David Artiss

Has the ClassicPress fork of WordPress taken a wrong turn?

David Artiss on 18th September 2018

ClassicPress has recently been making headlines within the WordPress community – it’s a fork of WordPress which doesn’t include Gutenberg. Personally, I didn’t get it – you can just as easily install the standard WordPress Core and use the Classic Editor plugin to turn Gutenberg off.

But I have nothing against forks, per se, as Gary Pendergast (Pento) recently wrote, they are a much needed thing within the open source community. However, Pento put it succinctly when he said…

ClassicPress has styled itself as a protest against Gutenberg

However, recent proposals for ClassicPress now make me wonder what their aim really was and whether they’ve made a turn for the worst.

Can we talk about Gutenberg and some of the toxic elements of the community?

David Artiss on 14th September 2018

Unlike so many of the articles on the subject of Gutenberg, I’m not going to review it. I’ve run it on my site for some time and think it’s great. As a non-JS (okay, I know a little) developer, it’s going to be a steep hill to convert my plugins but as a user, I think it’s an amazing improvement.

No, I want to talk about some of the toxicity in the community and discuss some of the conspiracy theories that accompanies this.

Why Apple’s Giveback scheme isn’t as convenient as you’d think

David Artiss on 13th September 2018

The brand-new Apple Watch 4 came out yesterday, so users of older models may be considering using Apple’s Giveback scheme to get some money towards the new one. But, certainly in the UK, this doesn’t work quite as well as you’d hope.

Why you should move your personal site configuration to a plugin

David Artiss on 12th September 2018

Most people add useful code snippets to their WordPress site using their theme’s functions.php file – simply add the code to the end and all is good. But there are a number of downsides to this solution which can be simply cured by converting them to a plugin. Let me explain why and how you can do this.

Detecting per-post use of Gutenberg

David Artiss on 9th September 2018

There may be times when you need to detect use of Gutenberg on a per-post level – for example, a plugin that adds specific Gutenberg functionality, or maybe to display specific content on Gutenberg pages.

With plugins such as Gutenberg Ramp available, making it easy to specify specific groups of posts that should use Gutenberg, plus the fact that only posts you edit/add after installing Gutenberg will make use of its new functionality, it’s easy to see that most sites will end up with a mixed estate.

Battlefield V: Sorry, this isn’t a Battlefield for me

David Artiss on 8th September 2018

At the time of writing this, anyone can download a beta version of Battlefield V and try it out. As a massive Battlefield fan, I did just this on the PS4 but, sadly, I came away very disappointed.

Adding a link to your draft posts in the WordPress admin

David Artiss on 7th September 2018

When you’re working in a publishing environment, the most used part of WordPress will be viewing your draft posts. After all, this is your current, active work. Once done, it’s over to an editor to publish. Yet, draft posts are a few too many clicks than they really need to be.

Tee-total and vegetarian?

David Artiss on 7th September 2018

As the world’s (very unofficial) most carnivorous person, it would be a cold day in hell that I’d become vegetarian, right? Well, get the blankets and fire extinguisher out as I’m nearly (but not totally) there. A couple of weeks ago I became tee-total and, starting next week, I’ll be nearly vegetarian. Let me explain…

Introducing WordPress’ Gutenberg editor to The Big Tech Question

David Artiss on 2nd September 2018

I’ve been writing for The Big Tech Question (BTQ) website for some time now. It’s my first foray into serious journalism but it really lets me sharpen my teeth on higher quality writing – one that I can then use back at my job with Automattic too.

But the link between the two doesn’t end there. When I joined them they were using WordPress but hosted somewhere, well, not very good. I convinced them to move to WordPress.com and, now, I’ve moved them onto the Gutenberg (GB) editor. In this post I want to give a little more detail on why, how and what then happened!

A Wicked trip to London

David Artiss on 31st August 2018

It was my wife’s 40th birthday back in June (which I’m sure she won’t appreciate me announcing here) and, as her present, she wanted to see a West End show. We booked tickets to see Wicked in August, which we now just back from.

When booking, I decided that a made rush down to London, a show and then rush back wouldn’t be the nice, relaxed day out my wife was hoping for, so I made an early decision that we should stay in London for one night.