Tag: PHPeculiarities

Why are major WordPress plugins not bothering to fix their numerous PHP 8.1 deprecation notices?

I’m an early adopter for a lot of things, but new versions of PHP are generally not one of them. PHP 8.1 wasn’t really on my radar until I set up a new server running Ubuntu Linux 22.04, where PHP 8.1 is the default version.

Yeah, I’m a commercial WordPress plugin developer too, but my business is small. It’s easy to understand me not being 100% on top of this.

What I do not understand is how huge WordPress plugins like Jetpack, WooCommerce and Wordfence can get away with not being on top of it.

The general response these developers are giving when questioned on this is, “they’re only deprecation notices, everything should still be working.” Which is true.

But.

Are you a developer? Do you ever need to turn debugging on? Have you seen what happens when you have multiple plugins active, each of which generates 5-10 PHP deprecation notices on every page when debugging is turned on?

Aside from making the site, and especially the WordPress backend, borderline-to-entirely unusable (which, honestly, is a bigger problem than what I’m about to say), it also makes normal debugging impossible. It’s hard to find real issues when you have to wade through more than a screen’s worth of irrelevant deprecation notices. And the sheer volume of the notices breaks page layouts to a point where it’s impossible even to know what is or isn’t broken.

I actually blame PHP for this. I don’t know what they were thinking with some of these changes that are triggering all of the deprecation notices. I know “real” programming languages aren’t as loosely typed and lenient with sloppy coding as PHP is, but… well, it’s kind of too late to put that genie back in the bottle. I haven’t bothered to investigate exactly what the rationale is for no longer allowing null input to string handling functions. What I do know is that there’s a ton of code out there, written by competent, experienced developers, that is now triggering these warnings, because until now it was always fine to equate null and an empty string.

Anyway, principled arguments aside, I have a more practical frustration to deal with right now… I’m finding it hard to do my work, because other people haven’t done theirs.

Making Bootstrap work with the WordPress Block Editor

tl;dr: You need to load Bootstrap’s CSS in the 'wp_enqueue_scripts' hook with a priority lower than 10.

Where do I begin with this one? First, some foundational details: I’m old school. I’ve been a professional web developer/designer since 1996. I’ve embraced new technologies as they come along, but I tend to bristle at things that are either a) not an open standard or b) need to be compiled.

I refused to use Flash. In the end I was proved right, as open web technologies supplanted it. Flash is dead, and the open web is not. I still refuse to use CSS preprocessors for a similar reason. They’re a non-standard workaround to limitations in the current standard. They fragment the landscape instead of pushing the standard forward. And as CSS variables have gained wide browser support, preprocessors are beginning to look as pointless as Flash.

Now the thing I hate is npm — or any similar tech that requires me to run shell scripts and compile anything. I’ve long since embraced server-side scripting, using open source libraries like jQuery, and even using a pre-built CMS (or CMS-ish system) like WordPress. (Yes, for many years I rolled my own CMSes.) The bottom line for me is, if it’s code I can download simply and treat as a “black box,” fine. But if it’s something I need to get my hands dirty in, I shouldn’t need anything to work with it but a text editor.

All of that to say, I am having a bit of a time with where things are going these days with Gutenberg, a.k.a. the WordPress Block Editor. And I haven’t exactly been quiet about it here.

This week I needed to extend the Block Editor by creating a carousel/slideshow block. Yep, I’ve rolled my own with these for many years as well, but this time around I decided I wanted to work with something pre-built, so I settled on the one in Bootstrap. I don’t really need all of Bootstrap (although I suspect over time I will need more of it), but customizing it requires using npm, so I decided to go ahead and include the entire pre-compiled package in my theme.

That’s when the problems began.

Oh, the carousel works great! But I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to figure out why the custom background color and fonts defined in my theme.json file were being ignored… especially since they’re right there in the inline CSS inside the <head> of every page.

Don’t even get me started on inline CSS, or the way so many people in the industry seem to worship PageSpeed Insights. Once again we’re skating to where the puck is, instead of where it’s going, and to stretch the analogy to the limit, we’re melting all of the ice in front of it too. This is not the way to move web development forward intelligently.

Ah-hem.

Eventually I worked out what’s happening. WordPress, historically, was designed to allow you to define dependencies, so you could load CSS and JavaScript in a logical manner. Gutenberg/Block Editor throws all of this out the window with this inline CSS. Certain “critical” inline CSS for the Block Editor gets loaded immediately regardless of the dependencies you put into wp_enqueue_style(). The result being, styles defined (indirectly, in a way more convoluted way than vanilla CSS) in my theme.json file were appearing before the Bootstrap CSS file was loaded. And since I’m using the compiled Bootstrap instead of a custom npm build, there’s a bunch of “general” CSS it’s throwing in, including color and font definitions on the <body> tag that override Gutenberg’s earlier inline CSS.

Fortunately, someone else had the same problem and figured out a solution. But since, in 2022, spammers overrun any forum thread that’s left open too long, the thread was already locked and I couldn’t express my appreciation to the poster who shared it. So I’m writing this blog post instead.

The trick is to load any third-party CSS that you might need to override using a separate function called on the 'wp_enqueue_scripts' hook, with a low priority number (less than 10, since that’s the magic default).

Here’s a generalized version of the code I’m using:

function my_enqueue_scripts_early() {

    $ver = '1.0.0'; // Your theme version; could also be a class property, constant, global variable, etc.

    wp_enqueue_style('bootstrap-style', get_theme_file_uri('vendors/bootstrap/bootstrap.min.css'), array(), $ver);
    wp_enqueue_script('bootstrap', get_theme_file_uri('vendors/bootstrap/bootstrap.bundle.min.js'), array('jquery'), $ver);

}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_enqueue_scripts_early', 8);

WordPress development in the Gutenberg era: Threading the needle of Block Theme development

As described in several of my recent posts here, I have been working for the past month or so on building my first “all-in” Block Theme for WordPress.

After nearly 4 years of adamantly resisting “Gutenberg” and the new Block Editor revolution — not because I disliked the block concept, but because I disagreed philosophically with the core team’s approach (to what constitutes a block, which types of blocks are important, and which technologies are used to manage the UI of the editing screen) — I am finally accepting that if I am to continue making a living primarily as a WordPress developer, I need to give up on my Classic Editor, Advanced Custom Fields “Flexible Content” approach, and embrace that the Block Editor is now The Way.

One of numerous challenges I’ve faced in this process (on top of the learning curve of a completely unfamiliar method of constructing themes, the dearth of adequate and up-to-date documentation, and the core team’s willingness to allow very unfinished versions of functionality to roll out in public WordPress releases) is figuring out the best way to approach some of the more complex design structures I am used to dealing with via ACF’s Flexible Content fields.

My biggest hurdle is recognizing that what I think of as a “block” is not what the WordPress core team thinks of as a “block”

Here I will admit this is a shortcoming of my own approach. I have been “opinionated” in my development approach (well, about everything, really), and created large-scale and complex “blocks” that, in Gutenberg/Block Editor terms, would really be “groups” or “block patterns,” not blocks. Gutenberg blocks are more granular.

Gutenberg blocks are also static, in that they generally do not interact with database content, or if they do, it is in very limited “bloggy” ways that don’t align with my use of WordPress as a general-purpose CMS.

So I’ve found myself falling back on ACF. I like its server-side approach. I’m more accustomed to dealing with PHP and MySQL. I use JavaScript (mainly jQuery) a fair bit for front-end interactive elements, but I don’t build complex functionality in JavaScript and I avoid AJAX if I can help it.

You can see I’m destined for a strained relationship with the Block Editor.

A concrete example: “Tiles”

One of the most idiosyncratic elements of my old ACF approach is the block I call “Tiles.” It’s a way of creating a set of small blurbs to link to other pages/posts. There are numerous options for appearance: number of tiles per row, relationship between the image and text in a tile, etc. And there are also numerous options for the content source: a specific page or post (with the title, featured image and excerpt automatically pulled in), a dynamic feed from the blog or a specific category (likewise with the info pulled in automatically, except this one auto-updates when there’s a new post), or a completely custom-built tile, where you manually select the image and enter the text and link.

Here are screenshots of the ACF-based editing tools for my Tiles block.

I tried recreating this entire setup as a new ACF-based Block field group. It worked, to be sure, but the complex ACF editing layout really did not feel right in the new Block Editor interface, either in the sidebar (eek) or in the main content area. It felt like a cop-out.

Then I considered creating a block pattern. I knew this would lack some of the benefits of my ACF-based Tiles block, but one in particular: the option to dynamically pull in the details of another page/post, rather than manually entering the text. But as a starting point, I decided to recreate the “custom” tile type.

That, also, worked. But it was finicky and didn’t apply well in a lot of different places. So I realized that instead of creating a Tiles block pattern, I needed to create a Tile block pattern. Just one tile. Instead of a monolithic block that was really a group, users would insert each individual tile into whatever larger structure they want (e.g. columns).

The end result was a block pattern that looked like this (screenshot instead of live code because, well, you really don’t want to use this):

I was really proud of myself for using the new “lock” feature to force the elements to stay in a particular order, but to allow the user to remove elements they don’t need, such as the image, lead-in text, or CTA button.

Still… I didn’t like it. And it didn’t allow for dynamic sources.

Along the way I also finally came to grasp another fundamental limitation of the Block Editor and Block Patterns. Since all of the parameters of the blocks are stored as HTML comments right in the post content, you (the theme developer) can’t update the design of a block pattern once it’s inserted into a page/post. The Block Editor isn’t dynamically inserting content into a template when the page is rendered. It’s making a one-off copy of the template and storing it right along with the content at the point when the content is inserted into the page/post.

This seems, to me, to be a fundamental flaw in the entire Gutenberg/Block Editor approach. It’s bad enough that if I were building it myself, I’d have stopped right there and taken a completely different direction. Maybe there’s a long-term plan to address this limitation, but for now it appears to be here to stay. Which led me back to ACF.

Threading the needle

And that was when I had my insight into the true nature of the problem. It was the fact that what I think of as a “block” is larger-scale than what the Block Editor treats as a block.

So I went back to my Tiles ACF field group, stripped out the repeater functionality and created a Tile ACF field group. Now you’re building one tile at a time, it has all of the previous benefits of ACF’s dynamic integration of content with template functionality, it seems to correctly fit the definition of a “block” in the WordPress sense, and you can still have a flexible presentation of multiple tiles in a group… just using Block Editor “groups” to achieve that.

I still have more to learn and questions to answer (followed by more questions to ask and then answer), but I feel like this was a major step forward in finding a way to merge the benefits of ACF with the… inevitability, I guess, of the Block Editor.

Gutenberg: How is this better?

Every time I run into another weird, seemingly illogical quirk of the process of building a WordPress theme with Block Editor (a.k.a. “Gutenberg”) support, I ask myself the same question: How is this better?

As time goes by, the answer is starting to come into focus. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely satisfying.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

How is this better than what came before?

Well… what came before? You can’t ask the former without first answering the latter.

Over the years, WordPress has become many, many different things to different people. So you can’t expect the Block Editor/Gutenberg to be universally better (or worse) than what it’s replacing, because it’s replacing so many different things.

Is it better than the various “page builder” plugins out there? I’m looking at you, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery, among others.

Honestly, I loathe every last one of these page builder plugins. Partly that’s because before I worked primarily with WordPress, I rolled my own CMSes for years, dating back to the pre-.NET Microsoft era of ASP talking to a SQL Server 7.0 database. Then I moved to MySQL and PHP, first building a completely custom system before any MVC frameworks existed, followed by several years of development on a fairly robust custom CMS based on the CakePHP framework. I was very proud of that work, but by 2014 it was clear WordPress (which I had used for my own blog and occasional client projects since 2006) was picking up enough steam as a general-purpose CMS that my own couldn’t keep up, and I took the WP plunge.

Almost immediately, I wholeheartedly embraced Advanced Custom Fields as my solution to extend WordPress. And, in particular, I used its Flexible Content fields to create my own Block Editor-style interface, years before Gutenberg existed.

It’s way better than page builders.

But it’s also not entirely “the WordPress way.” It’s way more “the way” than Elementor and its ilk, but still… it led to a situation where all page content on my sites is stored in the wp_postmeta table, which is not ideal, for many reasons.

What’s good about the Block Editor?

I absolutely, 100% prefer the Block Editor/Gutenberg over the popular page builder plugins. It’s a much cleaner, faster, more intuitive user experience, and it renders front-end pages quickly. It’s built in which is a benefit in and of itself. But honestly, it only feels built in because WordPress is changing itself to be more like Gutenberg, rather than Gutenberg being built to feel like the WordPress we know and love.

Aesthetically, I like the Block Editor. For usability… well, where do I begin? I’m an old fart who still expects all of the available options to be visible on-screen, not just “discoverable” if I happen to hover my mouse in the right spot. And I’m a lot more savvy to this new type of interface than most of my clients, so I struggle to understand how the WordPress core team thinks this is an optimal approach. (OK, so maybe this paragraph belongs in the “bad” section below.)

But that leads me to the best thing about the Block Editor, which is not inherently great. It is what it is. I don’t mean that as the empty cliché we hear a thousand times in every business meeting or reality show interview. I mean it literally: The Block Editor is WordPress now. There’s no going back. So while that may mean some growing pains and struggles, it also does mean that it will (probably) continue to get better over time, and unless it is an absolute failure, WordPress will continue to grow, which means it will always continue to receive support.

What’s bad about the Block Editor?

This is another one that really depends on your perspective: where you’re coming from, what you’re used to, what role you play in the creation of a website.

If you’re a content editor who is a capable system user but not a developer/UI designer, and you’re used to the “vanilla,” TinyMCE-based WordPress classic editor, there’s a very high probability that you will be confused, overwhelmed, and/or frustrated by the Block Editor, because the concept of “blocks” does not reveal itself in the most optimal way as you are discovering it. (I’m not sure what the most optimal way is, but I’m confident this isn’t it.) I will say, however, that the glitchy, wonky, invasive behavior of earlier iterations of Gutenberg has almost entirely been smoothed out.

On the other hand, if you’re that same content editor, but you’ve been forced in the past to work with Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery, or something similar (and, if you have, I’m almost certain you hate it, based on anecdotal observations), then I think there’s a good chance you will love the Block Editor, at least if you’re given the opportunity to experience it in its pure form, not something that’s been bastardized the way those aforementioned plugins destroyed the classic editor.

But me? I’m a developer. Although I obviously spend a fair bit of time using the editor to test my work and also to assist in initial content loading on new sites, I mainly work behind the scenes, in code. And this is where I struggle mightily to understand just what the hell were they thinking??? with some of the decisions that went into how the Block Editor functions at a code level.

What’s it like to code for the Block Editor?

There are two main ways in which building Block Themes and/or coding for the Block Editor differ greatly from the “classic” way WordPress has functioned up to this point.

First, at a more surface level — in fact, it’s a level you can even stumble upon in the Block Editor itself if you click the right (wrong?) button — there’s the block markup, and how it gets stored in the database.

There is something that is absolute genius about this. In fact, conceptually it’s probably the biggest Eureka! moment of the entire Gutenberg project. All of the meta data about each block is just HTML comments. That means that all of the actual content of a page/post built with the Block Editor is stored where it should be in the database: in the post_content field of the wp_posts table.

This is much better than the way Advanced Custom Fields works. It’s fewer database queries, so it’s faster, and it’s where the content “belongs” so it’s automatically handled correctly by plugins — anything from Relevanssi for custom site search tools, to Yoast SEO for search engine optimization. (OK, those are both search-related, but in very different ways.) And the use of HTML comments for the meta data means it’s even backwards compatible: if the content gets loaded in a theme that doesn’t support the Block Editor, it may not look exactly right, but your content will at least still be on the page, in its entirety.

The problem is, the code itself is kind of a mess. I like the idea of using HTML comments to store the block meta data, and I like the use of JSON as the format for the properties.

But it often ends up being a lot of code, which is messy if you ever need to look “under the hood.”

And it’s fairly brittle, so if you edit any of it directly, you’re probably going to break it, and at this point the Block Editor only has middling success at recovering “broken” blocks.

And the documentation so far is woefully lacking. I know only too well how hard it is to make the time to write proper documentation, but when you’re forcing a change this radical on a user base this large, you need to prioritize it.

And worst of all, all of that JSON code is really only to get the editor to “remember” the settings for the block when you go to edit it. Most of the details also have to be repeated in the class attribute for the container HTML element in order to actually render anything stylistically in the page. (Once again, I don’t really know the optimal solution, but this isn’t it.)

And. And. And. And. And. (Sorry, wrong software, but since it’s timely I thought I’d throw it in there to amuse myself when I re-read this post in a few years.)

OK, all of that was only the first way the Block Editor differs greatly from the classic WordPress developer experience. The other way is the template structures that go into a theme.

I’m pretty flexible about how code files should be organized, as long as they are organized. Each project is unique, and as long as it has a consistent internal structure, it doesn’t have to be the same as every other one. I know this attitude is somewhat heretical in certain circles, and honestly the fact that WordPress has heretofore been just as flexible has created a lot of headaches for people trying to understand how themes, plugins and the WordPress core interact. It can also make it exceedingly difficult to jump into a custom theme someone else built and figure out where the hell everything is.

I get it. And I appreciate the core team’s efforts to impose a new, consistent structure that reinvents the way WordPress themes are built, and that aligns with how the Block Editor works.

I also get that it was not just an arbitrary decision to build the Block Editor on React. The Block Editor needs to be dynamic in a way the classic editor is not, so a purely PHP-based interface would not work. Not even something using the already-present jQuery would do the trick.

But building the Block Editor on React requires developers to know or learn React. I’m all for people learning new skills and adapting with the times (even though I haven’t bothered to learn React yet), but it’s a tall order to force an entire development ecosystem to radically shift gears.

That’s not even my biggest criticism though. What really bothers me about the new Block Theme template structure is the move away from PHP in areas where server-side scripting clearly offers some major benefits, with only the most nebulous justifications for the change. It usually comes down to “PHP is too intimidating to users,” but I find that really hard to accept, because PHP is much easier to learn, especially to a “dabbler” level, than React, and it’s way more forgiving than JSON.

So far my work on a new Block Theme hasn’t even touched React (partly thanks to my good old friend, Advanced Custom Fields). I’m coming around to the theme.json file, the more I work with it. I still want to be able to use PHP to dynamically set site properties, but I’m learning, little by little, how to accomplish my goals without it. (Or, perhaps, I’m changing those goals to suit the new platform.) I’m also slowly coming to understand that theme.json is mostly just for generating the inline CSS Gutenberg outputs in the <head> (and some ancillary functionality in the editor itself), and not a comprehensive spot for all manner of site parameters.

What I really do not understand, and may never accept, however, is the decision to make the files in the templates folder plain HTML files instead of PHP. In fact, my struggles with this very issue are what prompted this entire rant.

How do I use translation functions on hardcoded text in the templates, without PHP?

How do I selectively display post meta data — like author, publish date, and taxonomies — for posts in the search results template, but not for pages, without PHP?

I don’t have answers to these questions. Yet. But they beg the larger question of why the templates aren’t written in PHP in the first place. Is it a performance thing? That might be justifiable. But the whole “ease of use” argument makes no sense. A person isn’t going to be creating a theme in the first place if they don’t know some PHP.

No, I think it probably all comes down to being a decision that’s part of the development roadmap for Full Site Editing. So the decision is more about what the core team wants than what I want. Fair enough.

Who is this really for?

This is another grand question. Who is the Block Editor really for? Who is WordPress really for? I had never really asked that question, rhetorically or literally, until the Gutenberg project.

WordPress started out as blogging software. But it has since become much more than that. It famously powers somewhere around 40% of the web. Are 40% of websites blogs? In terms of sheer number of sites, maybe. In terms of amount of traffic, definitely not.

WordPress powers everything from the most obscure blog no one but its owner reads (don’t look at me) to massively popular sites that have thousands of simultaneous users. And it’s not just blogs. WordPress may not have been designed to be a general-purpose CMS, nor, in many ways, is it ideally suited to that purpose, but historically it has had the right mix of flexibility, extensibility, ease of use, and low barriers of entry, that it has come to be used for just about any purpose one might imagine a website serving.

But who is it really for?

I’m reminded of the story (recounted by John Gruber on a recent episode of The Talk Show) that Steve Jobs apparently pushed for the creation of the iPhone because he wanted a way to check his email on the toilet. The iPhone is, in the most generous sense, for everyone. But in a particular way that was critical to its actually coming into existence, it was for Steve Jobs and his bathroom correspondence habits.

So again, who is WordPress really for? Who’s making the decisions that ultimately determine what goes into it, that define what it is? That of course would be the core team, and probably more than anyone, the leader of the core team, Matt Mullenweg. I don’t know much about Matt, other than that he spearheaded the initial WordPress project (at least once it was forked from b2), that he now runs the semi-eponymous Automattic, and that we most likely have very different senses of humor. (Consider this: I’ve written a plugin that partly exists to remove humor/”folksiness” baked into WordPress that I am pretty sure is attributable to Matt.)

Matt still leads the core team, and has final say on certain decisions about its direction. Ultimately, if he thinks something matters for WordPress, it makes it in. And he clearly believes WordPress is still primarily, if not entirely, for blogging.

Again, maybe in terms of number of sites, “most” WordPress sites are straight-up personal blogs. But in terms of an active ecosystem, a development community of people who are able to make a living building WordPress sites, who comprise a thriving professional industry, in my experience, at least, blogging is peripheral or absent entirely from most professional applications of WordPress. It’s a general-purpose CMS, first and foremost, even if that’s not what it was originally intended to be. And, sadly, even if that’s still not what its core development team prioritizes.

I don’t know. I’m just me. A solo, somewhat iconoclastic developer who likes to do things their own way. I’ll probably never embrace putting spaces inside the parentheses in my PHP code, and I definitely won’t use if: endif; constructs.

I have strong opinions, but I’m not an idealist.

I just want PHP in my damn templates. Is that too much to ask?

Ironic side note: This site is one of the few cases where I have built a WordPress site that absolutely is a blog, full stop. And it’s not using Gutenberg, because I set up the Classic Editor plugin on it ages ago. But as I write and edit this post, I’m actually finding myself wishing I had the site running Gutenberg instead of switching between the back end and the front end. Of course, that’s because I always write my posts in plain HTML rather than the visual editor. I said I’m an old fart.