elementor vs Elementor Pro
• How to get started & a brief look at the user interface
• A crash course on how to create a page from scratch
• A hack on how to create a page layout in < 1 min
• 5 useful Elementor features to know about
• 5 Tips on how to speed up your workflow in Elementor

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About the Speaker:

Lisa Ross is a web designer and strategist. She’s been designing and building websites for Earthling Interactive since 2016, and recently started her own business Launch & Grow where she helps Life Coaches create strategic websites.

The presentation slides are available here.

Dan Stout, of TechDistillery, brings us the presentation this month:

Spinning up a local WordPress development environment has never been easier with VVV. Whether you need one WP installation or a dozen, you can spin up and spin down like a champ. VVV works cross-platform, so no one is left behind. Come hear more about this useful and easy-to-use technology!

The presentation is available here.

Nate is back this month with the following:

1. Blocks: what are they, how do find them, how do we get more?
2. Modifying available blocks with CSS
and, if there’s time,
3. Making our own blocks: the Blocks API and the ACF Blocks API

A little about the Speaker:
Nate has been building websites for individuals, non-profits, embassies, and businesses since 2011. He loves web development because it’s the perfect mix of problem solving, building, and life-long learning. Nate is an avid learner and has made a habit of collecting masters degrees. He’s also been to six continents (not Antarctica yet!), lived on four, speaks Spanish, and is varying degrees of conversational in a couple other languages. Family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities outside of work. He now lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and daughter and is VP of Development at The Digital Ring.

The presentation is available here.

Making API requests with JavaScript is something web developers do every day. API services often require you to keep API keys out of the browser or route your requests through a server to secure the request. These requirements are meant to keep the API secure and not overloaded with hijacked requests. We will look at a workflow in WordPress that will route a request through the server and return the information to the browser without a page refresh. This workflow is particularly useful if you want or need to keep your API keys secret or out of the browser client, and make requests from a server and not the browser.

A little about the Speaker:
Nate has been building websites for individuals, non-profits, embassies, and businesses since 2011. He loves web development because it’s the perfect mix of problem solving, building, and life-long learning. Nate is an avid learner and has made a habit of collecting masters degrees. He’s also been to six continents (not Antarctica yet!), lived on four, speaks Spanish, and is varying degrees of conversational in a couple other languages. Family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities outside of work. He now lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and daughter and is VP of Development at The Digital Ring.

The presentation is available here.

HTTPS is the future of the internet, providing security, getting that cozy “Secure” lock on your browser and enabling a speedy future with HTTP/2. Forcing HTTPS helps secure our content and gives our users confidence to use our products. WordPress has even added HTTPS support to the minimum requirements for web hosts. But what if your site is already on insecure HTTP? What if it contains hundreds of blog posts full of content and plugins importing content from outside sources? There’s a lot to consider including all the absolute URLs to images in your database, outside links to your site, your google analytics account, setting up page redirects and testing to make users aren’t seeing mixed content warnings. This session will cover lessons learned from forcing HTTPS on several WordPress websites.

ecurity, getting that cozy “Secure” lock on your browser and enabling a speedy future with HTTP/2. Forcing HTTPS helps secure our content and gives our users confidence to use our products. WordPress has even added HTTPS support to the minimum requirements for web hosts. But what if your site is already on insecure HTTP? What if it contains hundreds of blog posts full of content and plugins importing content from outside sources? There’s a lot to consider including all the absolute URLs to images in your database, outside links to your site, your google analytics account, setting up page redirects and testing to make users aren’t seeing mixed content warnings. This session will cover lessons learned from forcing HTTPS on several WordPress websites.

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A little about the Speaker
Andrea Roenning is the Senior Web Developer and Designer at Forte in Madison, WI where she develops and manages several custom WordPress sites. She has been building websites as an in-house developer and for freelance clients or since 2001.

The presentation slides are available here.

Amit Kvint will share tips and hints for creating multilingual WordPress sites with WPML – how to do it right, we’ll cover:

– Choosing the right settings
– Following Google’s directives
– Making it easy for end users, editors, translators and developers.
– How to sell for all languages with WooCommerce

A little about the Speaker:
Amit has been creating for the web since the ’90s and with WordPress, since he came across it. Never made a single-language website and ended up working for OnTheGoSystems a distributed company behind WPML and Toolset, where he is the Compatibility team leader and Support Manager.

The presentation is available here.

Nate Finch will regale us with his extensive knowledge on the topic of customizing WP.

Everyone wants a unique web presence. WordPress makes this easy by allowing us to customize our website to our heart’s content.

BUT, where do you start? Where does all that custom code go? Maybe you’ve gone through a tutorial (or ten!) that instructed you to, “Put that custom style in your Child Theme” or “Just add this snippet to your functions.php file”, or some other direction for customizing your site.

In this talk, we’ll explore the overall structure of WordPress themes and plugins, and look at where to put custom CSS, JS, and PHP code, as well as the pros and cons for each approach. We’ll also refer back to the concepts from last month’s Child Theme discussion and explore extra resources to help us customize our websites.

A little about the Speaker:
Nate has been building websites for individuals, non-profits, embassies, and businesses since 2011. He loves web development because it’s the perfect mix of problem solving, building, and life-long learning. Nate is an avid learner and has made a habit of collecting masters degrees. He’s also been to six continents (not Antarctica yet!), lived on four, speaks Spanish, and is varying degrees of conversational in a couple other languages. Family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities outside of work. He now lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and daughter and is VP of Development at The Digital Ring.

Presentation slides are available here.

Want to create your own custom design for WordPress, but don’t want to rebuild all the awesome features that your favorite theme already has? Need to create something unique, but need to stay upgrade-safe? You need a child theme! Learn the benefits and gotchas of a child theme as well as learn how to set up a child theme as we create a custom child theme step-by-step during this talk.

Bio:
Beth Tucker Long is a PHP developer and co-organizer of Madison PHP and the Madison Web Design & Development group. You can find her on Twitter (@e3betht) or on her blog (http://www.alittleofboth.com­). Beth is a firm believer in promoting community and mentoring. She runs Treeline Design, a web development company, and Playlist Event Music, a DJ company, along with her husband, Chris.

The slides are available here.

Eric Anderson, a fellow Earthling, will be talking about how to get the Sage starter theme up and running and some general conventions for creating custom WordPress themes. Sage has a few automated build processes and he’ll spend some time going through how to get that set up as well. Please come with questions about custom themes even if they aren’t related to Sage!

Note: Sage 9 has just been released but he will be talking about Sage 8 since he hasn’t had enough time to work with Sage 9 to talk about it competently. If you want to start checking out Sage 8, here a link to the latest Sage 8 release: https://github.com/roots/sage/tree/8.5.4

The slides are available here.

You may or may not have heard about of the one biggest changes coming to WordPress core, Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the new backend editor that will change the way we create WordPress sites. Jason from Blend Integrated Marketing will discuss the following:

1. What are the reasons and core concepts behind Gutenberg and why should I care?

2. A short demo showing the features of what Gutenberg can do

3. Demonstrating ways to extend Gutenberg blocks

4. How this will affect WP development and the plugins our sites depend on

Presentation by Jason Jones from Blend Marketing.

The slides are available here.

Andrea Roenning is the Senior Web Developer and Designer at Forte in Madison, WI where she develops and manages several custom WordPress sites. She has been building websites as an in-house developer and for freelance clients or since 2001.

The slides are available here.

Josh Betz, from Automattic, brings us his expertise on the WP REST API.