Remkus’ Ramblings – #042 Turbo Admin & Highlights

After last week’s ramblings, it’s time for another!

WordPress News 🗞

Besides the obvious WordPress 5.8 news, there wasn’t much to mention on WordPress specific stuff, but I did to run into a couple of interesting WordPress related things. But, let’s look at the obvious WordPress 5.8 stuff first. Here are the 3 most important things that were shared:

1. WordPress 5.8 introduces block based widgets.
2. Boss girl Milana wrote about miscellaneous developer focused changes in WordPress 5.8.
3. WordPress 5.8 will introduce theme.json.

Next up are some non-WordPress 5.8 specific highlights I’d like to share with you.

• Highlighting Ross Wintle three times in a row was not part of my game plan for this newsletter, but here we are 😅. Ross released a super interesting browser extension called Turbo Admin. It’s a browser extension that adds a fast-action, OS X Spotlight or Alfred-style command palette to (almost) all of your WordPress sites without the need to install a plugin. And I looove Alfred, so this should be cool. Go ahead and check it out. And someone let Ross know of his hat-trick, m’kay?!
• First is a plugin called Block Editor Colors, which allows you to edit default Gutenberg block editor colors or the ones registered in a theme, as well as add your own colors! Since this is a global site configuration you can much easier go with your brand color scheme, without a need to manually change colors for each block each time. I thought this was quite a nice use-case to have a solution for. Hope you do too!
• The second thing to share is also a plugin by my good friend Ronald Huereca called Highlight and Share. It’s a social sharing plugin that allows you to highlight text and and share amongst several social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.
• Lastly, I saw Alex Standiford released his WordPress plugin course and it contains 6 hours of content with 37 videos. Join him as he helps you make a beer custom post type, customize the Gutenberg editor, create a new block, and create WP-CLI commands to make testing fast and easy. And more! It’s called WP Dev Academy and you should check it out!

Interesting finds 💡

The following tools are quite the niche, but cover that niche perfectly and as such, I wanted to share them with you:

• If you’ve ever needed a Swiss army-knife of email testing and debugging on your local machine, well, you can now have it. It’s called Helo.
• Being able to share a local site to someone else has always been somewhat of an hassle. If you’re using Local, it comes built in, but if you’re using something else for your local development environment, Expose is a tool you might want to be looking into.
• Ever wanted to monitor content, design or code changes on pages of any site? Check out Visual Ping. It allows you to monitor 2 pages for free per day.
• Last cool tool for the day: Magic CSS. It’s an extension for any Chromium based browser (Brave, Edge or Chrome) that allows you to edit CSS on the go. Aside from saving styles, syntax highlight and autocomplete, it can highlight DOM elements matching the current selector!

What I am reading 📖

I’ve started reading one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last decade again. It’s called Who Built The Moon and what its two authors discover is pretty wild. Wild, I tell ya.

Bonus 🎁

This week’s bonus is actually also a WordPress related link, but it’s not a plugin, service or tool. It’s the soon-to-be-launched WordPress block editor patterns library. Which I know you’re going to love once it’s fully out and about with WordPress 5.8.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

Remkus de Vries

WordPress veteran. Performance aficionado. Aspiring strongman.