This post covers what Friday April 13th (the day before WordCamp officially begins) will be covering on the development “track”. This was recorded using Zencastr and it is a conversation between Aaron Reimann and Micah Wood. Enjoy listening.
Aaron: [00:00:01] Hey, my name is Aaron and I’ve got Micah Wood here and we’re going to be talking about work camp Atlanta 2018, the day before, actually Friday the 13th which hopefully isn’t too spooky. We’re gonna be talking about what the developer day is going to be like and then get into what Micah is going to be talking about either on Saturday or Sunday for his session.
Micah: Hello.
Micah: [00:00:28] Hey, hey, how you doing?
Aaron: [00:00:29] I am doing well. So, how about you?
Micah: [00:00:33] Good.
Aaron: [00:00:35] Good.
Micah: [00:00:35] Keeping busy.
Aaron: [00:00:37] That’s good. So, most of the WordPress people tend to stay pretty busy, that’s why we can’t find developers on a regular basis, which is good.
So wanted to go into what Friday is going to be like. We had a couple questions on the Atlanta Slack saying, are we going to talk about Gutenberg and my response was, yes that’s going to be the majority of it. So, just want to get a couple minutes about what you think it’s going to be like.
Micah: [00:01:09] Sure, yeah. So I know in the past we’ve done workshops on different topics. One of those being theming and with Gutenberg coming to WordPress core soon and possibly, I don’t know, it’d probably be maybe right after work camp, it could be a little before, I have no idea.
Aaron: [00:01:26] Could be that weekend. Who knows.
Micah: [00:01:29] Exactly.
Micah: [00:01:31] So, I can only imagine that there will be a lot of developers who probably haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to Gutenberg until the point at which it gets in the core. So, I think there will probably a lot of people who are interested in that but ideally the, what we’re trying to do is cover Gutenberg in as much detail as possible, so we can kind of give everybody, all the developers a good overview of what Gutenberg is all about. So, starting obviously with the basics of what it is, which I think most people understand at this point. But also going into the technologies behind it and the WordPress API is built on top of those technologies and how to leverage those. And even a lot of documentation at the moment is still a little sparse. So being able to have an actual walkthrough type workshop where people can really explore that, I think is going to be very helpful to a lot of people. But then just covering what does it look like to build a Gutenberg block.
And technically I’m actually speaking on Saturday I think or Sunday, I can’t remember which but my normal talk is actually on creating a Gutenberg block and then, of course, we’re doing this workshop beforehand. So granted that I’ll only have 45 minutes to give a talk on creating a Gutenberg block, it will be a little bit more slimmed down but that Friday, we’ll get to have plenty of time to cover the topic.
Aaron: [00:03:10] Yeah, I was going to say on Friday we probably, in the past, like you said we’ve done some theming workshops and we’ve set up local developments and then we’ve actually shown code. I’m assuming in the Gutenberg on Friday we’ll have time and we’ll be going through and explaining the code.
Micah: [00:03:32] Correct. Yeah and so ideally we would have everybody set up with some way to run code on their machine. Typically the success of that depends on how many people actually already have something set up on the machine or take the time to do it before the workshop starts which I think is important. But yeah, so the idea is to actually have everybody kind of follow along. One of the things we’ve done in the past with the theming workshop is actually create a child theme and we actually created a repository where every step of the way, one commit at a time, which was commented, almost like blog posts. For every commit, you could actually follow step by step, what was going on. So that even after the workshop you could actually go back and review everything that we did in relative detail. So, I think as much as possible, I’d like to continue that with Gutenberg so that we essentially end up with a Gutenberg tutorial GitHub repository where people can kind of follow along if they get behind or something, they can jump ahead a few commits or whatnot or just review all that after the workshop if they, however they, it depends on how people learn really, best.
Aaron: [00:04:48] So that’s good to know. Since I’m in charge of getting the word out as an organizer, they’re going to need to have local developments set up, right and then they’ll need a text editor.
Micah: [00:05:00] Correct.
Aaron: [00:05:01] Okay.
Micah: [00:05:02] Yeah, Atom is the one I prefer. If you don’t have PhpStorm, which is my number one preference. It does cost…
Aaron: [00:05:09] I was going to say.
Micah: [00:05:10] …it does cost money.
Aaron: [00:05:10] I’ve never heard you promote.
Micah: [00:05:12] But you can get a, if you have Opensource project, you can actually get a free copy or if you are a teacher or anything like that but.
Aaron: [00:05:21] Right, yeah. I was going to say I’ve never heard you promote anything except for PhpStorm. So yeah and that is true, I’ve gotten, I taught some of my, at kids school, had a little class and I got ten licenses which I thought was pretty awesome for free. But yeah if you have a Opensource project, you can get a license or it’s just what? 99 bucks a year?
Micah: [00:05:47] Yeah, something like that.
Aaron: [00:05:50] So even if people don’t have that set up, they could go and get a, I think there’s a thirty day trial, right?
Micah: [00:05:56] Correct, yeah.
Aaron: [00:05:57] So I think the talk is on April 13th, so don’t install it until, I don’t know, a little after March 13th, if you’re not planning on buying it afterwards. But yeah, that sounds great.
So I think that that covers kind of what I wanted to get the word out about, is just what we’re going to be covering. I’m not sure how involved I’m going to be in it. I think we’re going to have Evan Mullins involved in it, he might be doing the beginning talk, kind of explaining where we are and where we wound up with the need of some kind of page builder because there’s a ton of page builders out there like Divi and Beaver builder and stuff like that and I think it might be good to have a little talk and maybe I’ll assign that to myself, as how are they going to interact or are they going to, is Gutenberg gonna be a page builder killer. We don’t know at this point and like we had said, the code isn’t out yet in the aspect it’s not in core. There is a plugin, if you’re planning on being in the session on Friday, definitely install the Gutenberg plugin, It’s in the WordPress repository. And I think that will give you kind of a heads up on what it’s doing in the back end.
Aaron: [00:07:24] So you can see the difference between the, I think the original and correct me if I’m wrong Mica, the original editor was Tiny MCE?
Micah: [00:07:34] Correct, yeah.
Aaron: [00:07:35] Okay and so Gutenberg’s coming in and replacing that, kind of in a 100%, I think it’ll still be there if you want to disable Gutenberg when 5.0 comes out.
Aaron: [00:07:49] But anyway. Well, thank you for your time Mica, I appreciate it.
Micah: [00:07:53] Yeah, absolutely.
Aaron: [00:07:55] Cool, any last words?
Micah: [00:07:58] Well, I’m trying to think. Well, I guess just a little bit more on the, kind of what will be covering, just so people will have a better idea. But yeah, just a couple of the basic approaches to creating Gutenberg blocks, which will include kind of the more PHP shortcode type Gutenberg block, as opposed to maybe a more dynamic block which will have front-end functionality. We’ll try to cover both of those used cases, as well as the different types of user inputs for blocks and when you would use those. As well as try to hit on, if you’re a theme developer, what do you need to know to be prepared to have your theme work with Gutenberg.
Aaron: [00:08:47] Awesome. That’s sounds great. And I look forward to working with you on April 13.
Micah: [00:08:54] Absolutely, Friday the 13th.
Aaron: [00:08:57] Yeah, don’t get too spooked. So hopefully everything works out well. So. All right thank you, Mica.
Micah: [00:09:03] Yeah.