Category: Development

Building a WordPress Theme: Things to Consider in 2019 (And Beyond)

WebDevStudios (WDS) is working to improve our theme framework wd_s based on Automattic’s _s; although at this point, it’s resemblance is only vaguely similar. WDS is dedicated to keeping up to date with the web development industry and making educated decisions about...

Dev Shortie: A Better Process for Styling Websites

One thing I’ve noticed a lot lately with websites is that no matter how it looks, the style sheet is full of redundant, duplicate, or unnecessary styles. A lot of that, I imagine, comes from updates after a website goes live, where...

Web Design and Development Myths: 2019 Edition

I’ve written about New Year website prep before and how this is a popular time to give your website a good once-over for the new year. You can read Get Your WordPress Site Ready for the New Year: What to do Now!...

Paths to Learning Web Development

Computer programming is a vast and complex field. For those interested in the ins and outs of engineering, determining a path to learning relevant information can seem incredibly daunting. Even once you narrow your focus to a particular area of the field,...

Modern Theme Development with Storefront

Storefront is a robust and flexible free WordPress theme developed by the team behind WooCommerce. Out of the box, Storefront supports deep integration with WooCommerce, which makes it a perfect starting point for developers to launch their projects. Storefront’s codebase relies on...

Introduction to End-to-End Testing with Cypress.io

The topic of testing comes up often at WebDevStudios—whether we’re on-boarding a new project, or we’re digging out bugs on existing work, and even when we talk about our own internal tools. Testing is a common part of software development that often...

Beaver Builder Custom Fields

At WebDevStudios (WDS), we’ve used Beaver Builder for several projects because it provides a quick and intuitive way for our clients to customize their websites. The development documentation for Beaver Builder is pretty good, however it falls short in one particular area: custom...

Leaving Homestead: Finding the Best All-Around Local Development Environment

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about using Laravel Homestead as my local environment. At the time, my only real options were Vagrant or MAMP as an Apple user. Since then, the number of options has increased slightly to include...

The Journey to 1.0 — WDS Blocks and WordPress Gutenberg

WordPress made a big leap into the world of modern web development with its announcement of Gutenberg last year—reimagining what WordPress is and can be by providing a new interface for creating content built partially on the React.js platform. Since it will...