3/16/2023 0 Comments Wordpress developmentWhen this happens to me, I usually take a step back and return when I have had a chance to rest my mind.Ĭontributing to the WordPress ecosystem has always had one barrier or another. The Gutenberg project, which is at the core of nearly every new WordPress feature, moves so fast that it is next to impossible to keep up with while also upping your skills. For a fresh mind, an open canvas that has yet to be painted with over a decade of doing things the “WordPress way,” I am unsure if the barrier to entry is so much higher.įor us old-schoolers, our world has been flipped upside down. Someone’s first introduction to Subversion or Composer can be just as scary as their initial dive into webpack and npm. Both had huge learning curves for someone new. Would a 20-year-old me struggle with this JavaScript landscape more than a strictly PHP-based WordPress? I doubt it. However, I have a strong foundation and enough experience to overcome some of the hurdles I encountered. At 37, I no longer have quite as much drive and likely less capacity for picking up new skills as quickly as in my late teens and early 20s. Truthfully, I did not struggle as much, but I am also at a different point in my life. Was the barrier to entry higher than when I first developed plugins? Probably. A week after that, I built a second block plugin with more advanced features. In the days after, I re-coded it all to use more modern JavaScript and compiled it with webpack. I needed to crawl before I could walk, and getting that first iteration of the code into a workable state was necessary before I jumped into anything more complex. I also built my first block type with vanilla JavaScript. In time, added more robust developer documentation, but this was not built overnight. And many other developers in the space did the same. Nearly every time, I dug into the project’s source code to make sense of it, which allowed me to teach other developers how to work with various features. I know this because I have written at least a couple hundred tutorials in my career. WordPress has never had the sort of deep documentation that could teach a budding developer everything. That was a distressing experience for someone who had become comfortable in his own skills. It had been a while since I had been challenged in that way. However, my JavaScript knowledge is 10 years behind. Objectively, I am an expert (or close enough) in the language. Had everything been in PHP, that would have been an easy feat for me. What I had wanted was to build the plugin in 30 minutes. We tend to view the past through rose-colored glasses while forgetting the real struggle. Having had the time to sit back and think about that, I am not sure it was a fair statement. When writing on the experience, I said the barrier to entry was much higher than when I had built my first plugin in 2007. I built my first block plugin in a few hours about a month ago. The learning curve is now extremely high regardless of past experience. This is not the same project as it was in the past. The deeper I get with modern WP dev the more I understand why newer devs don’t like to work on it. This has been an ongoing discussion for a few years now, but the latest flare-up comes on the heels of a tweet by Chris Wiegman: Lately, there has been a growing conversation around the difficulty of overcoming WordPress’s current barrier to entry for developers. I recall the days when there really was non-existent documentation for pretty much everything. Having been in the community as long as I have, I can remember the backlash each time a new feature landed. They were “simpler” times but not really. I count myself among the old-school developers who helped build the WordPress that so many are still nostalgic about - I think I have earned the right to joke about myself. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and built everything from scratch.” “Back in my day, we didn’t need all these fancy tools to help us write code. We have grown to become the proverbial grumpy old men. We are spoiled by our own expertise, built-in our more vigorous youth, now sitting on our haunches as we have aged along with our beloved platform. We are spoiled by the gluttony of documentation and tutorials, a wealth of knowledge created over more than a decade. Oh, how easily we forget the WordPress of 10, 15 years ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |