WP Café #40  ## Metadata - Author: [[Highrise Digital]] - Full Title: WP Café #40 - Category: #articles - Summary: 2:05 Navigation block alternatives 11:34 Exporting/importing changes in FSE 25:03 Are you a "real/professional" WordPress developer? - URL: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0PlArcXUtVo foreignto episode number 40 of the wp Cafe showwith me Keith Devonand with me Mark Wilkinson we've made itto the big 4-0 over the hillover the hill yeah oh well it's gonnaget worse for me then yeah yeah so it'sgood good 40 40 episodes decentdecent little Milestone that I think soyeah it is good yeahso thank you for joining us everyone today we've got a few people watchingalong live I'm sure a few of you'llcatch this later or on a podcast orsomething like that so because we'reobviously on all the podcast kind ofcapturesum I think we're awesome uh and we'rehere Live on YouTube and you can catchus on YouTube afterwards as wellum so thanks for joining us today we'vegot a few things to chat about todayum Mark what are we what's on the agendaso we I asked earlier this week um for questions we always like takingquestions from people and I did get aquestionum from um um I can't remember theperson's name let me click on the linkfrom Anthony Smith so we've got aquestion to answer from Anthony so thankyou Anthony for your question and wehave got a topic about our full siteediting which we are continuing with sowe've got some things to chat throughabout that if you have done any fullsite editing uh you will probably knowthose things and if you've done any letus know how you get on as well um and then finally a bit of a sort ofconversation that we saw on Twitterabout developers and things so we cantouch on that uh as well yeahyeah so lots to discuss so we getstraight into that question let's do ityeah um tell me to read it out and thenyou can do your best to answer it or wecan both try and answer it but yeah wecan definitely do that um just before wedo uh hello to everyone who is currentlysaying hi in the chat so thank you toTonyum Excellence Paul and is it silly silly yeahum so hi thanks for joining us and uhlet us know if you have any questionsum go for it let's see what Anthony hadto say okay so he says the navigationblock remains largely crap slash uselessfor anything other than the simplest ofmenus I'd love to know what alternativespeople use extending seems a non-startat the moment I've settled on Max Megamenu via a short code which defeats the object of FSC editorso that was his comments slightly editedbut uh for me for me okay that's fineum yeah great question andyes the navigation block if anyone hasever used it in full side editingis crap but let's be honest it's notvery good I'm sure it's going to getsome work at some point in the future orI certainly hope that's going to be thecase because it is I tried to use it onI think it's on my personal siteactually I was doing some work just trying to get the I post a lot of codesnippets on Twitter and many people havesuggested there should be a place whereI can sort of collect all thoseso I was adding up to my website Iwanted to put a link in the title in themenu and it was horrific like actuallyadding a link was was horrific uh so yesit is rubbish so what are theAlternatives that people usesowe are going to do it the old-fashionedway so essentially uh doing an old menu is the other is the best way of doing itlike the old menu interface in the backend or even in the customizer was prettygood like it did a really good job ofcreating a menu for me and actually whatwe found out is if you if you registeruh an old style I don't know do we callthem classic menus now I don't know whatwe call them yeah that's that's coin areyou ready yeah if you register a classicmenu in the normal way they just comeback that's all you need to do is justregister a menu or a menu area asthey're called um and those menus will reappear in theback end so what you then need is you'dneed a block to actually add to the pageto choose a classic menu so there's afew ways you could do that you couldobviously build one natively if you'vegot the skills to do so I'm actuallygoing to have a stab at that it's beenon my list this week today I've nevergot around to it yet yeah I don't thinkit'll be that hard but they always arewhenever GodI can imagine it'd be more timeconsuming than actually think it's goingto be obviously you could create one with something like Advanced customFields blocksum you know getting a list of theregistered menus and allowing the userto choose which menu to show in sort ofa select input something like that thatwould be greatum you could also build a short codethat lets you sort of pass a menu nameas a parameter and then use that in thefull site editing system that's anotherway of doing it so there's quite a fewoptions but like as I said I think we'regoing to go for the building sort of a ablock just a native it's native the right word blockum to actually choose a menu and thenregister it in the old style whereum which will give the user the oldstyle appearance menus section toactually construct their menu and makethe changes that they want I thoughtthat was a pretty good menu systembut yeah I'm kind of surprised at howmuch of a step back the new navigationblock was I find it really terribleum there's a place like there's a buttonwithin the interface for example I thinkit says something like manage menu and you click it and it goes to some likeold school WordPress admin area and theonly thing that you can do is change thename of it like you can't manage it atall except it gives it a new name it wastotally bizarre like I just yeah I foundit felt like it felt like anafterthought I'm sure it wasn't I'm surethere's technical difficulties andthere's a plan but yeah really reallypoor experience I wonder Mark if it'sworth justtalking very briefly about how we did a mega menu for a client because I thoughtthat worked really well and I don't knowif that's somethingthat you could do in full site editingsomehow I mean you couldbut what we ended up doing is umregistering our own post type I think itwas called menu itemor something like that and for each ofthe top level menu items in a menu sothe ones that you see in the horizontalbarum it would you'd have your own kind oflike post stroke page edit screen uh and it was it was block enabledumand what you could do is you couldeither like give that a link just in thesidebar wasn't it and if you gave it alink that was that was a page it didn'thave a mega menu if you didn't give it alink and you added content to the kindof block area whatever you hovered overthe item it displayed that block areaand it actually worked really reallywell so we ended up doing like uhGutenberg uh or block you know column blocks uh to create the mega menucolumns and then we just added lists oflinks uh yeah I thought it was a reallyreally tiny solution for Mega menus it'snot something that we've kind ofpackaged up in any way and released butno um yeah something that people couldgive a go it had some challenges becausewe had to make it the selected item whenyou when you're actually on a page sothey use that to sort of choose whichpage it should be this little whichpages in posts and post tags it shouldbe the selected item on because it was a mega menu it contained like contentacross different post types and pages sothe the client wanted to make it sure itwas active when the user was on any ofthose pages so they've got a littleselection tool in the admin where theycan choose all the types of content thatit should be the active menu for thatsort of thing and then like he said itjust has a a link where you can paste aURL in essentially and if that's presentit that's all it does it just makes makes the the title of that particularmenu item will link to that thingwithout being a mega menu butI think we looked at those pluginsdidn't we like the I can't remember whatthe code I think Anthony mentioned onein his his comment his question which isabout Max Magnum with that song welooked at but it was a few Mega menupluginsand they were all just like supercomplicated and not really what wewanted so it would be a bit of a um itwould have to be a step of making iteasier or simplifying it or strippingstuff out or adding stuff to it so we just decided that this would be a decentuh idea to do and I think it came offthe back of one we did a couple of yearsago which was very similar except wedidn't have the block editor back thenyeah and actually the block editor madethis nice and easy because you could layout the mega menu with blocks andcolumns and things which is great and Idon't think we did this but you couldquite easily give a templatefor what a mega menu should look like sowhen they click on new menu item youcould already have it laid out in three columns with headings for each columnone that third column for example yeahum and lock that sort of down as well sothat'd be a really good ideaum I don't think we did that I might bewrong but anyway if they if anyone wantsto take a look at this solutionum if you go tofraserjones.com so f r a z e r Jonesj-o-n-e-sdot com it's on thatumso you can have it you can look and inspect inspect the code and kind of seehow that was see how that was puttogether but yeah that's that's how wedid it worked it worked really well yeahyeah it is it's good but yeah certainlymenus and navigation is is not great inthe full site editor so uh it needs toI'm sure well everyone's basicallysaying the same thing so I think it'sgonna have some improvements but thesethings take time so we've just got to bea little bit patient to come up withSolutions in the meantime whichhopefully those suggestionsI've helped so we'll see yeah thanksAnthony for the question that was uh that was a good question hopefully thathelped I know it's not like we don'thave a a solution that's just likeinstall this and all your problems willgo away but uh and if anyone does ifanyone's come across a a plug-in thatreally levels up the menu system and andWordPress and full-site editing inparticular we'd love to hear about it umstick it in the comments or send us atweet or something like that cool umlet's move on for comments which is ohyeah go for it um yeah so uh xlamps isyeah how would the navigation block work for complex uh menus and mega menusI guess the classic navigation that wejust talked about doesn't really handlethose so you might have to use plug-inright antonym suggested or do somethingwhat we've doneuh Peter says hi just popped in for alook um hi thank you very much hopefullyyou're finding something interesting inthe show and you'll come back and Tonyyeah said that I've had some nav payingthis am I like the sound of adding anavary to get around his problems to goback to the classic menu system so I think that's uh yeah that's the bestsolution that we've come up with interms of fixing this in the short termat the very least so certainly worthconsideringso yeah that's the question as we saidalways if you do have questions forfuture episodesnow because it'd be really good to uhwe've got we've got another one rightnow from silly um do you apologies ifwe're pronouncing that wrong I'm notsure if once that name but um do youalready use FSC for your customers weare in the middle of building our first FSC powered websiteum which brings us nicely into our nextkind of topic it doesso what are the challengesum this is a this is just a kind ofdiscussion point we don't actually havean answer necessarilyum but it was to chat into a client theother day so we're building this fullsite editing theme and I've been workinglocally like just building building thesite uhbuilding the site you mean in the site editor in the WordPress app yesusing this block Editor to build siteout of templates yeah that's rightum so I've been doing all of thatlocally as much as I can and thendeciding the CSS I needum that I can't achieveum so that was all going very well andthen we talked to the client and she wassaying uh you know when can I get accesssort of adding content and I was likeokay yeah we'll I'll just kind of uhexport uh and import What I've Donelocally and onto the staging site and we should be good to go by the end of theday kind of thing and I think you'relike well hang on uh I don't think thisis going to be quite so straightforwardthis time becauseunlike when we're building kind of moretraditional themes and I've committedall my kind of theme changes in CSS andI just like push it uh push it todevelop or uh or Main and then it youknow automatic gets deployed and thenall those changes are are there on theon the live or the staging site this isthis is a little bit different because a lot of my changes are actually databasechanges and not not code changesumand we had a quick look and you can youcan export okay Mark you you actuallykind of had a quick go at this earlierso what what did you come up with is theso the way we're going to go about itso with that with a full site editingtheme you've got obviously templates inthe themewhich are actually now HTML templatesthey're not PHP although you can have PHP templates in the override things butwe'll leave that for another time so theHTML the reason why the HTML is becausethey're just block markup with withblock markup comments essentiallyand what what we've doneum as part of our build is we have addedadditional templates so one of thetemplates that we're building it's arecruitment site so we're building a jobarchive which is the job listings pageso that's a new template so using thesite editor you go in and you say I wantto create a new template it gives you a list of options that you can that youcan add that aren't in the themecurrently and as it's detected thatthere's a jobs post type and it knowsthat the theme doesn't have a jobarchivetemplate it gives you that option tochoose that one you can also correctcustom ones that you can assign to Pagesfor example and posts so we've added thejobs template and in case basically usethe block Editor to build that out interms of like a query Loop and outputall the content etc etcnow what happens when you save that is that gets saved in the database so itdoesn't actually get saved as a file inyour theme so it's sat in the databaseum of of that particular site and thiskeeps working locallyit's just sat in his local site so Ithink what you were thinking originallyKeith is that you would go into the livesite or the staging domain whateverwe're using and actually do exactly thesame as you did in the site editor inthe live sitebut I remember the scene that there was an export feature so once you had builtyour site in the a site editorso you then have a mixture of databasetemplates and that have been customizedor added and ones in your theme youcould then export that into one themepackage so that everything was actuallya physical file template a HTML templatein your theme which you could then pushto the serverand that will have all the templates inso I think that's the process that we need to get used to to working withwhereas previously we'd just be writingPHP templates committing the chordpushing it and then hit Presto it's onthe serverum so we don't really have a workflowfor that yet um in terms of how thatactually works but that's something thatwe need to work out and that's what kindof caught us out a bit in terms of wethought this would be really quick butactuallyum it's just different than what we'reused to doing so it's going to take sometime to get used to how to do that so II think we were chatting this morningbut I think the solution might be that what you do now is you get your localsiteready so you've you've made the changesto the templates that you want anycustomizations to templates are alsobeen doneand then you basically say all right I'mready for export you export thatWordPress gives you this themewith all those templates in with allthose template Parts inthen what you can do is we can committhat to our repository and push that tothe server so that's our theme which hasgot all those templates available and then in your local site you can then goahead and remove the customizationsyou've made locally from the databasebecause you've now got them in yourtheme so they'll automatically be thereas wellI think that's the best way to do it butI'm probably wrong so if anyone knowsbetter then let us know and uh I've justmade a note to follow up with this nextweek on this week so we can we can sayhi can I how that went a couple ofcomments on this particular topic uh so Dean asked do you use any type ofdatabase sync between local and stagingeven before full site editingum adding media Pages Etc within localdevelopmentumforeignI've not found we need that to be honestso for example if if we're building outsome features on a single post template so it's changing you don't need all ofthe latest posts from the live site toactually do that work you can do itwithout having the latest content ifthat makes sense there are times whenyou probably may want to sync thingsuh and if so settings like plug-insettings and things like that would beuseful yeah we haven't really seen themup for that we've just generally set itup it depends sometimes we've done likea pull of the live site back to to localor to staging because we need like a copy and to do that we usually use WPmigrate from Delicious Brandswho it may or may not be WP engineanymore I can't rememberum there's that many differentAcquisitions going on that's really goodfor doing that you can pull that contentin and do it that wayum but other than that no there's nevernever been a direct sync betweendatabases for local staging lab Etc Ijust haven't really found that we needit I think there's probably there'sprobably certain types of website wherethat's super useful but we've builtfairly big websites and never really felt the need I think we used to do moreof that than we do today and actuallysometimes it just ends up complicatingthings so yeah we'd like we like toavoid complicated things as muchsuccessfulum some good questions here from Peteruh thanks Peter and this for futureepisodes how to improve the speed of mysite yeah we could talk about that everyweek can weum completed webp images Etc but nottrying to remove redundant CSS andredundant fonts Elementor Pro and Astra theme I think the answer is in thequestionum Elementor and ask it's just they'rekind of you know those are everything toeverybody Solutions uh and thereforethey are going to be bloatedum I don't know if there's a reallyclever way to remove the CSS you don'tneed but you can imagine you know thepeople behind Elementary and Astra aretrying to build a system that can doanything so you're going to need a lotof code if you need something morestreamlined you know you either choose something a lot more lightweight or godown a custom route but very interestingquestion like is there is there a way totake something that is bloated like thatuh are there any plugins out there thatcan kind of strip out what isn't used uhlike I know I know in the umChrome like Dan like the inspectorthere's a coverage tab which is reallyreally interesting so you can see whatpercentage of your JavaScript and CSSfiles are actually being used on that pagebut I don't know if there's any cleverSolutions out there that can turn thatinformation into a new CSS file whatthat's what you want like something thatcan work kind of almost on the Fly uhand say this page needs this CSS I'mjust going to cue that CSS what will begood they may well do this I don't knowit'd be good that you can turn things onand off and that turns off the CSS aswell as sort of thethe admin panels I'm just I don't knowwhether this is the case but like ifAstra theme comes with like its own testimonials post type to dotestimonials like turning that off inthe admin would be a great option andthey also actually doesn't enqueue allthe CSS for that as well I don't knowwhether that's an option or not yeah Iwas looking atum sliders earlier this week we werelooking for a slider that wasn't Jakewe've got lots of suggestions on Twitteractually which was goodum and a lot of those now that sort ofthing so they're very modular in the wayin which you sort of like request themso you don't you're no longer justpulling in the slider.js and the sliderCSS you just get everything and then ifyou're not even using pagination or you're not using dots you get themanywhere they're very much like yeahpick and choose and then you just getwhat you you just load in what you needwhich is goodthat's cool oh loads of questions todayI love first it's good yeah it's greatthank you very muchum where are we going to next uh Tony Ithink oh no Lucas says thanks for in thecontent you're welcome thank you thankyou thank you guys uh so Tony I haven'tread this yet so I don't know uh whatthis is going to say my workflow withHTML templates is to switch to code viewwhen I'm done and save that to the correctly named file in the templatesfolder then delete reset the mods in FSEyeah I think that's a similar thingexcept I was just talking aboutexporting itum and there is an export function Ithink that's your next question is thatpart of native WP yeah if in the siteeditor if you click on the very topright hand side there's like three dotswhich is where you can choose fullscreen mode or or switch between Visualand code there's an export button inthere and it'll just literally downloada zip file if you think with all HTML files yeahum sander in the top right left editingyou have the meatball menu and toggle toofficials that's exactly what I justsaid I think a cop no it's notum so standard says in the top right ofthe full site editing you have themeatball menu and toggle between visualor code editor I copy the code to anHTML file and commit that after I builda page template yeah perfectum so that's that's what Tony was sayingkind of the first time first time around um and then Dean uh saying to Tony crateblock theme the end of all WP themesinterestingreally yeah okay we need to have a lookat that thenyeah I haven't used or really know muchabout create block things so I'm reallyinterested as a kind of theme developerwho's rapidly losing his jobumour comment system here that come up itdoesn't like shows emojis but it likewrites them out so we've got like face purple cryingnext Green game over yeah that's greatthe Emojis would be better to be fairbut that is yeahuh sander suggests flickety slider uhwhich I think I've used before actuallyum or certainly come across itum this is good from Alan thank you Alantoolkit for Elementor is what you'reasking for I've bought and installed itbut not started using it quite yet so Ican't say more great that's uh yeah cool yeah yeah that sounds that soundscoolum lots of thanks uh swiper what's thatis that a that's a slider out so that'swell yes there was Glide Glide swiperthere's about three or four I gotmentioned uh which is certainly worthlooking at yeah coolum what's Mark saying there's a pluginfor that just trying to find it we'llseethat's a plugin which right but as atheme for all the uh clear database well I was saying to make your changes andthen you say put these in my theme andclear them from the database that wouldbe really good yeah okay so what thereis a plugin that does this or are thesethat's a suggestion for a pluginI don't know I think he's suggestingthere is one okay just trying to findout find what it is if you find it letus know be good yeah absolutely and thenTony says I'm just a lot and I'll workall the interaction today Tony uh beforeyour next subject is anybody going tothe London WordPress Meetup next week Ihope to be there uh I wish I wish can't make it yeahabsolutelyyes but for a few but I I saw that uhhit my inbox I was like yes and then nounfortunately not Tony but hopefullythere will be some others looks likeExcellence is going uh that's super cooldefinitely yeah I wouldn't check it outif you're in the area for sure be niceto get back to some in-person meetupsum we're going on a bit today this is uh stretching our our time scales um but wehad one morelittle kind of topic and it's kind ofwell potentially controversial topic itwas certainly controversial on Twitterwhen we saw it uh webecame aware I'm not going to name namesbecause I don't I don't want to that'snot what this is aboutum but we saw we saw a conversationwhere it was suggested thatyou couldn't or shouldn't maybe cutyourself a professional WordPress developer if you didn't know how tobuild native blocksand the two of us strongly disagree withthat sentimentum any thoughts on that Markwelljust because you don't know how to doone aspect of something doesn't mean tosay that you're for me doesn't mean tosay you're not a professional at thatthingwhat does professional mean for me itmeans you weren't living from it and we do so but you know everyone'sdifferent everyone does things differentuh and that's fine I think that's goodum yeah so that doesn't mean say you'renot professional and you're not you knowworthy of that title or whatever I thinkI don't think that's fair there's youknow there's an argument to at least bemade that as a professional WordPressdevelopermaybe you should be able to do it at some level should as a strong wordthough but likeyou know it is how WordPress is builtthese days so if you're going to buildundevelop on WordPressshould you be able to do itI don't know what do you thinkI think it'll help you if you canyeah sure why why because it willumIthink that's up to your clients to say whether you should or not really andthen if if they don't if you can't thenthey'll go somewhere else won't they andthen you'll thinkno I don't think we should be sayingpeople shouldyeah it'll be advantageous for you ifyou learned it and could do it for surebut but would it necessarily even bethat likeI'm sure they're gonna make it worse sois it it's not gonna make you worse nono it's another string to your boatanother arrow to your clever uh but yeah it's yeah I agree I agree with thatbut I mean there must be so many waysthat people build WordPress the sitesthese dayslikeon their old like just because the blockeditor came along and did its thingdoesn't mean that what came before itwas a terrible solution for everybodylike people were very creative with herand they started to use ACF and uh andnot just ACF like other kind of likepods and things I think was one of theother ones what other kind of meta style Frameworks but yeah I I just I just feelgreat yeah exelon's agreed with me hereit's kind of like a feels like a kind ofGateKeepertype comments like you're not goodenough to kind of join our DevelopmentClub and I just feel like there's thereis inin their spectrums are there the peoplethere's people at one end of somethingand there's people at the other end ofsomething and usually it's a bell curveand I feel like the people that are saying that kind of thing are rightright at the endyou know they're one end of the spectrumand they're not necessarily like intouch with that vast majority that sitsin the middle that are doing things theway they were doing things and I'mgetting by and actually delivering goodresults likeyeah there's loads of people to thinkgreat results using pubs and ACF and allsorts of other Solutions Elementor Proand whatever and the stuff they buildfor their clients the clients like it solike where's the problem you know if theclient knows what they're getting and soforth I just I don't see if there's anyproblem with that you know I think I Ithrew this analogy at you before andit's like you have like professionalfootballers at loads of different scalesand and ranges you have like League twoprofessional footballersand then you have Premier Leagueprofessional footballers and it's a bitlike the Premier League footballers andwell you know those League twoprofessionals oh they're not they're nottraining like us they're not using allthe systems that we use so how can theycall themselves professionalyeah but still professional footballers they're still earn a living from playingfootball and doing the best they canyeah yeah is that wrongyou know interesting yeah exactly yeah Ithink I I pushed back and I said um youknow I'm a professional developer and Idon't can't build native blocks andthe person in question said wellyou can build out of blocks because I'veseen you build oneand that okay fair point but does thatmean that I only became a professionaldeveloper at the moment I learned how to do that and what was I before thatmomentjust the Charlotte and of some kind Idon't know it just feels yes exactly itjust it doesn't feel quite right but I Ithink we should justthere are better ways to do thingswithout a doubt not everybody's thereyet you know and maybe they never willbe and that's also okay as long aspeople aren't being dishonest abouttheir skills and the product thatthey're delivering it's okay to havethis range of skills and abilities and price points might I point out uhbecause some people are working withvery very different budgets than othersum so basically the message I want toget across is don't feel shamed by notbeing able to do X or Y or Z becausethere will always be someone that saysyou should be better at this you shouldbe better at that because that's theirthing and they're good at it and theythink everyone should be good at it butdon't understand that you're doing thiswrong when you're doing that wrong wellyou're not necessarily I think Santa hasa good point there so it says transition takes time you know everyone's got tomove to something else if they're usingsomething and why change your winningformula yeah if you're if you're usingACF blocks and it's working for you yourclients are enjoying the site as youbuild you're making moneyyeah you know yeah I think it'simportant way to try and look at newstuff and better stuff but if it'sworking then great it's working no yeahyeahabsolutely so yeah crack on I think likeyeah just don't feel any shame becurious about what's there find out about stuff if you want to butkeep doing the thing you're doing ifit's working for you just like don't letanyone tell you otherwise yeahjust before we finish by the way it hasworked actually Keith the Twitter we'veactually put this live on Twitter todayfor the first time as well and we didn'tactually know where it would beum but it is actually on Twitter I cansee it on a page um on the wp Cafe showhandle uh nice so yeah and there is zeroviewers watching it but nevermindum it might appear in someone's feed at some point in the future but we'll keepputting it on there because I think it'sgood to get out to different platformsand different uh different places itdoesn't uh it doesn't do us any any morework to sort of push it to thesedifferent places before before you gotodayum people uh that are watching alonglive please do give us a little thumbsup or like or whatever on on YouTubethat would be much appreciated it helpsthe algorithm helps uh spread the worduh to other people who might beinterested in this kind of thingum yeah so please do like subscribe if you feel inclined uh to receive morecontent like this it comes into yourinbox so when we go live you will met ashow or pick us up on the on yourpodcast players subscribe to the showsthere but uh yeah great to have so manypeople along today really appreciate itappreciate your questions and thefeedback and uh we'll see you next weeksee you then bye, WP Café #40, Highrise Digital, 01gqdtctjjzcd6f25n3xmcp6y5.