18 May

Vindication!

I already mentioned this in an addendum to my last blog post, but it seems to warrant its own dedicated post.

I’m a self-employed, solo developer, not very actively engaged in the WordPress “community” even though my work is 95% WordPress. So I have apparently missed the memo that shortcodes were (prior to yesterday’s release of WordPress 6.2.1, anyway) the way people were injecting PHP into their HTML-based Block Theme templates. (Silly me… I was just misusing Block Patterns to the same effect.)

Well… as it turns out, allowing shortcodes in Block Theme templates apparently was a security issue, which the WordPress core team summarily “fixed” by just outright removing shortcode support in templates in this update.

This change did break a pair of sites for me (which are still just in final testing, not live, and which I need to go fix as soon as I finish writing this), but the problem was relatively minor. It sounds like a lot of people are using shortcodes extensively as a backdoor hack for adding PHP functionality to templates, and they are… um… not happy.

At what point does the Gutenberg team collectively take a step back and realize that maybe they’ve been the ones Doing It Wrong™ all this time? I feel like that reckoning is approaching.

A Gutenberg/Block Editor revelation… just stop trying

This is not as defeatist as it seems by the title. I’ve actually had a huge breakthrough in my ongoing battle journey with the WordPress Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg).

My biggest problem throughout the process of trying to build a Block Theme has been finding myself hamstrung by the lack of PHP in a Block Theme’s all-HTML template structure. I’ve ended up brute forcing my way into having access to PHP with a combination of ACF Blocks and Block Patterns. But it should have been obvious to me that both approaches were wrong, because I found myself creating ACF Blocks that didn’t have any custom fields and Block Patterns that didn’t have inserters.

The fact that I was using both of these tools in ways that they are patently not intended to be used should have been my first clue, but the problem has always been that documentation of all of this new technology is so scarce, inconsistent, poorly organized and out-of-date by the time it’s written, that it’s hard to really know in advance how they work, and whether or not you’re using them properly. And as my recent series of blog posts have indicated, I am the proud king of Doing It Wrong™.

But as I said at the beginning, I’ve had a revelation, which is this:

The only reason to create a pure “Block Theme” is if you intend to use the new Site Editor (a.k.a. Full Site Editing).

I emphatically do not intend, now or ever, to use the Site Editor, because I have always coded themes from scratch, and the people I am building sites for do not want to modify the overall design themselves, nor should they be given access to the tools to do so.

I am completely locking down access to the Site Editor on the sites I build, so why should I design my themes to work with it? Well… until now, I kind of just thought that was The Way Forward. Maybe it is, but it’s a way that does not, at all, align with how I do business or what my clients want/expect from me.

Luckily, core WordPress team member Carolina Nymark has written an excellent introduction to using PHP templates in block themes. It’s as simple as this. Just… use the old PHP-style of templates. There are a few tricks to be aware of, most of which are addressed by Carolina’s article, but some more I discovered along the way.

I’ve spent the last year and a half of building my block theme constantly butting up against this frustrating limitation. Now after about 4 hours of work, I’ve managed to convert my nascent Block Theme to using PHP templates.

I’ve eliminated my custom field-less ACF Blocks.

I’ve eliminated my un-insertable Block Patterns.

Things are working like they should. Well, mostly. This is an ongoing process. But the key test of the change has been that everything that was working in the theme before is working now, and I have the full capabilities of PHP and the long history of PHP-based WordPress development back at my disposal for future work.

I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks as I refine my process, including an overview of my general setup for a Block-friendly but PHP-rich base theme.

Update: Well, it seems rather fortuitous that I chose this undertaking when I did, because it coincides perfectly with the release of WordPress 6.2.1 which breaks shortcodes in Block Theme templates (which is even more of a shitshow for some people than it is for me, since it hadn’t occurred to me that shortcodes could be used as a workaround to the absense of PHP in Block Theme templates), including a pair of sites I’m currently developing using this theme. Switching those sites to the new PHP-based version of my theme should fix this issue automatically.

Getting out of my comfort zone… on bass and in the world

After two years of mostly not performing (or even interacting) with other people, suddenly I find myself thrust deeply into both.

I’m currently rehearsing on bass with the Minneapolis South High Community Jazz Band for a concert in the park on June 3, and I’ll also be playing bass in the pit orchestra (which is neither an orchestra, nor will it be in the “pit” for this show, but on stage!) for Summerset Theatre‘s production of the Queen jukebox musical We Will Rock You in Austin, Minnesota at the end of June.

Going into this, I figured the jarring proximity of other people in the post- (or, ongoing-) covid era would be the hardest thing for me to handle about the experience, but sight-reading sheet music for bass is reminding me of a much more enduring challenge.

I formally studied clarinet from 5th grade through my senior year of college, and I played saxophone in school jazz bands throughout high school and college as well. I was a music major, to boot. But I am entirely self-taught on bass (including reading bass clef), having mostly just played it in rock bands since first picking it up as a sophomore in high school so I could emulate Geddy Lee and Chris Squire.

I would label my bass skills as “intermediate” in general, maybe “intermediate-plus” if I’m feeling generous to myself. But I have three major weaknesses: occasional struggles to coordinate my left and right hands, less-than-instant recognition of notes above the staff in bass clef, and most significantly, a fear of the 6th to 11th frets.

It’s amazing how far you can get playing rock music and rarely venturing above the 5th fret (or outside of the 12th to 17th frets, which are easy to mentally map to the first 5). I have an immediate, instinctive recognition of where the notes on a piece of sheet music in bass clef are on the bass neck, if I’m thinking about the first 5 frets.

The problem is, jazz and musical theater expect a bit more out of a bassist. The past few years of playing in the jazz band (and having played in the pit for Summerset’s production of The Little Mermaid in 2019), along with numerous gigs as a part of 32nd Street Jazz, have forced me to finally learn the middle of the neck. But I still don’t have that immediate instinctive recognition of where the notes are.

And the weird thing about guitar and bass, compared to woodwinds, is that there are multiple places to play just about every note. So when you’re playing, say, a second line B-flat, you need to consider, “Am I going to play this on the 1st fret of the A string, or the 6th fret of the E string?” That consideration depends a lot on what comes next. If the line suddenly soars up to, say, a D above the staff, you really need to be on that 6th fret.

So far so good. If there are just a few sporadic notes, or a repetitive pattern, that sits best in the middle of the neck, I can get that down. But when there’s a fast run with a bunch of accidentals, I’m still just not tracking fast enough to pull it off. Until I have a part down cold, I often find myself in rehearsal panicking in the middle of a measure and quickly dropping back to the first 5 frets, where I immediately know a top-line A-flat is the 1st fret on the G string, for instance. Never mind the fact that in 2 beats I’m going to need to be up at the 9th fret. Eek!

It’s easy to get stuck for a long time as an “intermediate” bassist, especially if you’re in your 40s and not making a living as a musician, because there’s a big bump in the learning curve to get to that advanced level.

But maybe I’m just being too hard on myself. After all, other people are letting me play bass in these situations, so I must be doing it adequately. Right?

How did I not know about ClassicPress before now?

ClassicPressI’ve been using WordPress for 15 years, and have made it my go-to platform for all new websites I’ve built since 2014. So how is it that it took me three years to discover that ClassicPress exists, especially since its whole raison d’être is to keep the pre-Gutenberg dream of WordPress alive?

On one hand, being a solo developer — even before the pandemic — has always kept me a bit out-of-the-loop, especially since I don’t attend conferences. But I suspect the fact that I knew nothing of this also speaks negatively to the project’s future.

Is it gaining enough traction to continue to exist? Is it really a viable option to use on new professional projects in 2021?

Has the Gutenberg ship sailed? Well, yes, it has. But my issues with the current and future state of WordPress go beyond Gutenberg, to the nature of Automattic’s role in steering the ship, the greater vision of what WordPress is and should become, and… well… Matt Mullenweg’s personality. I feel like the future of WordPress is increasingly diverging from what I hoped to get out of it as a platform, and it’s clear that I’m not alone. That’s why ClassicPress exists.

There are a lot of things to like about ClassicPress, right out of the gate, besides the most obvious element, which is the absence of anything Gutenberg. It does away with a lot of the cutesy crap that’s rolled into WordPress by default, not least of which being the annoying proliferation of the word “howdy” and the beyond-pointless-to-actively-detrimental* plugin Hello Dolly.

As I look to my own future with WordPress and/or ClassicPress, I am primarily thinking about two things: 1) how/if I will continue to use it as the platform of choice for client projects, and 2) what the future will be for the plugins I have contributed to the WordPress community, and more specifically, my commercial plugin, ICS Calendar Pro.

I’ve been struggling with these matters for almost four years now, ever since Gutenberg emerged on the scene and went through its early phases of absolutely sucking, to its too-soon release as the default WordPress editor, to its current state as a mostly good but highly quirky and weirdly limited page building tool.

The timing was not great for me, as I had just recently gone “all-in” on 34 Blocks, my own block-based starter theme that I have been using to create all of my client sites since 2017. It started from a series of one-off client themes beginning around 2015 and is built around Advanced Custom Fields and its “Flexible Content” fields. It’s all much more in line with what “WordPress” has always meant to me. But as WordPress becomes Gutenberg, my vision of what this tool is and the reality of what it has become are increasingly at odds.

In those four years I’ve been bouncing around between several different ideas:

  • Suck it up and finally embrace Gutenberg development, learning a bunch of new stuff like React, in which I am not only wholly disinterested but with which I philosophically disagree?
  • Cling for dear life to Classic Editor and pray the gods of Automattic keep it on life support?
  • Switch to an entirely new platform, whether that might be another open source or commercial CMS, or a complete SaaS approach like Squarespace?
  • Get out of the web development business entirely?

So far, I’ve mostly stuck with “cling for dear life to Classic Editor” although I have been tempted a great many times to “get out entirely.” My enthusiasm for this field hasn’t been helped by things like the caustic toxicity of social media, the rise of absolutely godawful and not-at-all-intuitive-regardless-of-their-claims-to-such interface concepts (see: Google’s Material Design), and technical snafus like Digital Ocean’s entire subnet getting spam blacklisted and them doing absolutely zero to rectify the situation.

I’ve been taking baby steps towards making sure I’m not caught out when/if they pull the plug on Classic Editor. My 34 Blocks theme is to the point where it works adequately in the Gutenberg environment, and I’m even moving it towards a potential future where I would scrap my ACF Flexible Content blocks altogether, in favor of Gutenberg blocks.

But I’ve also made sure ICS Calendar is backward-compatible with WordPress 4.9, so it works with ClassicPress. And I’m still looking at other tools, now and again, in case I need to switch directions entirely.

It’s happened before. After the first half of my career consisted largely of building “bespoke” CMSes for corporate overlords, I went out on my own. From 2008 to 2014 I sunk thousands of hours into the development of a feature-rich, completely custom-built CMS based on the CakePHP framework, which I used to create about 10 client sites per year throughout that period.

But the writing was on the wall for that project when I found it impractical to upgrade the CakePHP core past version 1.3, which was incompatible with PHP 7. (CakePHP is currently up to version 4.1 and now requires a minimum of PHP 7.2, for an indication of just how doomed my old CMS project was.) By 2014 I gave up on it and switched to WordPress. Has the time come to move on again? If so, I feel like in some ways, switching to ClassicPress would be a step backwards, or at best a lateral move, and would not set me up well for the future.

Where does that leave me? I don’t know. There are options. But embracing Gutenberg and the future of WordPress is not at the top of the list. If anything, it’s never been lower.

* Why is Hello Dolly detrimental? The justification for its inclusion in the default WordPress build is that it is a demo for new developers to learn how to build a WordPress plugin. The problem is, it’s a terrible, no good, entirely wrong example of a plugin. It’s ancient and doesn’t conform to any modern WordPress coding standards, and it’s so rudimentary that there’s no useful structure to build on for people who want to create an actually useful plugin. So why is it still included? I don’t buy the “demo” argument. It’s still there because Matt wants it to be, and that in a nutshell is my problem with Automattic running the show. (I mean look, he even “cleverly” misspelled the company name so his own fucking name is embedded in it. That annoys me every damn time I see it… almost as much as “howdy.”)