React Basics For WordPress Developers – Josh Pollock

Experience  Level: Beginner to Intermediate JavaScript

In this post – published Oct. 10, 2018 in Torque Magazine – Caldera Labs founder Josh Pollock provides a comprehensive guide for WordPress developers looking to learn the basics of React JS.

Article:

React Basics For WordPress Developers

Topics:

  • Basic Hello World example with React
  • In-depth overviews of concepts like React.createElement and JSX
  • Creating a basic, reusable post component
  • Bonus: Using iterators with item collections

Takeaways:

Josh does a great job breaking down React terminology here, a natural stumbling block for those who may have been primarily focused on PHP development up to now.  His code examples are great, though they might be better served in something like a GitHub embed wrapper rather than CodePen, which doesn’t render particularly well in the post body.

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Building a Gutenberg website – Bill Erickson

Experience Level: Beginner to Intermediate Theme Building

In this tutorial – published Nov. 15, 2018 – Bill Erickson gives a great overview of what you need to do to build a block-editor (Gutenberg) compatible WordPress theme.

Article:

Building a Gutenberg website

Topics:

  • Approach to building Gutenberg-compatible websites
  • Determining whether Gutenberg is the right choice
  • Adding theme support, editor font sizes, and theme colors
  • Using SASS with Gutenberg
  • Setting block width in Gutenberg

Takeaways:

This is a really great tutorial that touches all of the high points needed to make a new or existing theme Gutenberg compatible. It specifically dives into hooking into new and existing WordPress APIs for making a theme Gutenberg-compatible, and while it doesn’t necessarily delve into leveling up specific PHP or JavaScript skills, it does give a great overview of bringing a theme up to speed with modern WordPress.

PHP Namespaces for WordPress Developers – Justin Tadlock

Experience Level: Beginner to Intermediate PHP

In this tutorial – published Dec. 14, 2018 – Justin Tadlock provides a rich introduction to basic namespacing and autoloading best practices.

Article: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2018/12/14/php-namespaces-for-wordpress-developers

Topics:

  • Introduction to namespaces in PHP 5.3+
  • Declaring and aliasing (importing) namespaced classes and functions
  • Introduction to autoloaders and tips on organizing project files to match namespace structure
  • Composer and custom autoloadersIntroduction to using autoloaders with Composer
  • Custom autoloader example

Takeaways:

This post contains a wealth of great information and is written by a well-respected member of the WordPress development community, an excellent combination.

Related reading:

Hello world!

Welcome to Level Up WP!

Our mission is simple: serve as a clearinghouse of resources for “leveling up” PHP and JavaScript skills for modern WordPress development.

WordPress is evolving quickly these days, notably by including a new React-based block editor (Gutenberg) in the core software, as well as recently proposing a timeline under which to bump the minimum required PHP version from 5.2.4 all the way to 7.x by November 2019!

With all of this progress comes a natural need for WordPress developers to level up their skills in kind. There is no better time than now for developers of all levels to gain the skills they need to stay on top of their WordPress development game.

Level Up WP hopes to bring together any and all helpful resources we can find (or you submit!) in support of this mission.