viewSource

The Season 1 finale of viewSource is a draft style episode where we reflect on our favourite WordPress conversations over the last 20 episodes, chat about what’s coming next for both WordPress, viewSource, and both Aurooba and Brian. A fairly chatty episode where we touch on topics like Brian’s hatred of JSX, Aurooba’s recent struggles…

Season one moves closer to an ending as Aurooba and Brian share their biggest wish list items for modern WordPress development. With a focus on both User Experience and Developer Experience, they cover topics like extensibility, documentation, and user onboarding. A full transcript of the episode is available on the website. Watch the video podcast…

In this episode, Aurooba and Brian discuss the four main challenges they faced and learned from in while producing this first season of viewSource. They also dive into the side effects of producing viewSource and how it impacted other aspects of their professional lives. This all stemmed from a technical snaffu that lost them an…

Aurooba and Brian complete their accordion in React.js as part of their series on building an accordion block. They discuss how components are loaded into the Dom, binding a value to the className attribute, and thoughts on prop drilling. The episode ends with a preview of the rest of Season One and thoughts on viewSource…

Brian and Aurooba walk through the process of submitting a pull request in GitHub, reviewing it, and merging it into a repository – discussing best practices and perspectives to take as the reviewer and the reviewee in an ongoing pull request. In this case, the open source project was wphelpers.dev and Brian was adding a…

Aurooba and Brian explore the new WP_HTML_Tag_Processor that landed in WordPress 6.2, and how handy it would be in scenarios where they’ve had to use regular expressions to modify HTML in their WordPress projects. They then walk through a function using the new processor to inline and safely modify SVGs, ways they could improve the…

Aurooba and Brian are back with the series on building with React inside WordPress! In this episode, they dive into how state works in React and why ternary expressions are more common in JavaScript than they are in PHP. They break down the code of the accordion they’ve been building in React over the course…

In this episode, Aurooba and Brian discuss his recent recent experience speaking at WordCamp Phoenix. Then, they dig into the presentation topic: transitioning from Advanced Custom Fields Flexible Content Rows to ACF Blocks. The conversation ranges from what it takes to learn a new workflow to understanding the limitations of the block editor. A full…

On today’s episode, Aurooba manufactures a little bug in her code and then Brian helps debug what’s going on. As they debug the code, they discuss the high level approach to debugging, some helpful WordPress tools to make finding problems easier, and discuss the role coding standards can have in helping you debug better. A…

Aurooba and Brian convert their simple React accordion into separate, reusable components and discuss the importance of components as foundational parts of the web. Next, they show how to use React devtools in Chrome to quickly examine and debug your components. Finally, they dig into the code with a focus on passing and destructuring the…

Aurooba and Brian dig into the semantics of not only what makes an accordion accessible, but also why a11y should be a first class consideration when you build anything on the web. They also explore how different ARIA tags work and what they indicate, taking a previously inaccessible accordion and transforming it into something navigable…

Building on our simple React app, Aurooba demonstrates a component and sets up state to track variables. While discussing return statements, Brian cringes about JSX and mixing HTML with JavaScript. They also discuss how a function can return more than one variable in modern JavaScript. A full transcript of the episode is available on the…

Dig into what React is and how it works, especially inside WordPress, with Aurooba and Brian as they set up the basic environment and load up a little React component inside a WordPress post. Part one of a series of episodes where they’ll transform their code into a working accordion block. A full transcript of…

Two long-time remote workers share their history and their best practices for working from home. Aurooba covers how to socialize yourself and fight loneliness, and Brian shares his tips for creating boundaries when you have five kids outside your office door all day. They discuss some of the tools they use, the best ways to…

Brian walks Aurooba through how Bootstrap works and the conversation turns into a discussion about common design languages and the core concepts of CSS most people, frameworks, and systems employ. They also talk about the role frameworks like Bootstrap play in modern WordPress development and whether they are even necessary. A full transcript of the…