Quick CSS fix for WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) link hover color issue

The WordPress Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) makes it easy to set the text, background, and link colors on any block. But links can and often do have more than one color. And there’s no option here for setting the hover color. So what do you do in what, I think, may be a common situation, where you’re setting a background color on a block and making the link text white, but your theme’s link hover color is either the background color you’re switching to, or something way too close to it?

I’ve come up with a very tidy bit of CSS code that will make your link hover state match the custom link color — granted, you lose the UX of a unique color on hover state, but you gain necessary legibility and accessibility, which I guarantee is more important.

This may not work in every situation, but it’s so simple that it’s worth investigating as an option. With this code, any time you have a block that sets both a custom background color and a custom link color, it will ensure that the hover/focus state matches the custom link color:

main .has-background-color.has-link-color a:focus,
main .has-background-color.has-link-color a:hover
{ color: inherit; }


Update (April 4, 2023): Yeah, don’t do this. You can specify these colors in theme.json. I’m not sure if this is a recent addition, the documentation was previously lacking, or I just didn’t find it, but anyway… do this instead.

On the Futility of Naming Colors

I posted this over on the ICS Calendar blog, but it’s probably of some interest to the audience of this blog, dealing with the intersection of code and design.

HTML has “named colors” which are… weird. And I have finally given up on using them in the plugin, which was a bit of a silly thing to do anyway, when there are 16 million RGB colors at one’s disposal. The post ends with swatches of both the old and the newly revised color palettes.

https://icscalendar.com/on-the-futility-of-naming-colors/

This is the kind of thing that I find maddening about Gutenberg

First off, if you are the regular reader of this blog, you are painfully aware of how much I am waffling on rejecting or embracing Gutenberg (a.k.a. the WordPress Block Editor). There are things I genuinely do like about it, but I also have some fundamental disagreements with its approach (like the facts that it writes inline CSS directly into post content, or that its templates don’t support PHP code).

And then there are the weird little quirks that just make using it much more difficult than it needs to be. In general I have learned that this comes down to the incredible finickiness of JSON. Fine. But the fact that one character out of place in the theme.json file can break everything seems a bit ridiculous… or at least, a big step backwards for usability.

Fix your syntax. Sure. I wish JSON allowed trailing commas the way PHP — and even JavaScript! — does, but I can grok the fact that it doesn’t and learn to adapt. What I have a bit more trouble with is the problem that struck yesterday, only because it was so hard to pin down.

I’m working on a new, small block theme as a one-off for a unique project — a website that will feed menu board monitors in a pizza place. Seems like a perfect opportunity to practice and experiment a bit with what Gutenberg can do. (And, after over a decade of trying to find the “right” way to give restaurant staff a reliable but still easy-to-manage web interface for updating menu information, I actually think Gutenberg’s Block Patterns might be the optimal solution.)

So here’s the maddening thing. I was setting up my theme.json file like a good Block Theme developer, defining all of my colors, typography, etc. And then I started loading in some test content. All looked fine on the back end, in the Block Editor itself. But none of the styles were getting applied on the front end!

I googled the problem, of course, and found a WordPress forum thread about this very issue.

Huh. Sure enough, what’s described in the thread was exactly what was happening in my case. I had this line in my code (font names changed to protect the innocent):

"fontFamily": "'Helvetica Neue', 'Comic Sans', 'sans-serif",

Do you see the problem there? (No, it’s not the trailing comma… that actually belongs, in context.) It’s the stray apostrophe before sans-serif. Removing that fixed the problem.

Now, if this were just in straight CSS, I would have seen the problem immediately, because the syntax highlighting in BBEdit would’ve gone all wonky. But since this was inside a text string in JSON, it looked just fine, and I didn’t notice the apostrophe was there.

I get that the parser that converts the contents of theme.json into CSS would get thrown off by this. Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t cause the whole page to bork with a PHP fatal error… I’m pretty sure earlier versions did throw a fatal error if there was any problem parsing the theme.json file. So this is… an improvement?

I also get that the generated CSS output would not work properly. What I don’t get is that it all looked correct in the Block Editor. Why was the Block Editor on the admin side able to “fix” this issue, but on the front end it didn’t? It doesn’t make sense!

Anyway, trying to unravel that mystery wasted about an hour late yesterday afternoon, when I was finally starting to get productive after having a near existential crisis over Gutenberg for most of the week.

These are hard times to be a WordPress developer. No, strike that. These are hard times to be a generalist web developer who happened to make the fateful decision 8 years ago to go all-in on WordPress.

Musings on my future with WordPress

Regular readers of this blog, if such exist, may have noticed that one of the three (!) posts I published yesterday has gone missing. I unpublished it this morning, as I further contemplate the future of WordPress, and whether or not I want to be a part of it.

First off, I need to make it clear that I will be a part of it, because ICS Calendar Pro has become a substantial part of my business, and I only see that growing. The question for me, however, is whether or not the rest of my business will continue to revolve around WordPress the way it has since 2014.

I’ve been building websites for much longer than that. By 2014 I had already been writing HTML for 20 years, and building websites professionally for 18. My decision to go all-in on WordPress in 2014, and abandon the CakePHP-based custom CMS I had been painstakingly crafting for the previous 6 years, hinged on my realization that WordPress was evolving quickly into a powerful, general-purpose CMS.

But therein lies the problem. I am part of a very large community of serious, professional web developers who embraced WordPress (the open source project) as a general-purpose, if decidedly idiosyncratic, Content Management System (CMS). And we’re the ones who collectively turned it into the dominant platform that it is today. But I don’t think Automattic, or much of the WordPress core team, sees it that way. They’ve never lost the original vision of it as a simple blogging platform, even though the web world has largely moved beyond blogging (at least the open source, self-hosted kind).

Automattic (the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg) isn’t competing with Drupal or Joomla. They’re competing with Squarespace, Wix and Medium. And as such, their focus is on how to make WordPress.com (their commercial, hosted version of WordPress) into a stronger challenger to those platforms. The open source WordPress project that I and my fellow developers have grown to love is just an afterthought to that mission. Or at least, so it seems, with the aggressive pushing of Gutenberg (a.k.a. the Block Editor) since 2018, and even more alarmingly, full-site editing (a.k.a. Site Editor) this year.

Gutenberg is one thing. I started off hating it, not because it was a bad idea, but because it was a poorly executed one — or more specifically, that it was forced on the WordPress community before it was mature enough to replace the classic editor. But I absolutely believed in the idea of block editing in general. I had already been working extensively on my own custom theme that was built around ACF Flexible Content. Many others turned to “page builder” plugins/themes like Divi, Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, or Elementor.

I despise those page builders because they introduced their own, often convoluted interfaces that look and feel nothing like WordPress, and most frustratingly, are not easier for end users. The only people they’re easier for are “no code” website builders, and maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel like you shouldn’t be charging people money to build websites for them if you don’t know how to write code. Less curmudgeonly: These page builders require just as much work to learn as writing code does, but if you learn to code, you walk away with a much more valuable skill.

But I digress. For the sake of adding block editing flexibility to the content management aspects of using WordPress, I have no problem with Gutenberg as it stands in 2022. In fact, I’m using it to write these words. It is much nicer than the old classic editor — at least, now it is; not so much when it debuted in 2018 — and more importantly, it’s the WordPress way as opposed to page builders. Even if it’s only “the WordPress way” because WordPress has changed to be like it, rather than it fitting what WordPress was before.

I still have a major problem, in principle, with the entire concept of the Site Editor though. And the blog post I cited earlier this year feels more relevant to me than ever. I still don’t think it’s really for anybody. Except Automattic.

It’s not that the Site Editor is going to put people like me out of work. It’s that, if this is the direction things are going, it makes absolutely no sense for people like us to continue to use WordPress as our platform of choice.

Taking this thought a step further (and following the links), we get to the heart of the matter for me, which is perfectly summed up in a post called The Complicated Futility of WordPress. Specifically (emphasis mine):

The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow.

No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it.

coderjerk

For me, it’s been a difficult year of loss, with the death of my mother in September (and several months of decline preceding that), and some distance from my work. It’s also been a year when I have struggled constantly, through my efforts at building a new Block Editor-friendly theme to replace my trusty old ACF-based one, to find some sense in a lot of the decisions that have been made about how Gutenberg works and the direction WordPress is going. My low motivation, easy distraction, and generally slow progress on the theme, I am just now realizing, has been due to the amount of cognitive dissonance I was feeling, as I realized that everything about my approach to building websites as a professional developer, everything I am looking for in the tools I use to do my job, seems, as coderjerk put it, to be in complete opposition to what WordPress is becoming.

As a freelancer, I keep fairly diligent records of my time spent working on client projects. I have to. It’s how I make money. But I am not as rigorous in tracking how I use my personal time. I wish I had logged the time I’ve spent over the course of 2022 experimenting with, and then abandoning, various potential WordPress replacements. It usually only takes me an hour or two to realize that, as much as I am resisting learning the seemingly nonsensical framework (if you can call it that) for building custom blocks, block patterns, block themes, and everything else in the “new way” of WordPress, it is still probably superior to whatever platform I’m testing out that day. So I’ve dismissed ClassicPress as a backwards-looking dead-end. I’ve tried and cast aside more random niche CMSes than I can recall. (But, to prove this isn’t just empty talk, a few of them are e107, Craft, and Concrete, and I’ve even contemplated Drupal, of all things, as well as resurrecting my old CakePHP-based system.)

None of that has gone anywhere, because it was immediately apparent to me that none of them felt right. Not built on the right foundation, not polished enough, not enough momentum behind them. Well, nothing has as much momentum as WordPress. But now I’ve begun to wonder, is it momentum… or inertia?

Today’s discovery feels different. Since I agreed with so much of coderjerk’s post, I took the final suggestion of Twill to heart. I don’t have experience with Laravel, but I know that back when I was in CakePHP world, it was a big competitor. An employee of mine — in the short sliver of time when I had employees — built a custom site for a client using Laravel and he loved it. Twill is built on Laravel, so it seems fitting for me that the next chapter of my career might revolve around a return to MVC frameworks, in their much more modern, mature form. And while this gives me a lot of new stuff to learn — I’ve avoided doing much with systems that rely on Composer and managing dependencies — it all feels like the right stuff to have to learn in 2022, vs. what I’d have to learn to be a Gutenberg ace.

I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon getting the lay of the land with Twill. And while it has thrown me a few surprising challenges even in the basic setup, it’s also giving me a giddy feeling of just having fun geeking out on learning new systems… those moments of delight when I finally get how something works and I see the genius behind it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the structures underlying Gutenberg, and the only feeling that ever gives me is… “What… why???”

I plan to spend most of tomorrow continuing to tinker with my little Twill test setup. I may still end up scrapping it, and I know I will probably never completely leave the immense gravitational pull of WordPress. But I’m feeling more excited about web technology than I have in years, and more optimistic about my future in this business.

Debugging WordPress and PHP 8.1: a chicken-and-egg conundrum

If you’re a WordPress developer, trying to debug code on a server that’s running PHP 8.1, you may have noticed an absurd number of deprecation notices overwhelming your efforts to get anything done.

After trying in vain to resolve the issue by updating the value for error_reporting in my server’s php.ini file, I discovered why that doesn’t work, courtesy of a StackExchange answer.

WordPress sets its own value for error_reporting when you turn on WP_DEBUG, ignoring the php.ini value. It kind of has to do this. (Well, not “kind of.”) That’s the only way for WordPress to display more — or less — error output than what’s configured at the server level.

The problem is, when you turn on WP_DEBUG, WordPress shows you everything. Normally that would be desirable, but PHP 8.1 has introduced an unusually large number of deprecation notices in anticipation of PHP 9 imposing strict rules on things that have been generously allowed in earlier PHP versions.

OK, so we know what’s going on. But since a lot of the deprecated code is in WordPress core, or in third-party plugins, there’s not really anything a developer like me can do about fixing these issues. (Sure, I could fix it and submit a pull request, but I’m not currently a WordPress core developer and I am not sure I want to take that on, even in an extremely peripheral way.)

So… uh… how do I just make it stop? That is definitely easier said than done, and the reason is the sequential nature of how code is loaded and executed. “Everything everywhere all at once” is not how it works. WordPress loads one file, that loads another file, that loads several other files, each containing a mix of procedural and object-oriented code, and functions. The way WordPress lets you hook into that flow and insert modifications is… well.. hooks.

Hooks are great, but a) the hook you want has to exist, and b) your code that uses the hook needs to be loaded before WordPress processes the hook. Oh, and of course, c) hooks themselves are functions, so you can’t use them until those functions have been defined.

Hence our problem. The code that tells WordPress to show you all the stuff — errors, warnings, deprecation notices — happens pretty early in the sequence. Specifically (as of WordPress 6.1.1) it is in line 460 of wp-includes/load.php in a function called wp_debug_mode(). By that point, yes, the add_action() and add_filter() functions have been defined. But, WordPress hasn’t actually loaded any plugins yet (even “must-use” plugins in the mu-plugins folder). So if you write a plugin to modify the error_reporting value, it might work, but only on deprecation notices that are generated after your plugin has been loaded, and the ones we’re concerned with are all in WordPress core and get triggered before plugin loading starts.

Realizing this, I thought I might solve the problem by putting my filter into the wp-config.php file, a.k.a. the only “early” file you’re allowed to edit. But nope, can’t do that: the add_filter() function doesn’t exist until wp-includes/plugin.php gets loaded at line 49 of wp-settings.php, which itself gets loaded at the very end of wp-config.php.

Since wp_debug_mode() runs at line 80 of wp-settings.php, that means the only way to do what we’re trying to accomplish is to get it to fire off somewhere within those 31 lines of code inside wp-settings.php. Those lines consist of calls to a handful of low-level functions. I checked the source code of each of them for any hooks — not that it would be correct to use the hooks in any of those functions for this purpose, if they existed — but merely to see if it would even be possible.

There is only one hook in the entire lot, and it’s inside wp_debug_mode() itself. It’s called enable_wp_debug_mode_checks. I wrote my own filter function that leverages that hook to modify error_reporting, and it would work, except for the fact that there’s nowhere to put it. I can’t write any custom code in a plugin or theme to call that filter, because it wouldn’t be loaded yet by the time the filter is applied in wp_debug_mode(). And I can’t put it in wp-config.php because, as noted above, the add_filter() function isn’t even defined yet at that point.

So… there are only two place you can put this code to get it to work: either in wp-settings.php just before line 80, or by just editing the wp_debug_mode() function itself in wp-includes/load.php. And you very much are not supposed to do either of these things, because your changes will get overwritten the next time a WordPress core update runs.

But… what else are you going to do? Well… after going through all of the emotions on my wide spectrum from frustration to rage, I read the comments at the top of wp_debug_mode() that start with a pretty unambiguous statement:

This filter runs before it can be used by plugins. It is designed for non-web runtimes.

OK then.

Also inside the comment is a code example, mirrored in the next reply on the same StackExchange post I linked above. I initially ignored it because I instinctively ignore any PHP code example that includes $GLOBALS… but in this case, it’s apparently the official answer on the matter. Boo.

The code I ended up putting into wp-config.php looks a bit different though:

if (WP_DEBUG) {
  $GLOBALS[‘wp_filter’] = [
    ‘enable_wp_debug_mode_checks’ => [
      10 => [[
        ‘accepted_args’ => 0,
        ‘function’ => function() {
          error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);
          ini_set(‘display_errors’, ‘on’);
          return false;
        },
      ]],
    ],
  ];
}

I’m not sure why the StackExchange poster put the error_reporting() call outside the conditional. I also found I needed to specifically set ini_set('display_errors', 'on'); because returning false from this function causes the rest of wp_debug_mode() not to execute — which we want, but we need to make sure to replicate any of the rest of its functionality that we do need. I probably should add the bit that doesn’t output errors on REST/AJAX calls, but I’ll worry about that when it becomes an issue. I don’t use either of those very often. (Of course the WP admin itself uses AJAX all the time.)