WordPress Tech Roundup for the Week of November 14
Learn Accessibility • The Return of SmashingConf • PHP 8.2 Release Delayed • Deno for Decoupled Front-End Development • LogoIpsum, Post to Telegram, and WP .gitgnore • Substack, the WordPress Plugin • Cool Tool: Restrict With Stripe
Estimated reading time: 60 minutes
Learn Accessibility
Digital accessibility, commonly abbreviated a11y, is an important subject in web developer circles. More and more, folks are looking for solid guidance on designing and building websites and web apps that disabled people can interact with in a meaningful and equivalent way.
Fortunately, thanks to Carie Fisher, with input and review from Alexandra White and Rachel Andrew, web developers can now take the free Learn Accessibility course at web.dev.
This course is for beginner and advanced web developers. You can go through the series from start to finish to get a general understanding of accessibility practices and testing, or you can use it as a reference for specific subjects.
The Return of SmashingConf
Front-end developers rejoice, the yearly SmashingConf hosted by the folks at Smashing Magazine is back in 2023!
SmashingConf has two events this year: one in San Fransisco, US, and one in Freiburg, Germany.
SmashingConf SF will cover everything from accessibility and advanced CSS to JavaScript gems and web performance, while SmashingConf Freiburg is all about front-end, UX, and design.
PHP 8.2 Release Delayed
Due to some critical bugs related to OPcache that “are very likely to happen in a real-world use case” the PHP release managers have decided to add another PHP 8.2.0 RC and push back the final 8.2.0 release to December 8, 2022.
With the fast pace at which new PHP releases have been coming out, it’s good to remember that early testing of release candidates is critical to solid releases.
Deno for Headless WordPress Themes
In a recent blog post on the Deno website, the team announced support for building WordPress themes using the Fresh framework as a front end for headless (or decoupled) WordPress.
Deno is a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly that is based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. Created by Ryan Dahl, the creator of the Node.js runtime, Deno aims to address some of Dahl’s regrets about the initial design decisions with Node.js.
With the increased popularity of headless WordPress, this is an interesting entry into the space.
Substack, the WordPress Plugin
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery was a Substack inspiration and has always run on WordPress, but did you know Substack started as a WordPress product?
LogoIpsum, Post to Telegram, and WP .gitgnore
- logoipsum.com for free placeholder logos! Simple and sweet.
- Jetpack and WordPress.com can publish to Telegram.
- The ultimate gitignore for WordPress projects.
Cool Tool: Restrict With Stripe
Each week we feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.
Stranger Studios quietly launched a new e-commerce plugin for WordPress a few weeks ago: Restrict With Stripe. If you love Stripe, it’s for you. It connects to Stripe and lets you restrict a post, page, category, or tag by product so visitors must have purchased that product (or subscription) to get access to the restricted content. That’s it.
