[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things, WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making it easier for clients to use the block editor.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m very keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Alex Ball. Alex is a lead software engineer at Mindgrub, a digital agency in Baltimore, Maryland. He’s been there for over three years, during which he’s worked on headless implementations, multinational multi-site installations, and much more.

Prior to joining Mindgrub, Alex worked in-house for a company handling a suite of internal intranet type sites, and external marketing lead generation sites. He spent seven years at Baltimore magazine on the editorial staff, before managing their website.

His website leadership experience continues to inform his decision making today. Especially for training clients and making the block editor as easy to use as possible. And that, in essence is the subject of the podcast today.

During WordCamp US 2022, Alex gave a lightning talk in which he laid out some suggestions on how the block editor can be made more straightforward for clients.

Most regular WordPress users have become accustomed to the way that the block editor works. Over time, we’ve understood how things work and where we need to go in the UI to alter things. For many clients, this familiarity simply does not exist. The editor is new and perhaps confusing.

As the block editor is under constant revision, this can create confusion, and lead to mistakes. Add to that the fact that more and more of the website can now be modified inside the editor, and it’s easy to see how mistakes can be made.

Alex talks about solutions to this problem, and he comes at it from different angles. Maybe you lock certain features down so that only certain users can achieve specific tasks. Or it might be that you need to take some time to educate your clients more about the block editor and how it works.

Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WP tavern.com. Forward slash podcast. And you’ll find all the other episodes there as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you, Alex Ball.

I am joined on the podcast by Alex Ball. How are you doing, Alex?

[00:04:07 ] Alex Ball: Very well, thank you for having me.

[00:04:09 ] Nathan Wrigley: We are at WordCamp US 2022. We’re sitting in the media room, and Alex has joined me today to have a little bit of conversation about block patterns and blocks and locking blocks and all of those kind of things.

We’ll get into that in a moment, but Alex, just give us a little bit of background. Tell us about yourself, your journey with WordPress. How is it that you’re at a WordCamp, talking to a bunch of people in your presentation.

[00:04:31 ] Alex Ball: Sure. So I started with WordPress probably in 2007 or so. And at that point I was not a developer, I was an English major. I had been on the editorial staff of our city magazine in Baltimore, Baltimore Magazine for seven years, and people knew what the internet was at that time and we didn’t have a very good site and we needed one. And I somehow talked leadership into letting me take over the site without any of that development experience that was probably critical.

But, I dove right in and got used to it and followed some tutorials for building a WordPress theme from scratch, and just took off from there. So I, I was there for another four years. I worked at another company that had quite a few websites, both internal and external.

And they were across a number of different states in the US, and so working with those, using WordPress on quite a few of them. Landing pages, some internal intranet type things. And then I found Mind Grub, and I’ve been with Mind Grub for three and a half years, and we do all sorts of things from really large enterprise scale things hosted on WordPress VIP.

We do headless installations with a React single page app front end. We do more structured data sort of things where Gutenberg is really not a consideration because of all the structured data that’s going on there. And we have a pretty excellent WordPress team, and so it’s been really beneficial for me to try to carve out that path within our team and help us move forward with Gutenberg because we’ve heard from Matt Mullenweg more than once that Gutenberg is the future of WordPress. That you’re going to need to know JavaScript to work with WordPress in depth, and that when people ask him at WordCamp about the sites that they still have with the classic editor plugin running, and what they need to do about that and when they’ll need to switch those over, he says you’re going to need to switch those over at some point,

[00:07:02 ] Nathan Wrigley: At Mind Grub, is that a decision that you made more recently, or are we going back several years? You’re exclusively using Gutenberg with a variety of different blocks?

[00:07:11 ] Alex Ball: We are, no, I would not say we’re exclusively using Gutenberg. It still depends on the site, and we still do raise the prospect of it with a client at the beginning of a project. We find that some clients are aware of it, and really don’t want to use it. We’ve had that reaction so we just go with that and we use the classic editor plugin and we move on.

We have found that most of the time they’re not familiar with it, and so they don’t care one way or another. And when we tell them it’s a more enhanced, what you see is what you get editing experience with more ability to move things around and know what you’re doing before you hit save, that they like the sound of that.

We occasionally have people who say that they’ve heard of it and do want to use it. And I guess those are the three real possibilities there. So, in large part it is we’re moving forward with it and doing that because we know it’s the future, it’s going to be better for the client and they do not have a strong preference.

[00:08:20 ] Nathan Wrigley: So you are here and you are giving a presentation. I say giving, maybe you’ve already given.

[00:08:25 ] Alex Ball: I have given it, yes. It was about an hour ago.

[00:08:28 ] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?

[00:08:29 ] Alex Ball: I thought it went well. It was a lightning talk and it was about modifying or customizing core blocks for clients. And I used a metaphor about setting guardrails for clients, that I believe was also recently spoken on your podcast with another guest who used the same phrase, and I heard that one after I had made my submission. But I thought it went well.

It was a lightning talk and so it was really focused on the nitty gritty of using a few blocks as examples, core blocks that are probably the most used blocks. Heading, paragraph, image, button, and talking about the specific options that they present for modifying their output and their appearance. And how to go about doing that. And in some cases it was using PHP to do some things. In some cases it’s enqueuing some admin scripts. And in a lot of the cases it’s using the theme dot json file, which not everyone is totally familiar with at this point.

[00:09:41 ] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it was called customizing core blocks for clients. And forgive me, I was not present at your talk, I may be ill prepared with this question, but it felt from the show notes that you shared with me, the things that you thought it would be good to talk about. The principle of the talk was how to lock things down in a website, so that you could build things and then be fairly sure that when you hand it over, there’s not gonna be that moment where they phone you 24 hours later to say, it no longer looks the same. We’ve had a bit of a play. We thought we knew what we were doing, and sadly we need you to fix what we just broke. That’s the principle, right?

[00:10:20 ] Alex Ball: Right, Exactly. And you find that the nice thing about working with WordPress is that someone on the client team, when you start the project is already familiar with it. Someone has worked with WordPress in the past. Maybe the site that they’re replacing is a WordPress site. So they’re somewhat familiar with it, even if they’re not familiar with the block editor yet.

And before I even get into developing and writing the theme, there’s already been a large process with our design and UX teams designing the site, and those stakeholders, the client, are sitting in these meetings reviewing those designs, exploring design ideas early on to establish things that they like and don’t like.

There’s a lot of time spent on that design, and there’s a lot of thought that g