What To Learn In 2021 With WordPress

what's up wordpress nerds in today's video we're going to be going over what i'm going to be learning in 2021 but before we get started with that i wanted to quickly shout out wp scan now wp scan gives you a hacker's eye view of your wordpress site and allows you to fix things before issues can be exploited on your site so what it does is it checks your themes and plugins that you have installed and checks against a vulnerability database that they are updating constantly now if there's a version of your plugin or theme that is compromised it will alert you and tell you whether to upgrade or downgrade depending on what's available in order to make sure that your site is as safe as possible if you're interested in learning more about wp scan there is a link in the description all right let's jump into the rest of the video all right um thank you for clicking on this video and and jumping in here with me about what to learn in 2021 a little bit of pretext here is that this is not a definitive list of what across the board everybody who's interested in wordpress should be looking at this is more geared towards me as someone who's worked with wordpress for a while close to eight years now so this is not something that i'm gonna i'm gonna tout as as all-encompassing either but this is just stuff that is wordpress or wordpress adjacent that will affect me and my job over the next 12 months and i figured i'd kind of make a video out of it in order to kind of put that out there and see if you can add something to your own list the number one thing that i'll be working on is and this is not in particular order here like as in this is the top priority but this is one of six um is headless wordpress frameworks um this is something that i started working on last year i released a crash course about how to get headless wordpress up and running and kind of a create react app scenario and react native but i'm going to take that even further especially since over the past 12 months there have been so much so many people like rallying around the idea of headless wordpress which brings a lot of joy to my heart um in particular there is frontity which i've not done a video on it but i am working on one behind the scenes so you could look forward to that in the coming weeks but friday is a a kind of headless wordpress setup that is very specific to wordpress like you can't attach frontit to something like contentful or your own api or whatever this is like you you specifically throw in a uh wordpress site's url into the settings file and then it pulls all that wordpress's data um into frontity um it comes with ssr and many other things out of the box and so that is really nice to have it is a kind of all-encompassing uh set up for your headless wordpress project i i see a lot of promise with it i've liked a lot of what i've seen so far with it and i'm really excited to give it more of a try it is very opinionated which i mean i tend to like more opinionated frameworks like french d when react and angular came out i much liked i liked angular a lot more than react at the beginning because of its wonderful cli and it's a you're like you just type in a command and you're generating components and it makes all the files for you and is is very out of the boxy which i appreciate uh then of course there's gatsby i've talked a lot about gatsby on this channel and for good reason they have been really rallying around wordpress uh tyler barnes and jason ball have really taken um their source plug-in for wordpress to the next level and i'm really excited to see um the final version of that come out because they've added graphql and so many oh man i shouldn't even just said graphql because now it feels like i got to make a list of all the things but there's a lot of things that they've shown over the past months of you know live previews uh using graphql instead of the rest api um hot like updating for the content and so you don't have to rebuild the entire site every time lots of cool things like that so very excited to see what happens there gatsby has a very mild learning curve if you ask ask me anyway it wasn't that bad to get set up if you know react and you know a little bit of graphql then it's it's pretty simple and that has a huge ecosystem of plugins i have i'm running a gatsby site right now that you know for example like i needed to get like instagram images on there and i installed a plug-in i had to do all the the painful things of getting the api set up in in instagram but the gatsby portion was extremely simple which i love and then finally next js static site are static site generation and server side rendering it does both of those things very well out of the box much less a much lower learning curve i think it's a little bit easier to pick up um and it is less opinionated on how you can set things up and where you get your information from whereas you know frontity is very specific to wordpress nextgs and and of course gatsby you can pull things from different places um number two is unit testing framework so in my current job this is gonna be a task that i'm gonna be working on very shortly where i'm gonna be making sure that our wordpress project is a little bit more bulletproof than it is right now i'm going to be using a php unit most likely for this and the main reason why i i mean want to even like incorporate tests is because i want to take better care of the sites that i work on we're expanding our team so i want to make sure it's easier and safer to incorporate new developers in it and make sure that i'm pushing good code if i don't want to sit like push it up to github and then all of a sudden you know refresh the site on live and see that it's you know broken or that i'm something's not rendering properly um so yeah very awesome uh very awesome project that i'm working on very excited about it and then i've got mocha in here too because as you'll see kind of further down the list of things that i want to work on i'm going to be working a lot more with javascript in the future and so i want to make sure that that has proper unit tests as well so i plan on working with php unit and mocha in the next 12 months number three is page builders and i don't love page builders but page builders love me for some reason i currently work very extensively with elementor and i've dabbled with other ones like beaver builder divi oxygen things like that visual composer which also known as wp bakery stuff but it's been nice to kind of be able to learn some of these um i didn't actively go seeking out to specifically learn them but kind of over the time i've i've got enough knowledge with some of the other one other page builders besides elementor to be to be dangerous and so it's been nice to kind of have that under my belt and i want to expand that this year so main reasons is because i i get hit up a lot for freelance projects and um and just like friends needing sites and things like that so it's just setting them up with a page builder is just an awesome way to help out people and let them kind of run things on their own and sometimes a lot of people are just looking to help have help you know set up their their wordpress site with elementor or whatever and um i only take one client on at a time but if a client shows up and they want to use something like that it's nice to be able to have that so i plan on doing that a little bit more lots of companies use them i was really surprised over the years to find out how many companies large companies like very large companies are using page builders um like elementor or wp bakery like i i was very surprised to see that and so i plan on learning a little bit more because of that and maybe even gutenberg i've got a big issue with gutenberg i don't love it as a page builder especially from a data perspective but there's been improvements in there and more and more people are using it i probably should know more about it than than i do i i've messed with it on from a very rarely from a very very early stage and so as things evolved i i feel like as someone who kind of touts himself as a wordpress guy to to know more about it so well i'll continue on with that this year number four is aws and this is just kind of a simple one this is a little bit more of a stretch goal for me i don't have anything right out of the box out of the gate that i need to be working on this year that is going to utilize aws but there is so much there that i really want to sink my teeth into i love playing with digitalocean droplets and kind of building out those servers and and taking more control of the things that i do um and then the amount of uh uh transferable skills that you can have is is pretty nuts when it comes to aws if you put that on your resume and you want to move jobs or anything like that somebody it's never going to be a bad thing that you know it and so if i can kind of you know take control of some of these other goals i'd love to be able to add aws to um my set of skills and then number five is uh nodejs and this is more because i've been working with it more and more at my current job and i want to kind of round out those skills a little bit better currently we have you know like a node.js cli that does a lot of things and so i want to rewrite it and do a better job of kind of corralling all these tasks that we need to do with uh with with the command line um i've also been uh using it to create scripts and apis and things like that in order to make you know common tasks a little bit easier in regards to spinning up our wordpress uh install and or like you know doing lots of data manipulation with wordpress's api um there's been a lot of tasks that i've done this year with it and so i want to kind of round out these skills because of it and same thing with it's a very transferable skill so you'll find lots of reasons to use it and then number six this is another one kind of a spillover from last year i did a lot more work with docker this time around but i don't feel like i've really been able to take advantage of it as much as i wanted to this year so i'm going to try really hard the next in order to build up that skill because docker itself is um something that you can have that's extremely affordable so you can have it in a lot of different uh hosting services and it's extremely customizable obviously you build the thing from the from the bottom up and you can um you know specify exactly how you want your server to be in the kind of easy syntax and so you can transfer that that image around to make sure that no matter where you are on local on staging on live that you are going to have the same um environment every time so there's not going to be any like oh this hosting company doesn't use this php extension and there's no way we can get it on so this make would uh solve for that kind of problem and it's another transferable scale so all these kind of things are awesome to have on my tool belt and i want to make sure that these are you know things that i focus on in in the year 2021 hopefully you found this video helpful um and let me know in the comments what you think would be another good item to add to this list or just let me know what your list is in the in the comments um i also want to thank my patrons for supporting me we just learned about laravel mix in our monthly exclusive video if you're interested in learning about that or how to deploy wordpress with git or do headless wordpress with gatsby those are monthly exclusive videos that are currently on there so if you sign up you get that those videos to watch i'd also want to suggest you subscribe to my channel if you're new here i do weekly wordpress videos and uh if you uh like the video why not give it a like so anyway i appreciate you guys watching and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: WPCasts

Views: 6,796

Rating: 4.9528022 out of 5

Keywords: wordpress, 2021, wordpress development 2021, what to learn 2021

Id: c5dgA-f27QQ

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020