As Alpha Particle has grown over the years, we've gotten so many opportunities, made friends and even gotten clients from our connections to and in the WordPress community. Whether you're starting an agency, already work in WordPress or just want to get involved, below you'll find my recommendations for people to follow and ways to participate in the larger WordPress community.
Embedding SVGs for Animation and Styling
SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) are a great file format for making sure that images look good at any size! Because they're defined with code, they can scale to any size but since they're also an image format, they can be used in any standard image tag, like so:
SOLVED: Laravel Sail – Could not find driver error
Laravel Sail is a great all in one development environment that allows developers to spin up Laravel applications quickly and easily using Docker. However, after picking up a recent project that I hadn't worked on for a couple months I encountered a strange error:
How to implement “Minor edit – do not update translation” as a default in WPML
We've been working on a large WPML implementation lately with quite a few translated pieces of content. If you haven't used WPML before, you might not know that changing the contents of a page that's already been translated marks the other translations as out of date. This means WPML wants you to update them to reflect the content changes you made on the English page.
WordPress Developer
Alpha Particle is expanding and looking for a WordPress Developer who can tackle some of our production WordPress work. This means building custom themes (either completely from scratch or Child Themes) as well as plugins to fit our client's needs.
Automating FTP Deployments with GitHub Actions
Deployment is the stage of the software development life cycle most likely to cause problems. Even if your deployment pipeline is perfectly set up, it's the stage of the development process where any bugs you didn't catch while building or during QA get shipped out to your end users. This might mean you need to roll back, or at the very least track down the problematic deploy at some point in the future.
Custom Block Icons with ACF Blocks
Creating custom Gutenberg/Block Editor blocks with ACF is a great way to provide WordPress users with the functionality of custom blocks without having to be familiar with Javascript and React. If you haven't tried this workflow before, the experience is largely similar to how ACF was used before the advent of the Block Editor. There is the extra step of having to register the block (using PHP, still no Javascript necessary!) to make sure WordPress knows you're trying to build a new block. But after that's done, you add custom fields to it through the same ACF interface you're already familiar with, and build the template for controlling how the block displays with get_field and the_field calls just the same as you always have. The code to register a block looks something like this:
From Idea to MVP To Version 1.0 with The Snowball Project
The team behind the newly-formed non-profit The Snowball Project came to us with an idea. They wanted to build a web application that used peer-to-peer influence to encourage the unregistered to register, and the non-voting to vote. They knew what they wanted, but they needed a "virtual CTO" to help them make decisions and an engineering team to make those decisions happen. That's where Alpha Particle came in.
Getting Started with Gutenberg Ramp
You may have heard that WordPress has a brand new block editor that completely transforms the writing and content management experience. However, there are plenty of sites that aren't ready to move their entire base of content over to the new editor. This could be because not all of their plugins are compatible with the new editor or their editorial team isn't ready to have a totally new editing experience.
Write and publish faster with Block Editor keyboard shortcuts
I've been using the Block Editor since it was released in WordPress 5.0, but as I've been creating and updating more content, I've found one strange user interaction that I didn't know how to get around. When I move my mouse up to the top right of the screen, the Update/Publish button is very close to the Admin Bar, which has a hover state. For example, if I move my mouse just a couple pixels too far, I get the hover state for the logged in user rather than being able to click the Update button.