One huge advantage of dynamic WordPress blocks in the AI era: models can write block markup that validates far more reliably than it can for purely static blocks, at least in many cases. This wasn’t something I really had in mind when making Method’s blocks dynamic, but with wiki automation now online (with AI writing and modifying raw block markup for all pages), glad I went that route.

Getting crazy contact form submissions? Introducing Shadow Ban for Gravity Forms: github.com/pixelwatt/method-…

While I love AI, and use it daily to continue slowly building out my block theme framework for speeding up WordPress dev, I almost always prefer buying plugins from established vendors over getting AI to build an equivalent. Unless that plugin manages events on a calendar and was recently acquired by a massive company that jacked up the price of its events importer from ~$89/year to $399/year, in which case I will happily Fable and Opus my way to a custom importer.

This literally may be the best excerpt of tech journalism that I've ever consumed. Tech leadership really seems to have problems staying anchored to reality when it comes to using psychedelics and aligned substances in ways that others do not. But for real, I genuinely lost my shit at "with ideas" #WordPress

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH

I do not enjoy flying through Charlotte. Is it because of a single incident in which their Shake Shack was out of shakes and fries? Yes. Is continuing to hold that against them remotely logical? Not even remotely. Will I continue holding it against them anyway? Almost certainly.

I know a profit-driven rage baiter when I see one, and Ed Zitron is a masterclass on how to mask rage bait enough to make it pass as intelligent content.

Finally getting around to implementing backdrop filters, to be shipped in Method v2.0.0-beta20 alongside fixed box shadow controls. Backdrop filters will initially cover relevant Method blocks, then eventually some core blocks. After, focus is on the wiki...which hasn't been updated since like beta5.

Honestly, major props to the WordPress team for how graceful the 7.1 release has been on the dev side. I maintain a custom theme framework with its own responsive design system and dreaded it, but it shipped with mechanisms to selectively disable any conflicting features and, aside from breaking responsive in-editor display on one of the more JS heavy blocks, it was shockingly light on breaking changes, given what was being implemented.

The thing about porn is that by itself, its very much neither here nor there. The problematic usage patterns that so many of you (including my past self) love to conflate with porn itself are pretty much always symptoms of something else in life that needs to be addressed. But yeah, therapy and knowing ones self are hard, so keep doing the low-effort sex-shaming thing and continue being miserable for reasons you can't fully understand. That'll fix things.

Spent a lot of time with Fable this weekend building out a library to allow a WordPress block theme developer to easily implement post type specific search filters into a theme’s search template. Filters can be built from either post meta fields or taxonomies. It comes in the form of multiple blocks, so placement inside the search template is very flexible. Will upload it all to GitHub later, alongside a script to add post meta fields into WordPress’ search by post type. Both of these are intended with smaller projects that would only have a few hundred to a few thousand search results. Because of the nature of core’s search, your best bet for anything larger is always going to be offloading search functionality to a third party.

I don’t get the polarized AI takes, in either direction. It’s not going to solve all world problems nor is it going away, so if you want to shape what it looks like, find your way to some nuance. Especially given the variety of applications and different concerns around each.