In The Loop: A WordPress Podcast by Blackbird Digital

In The Loop: A WordPress Podcast by Blackbird Digital

A podcast from the developers at Blackbird Digital about WordPress and the web. We discuss agency life, tools of the trade, and also interview members of the WordPress community. We recommend starting with the most recent episode, or find a recent topic or interview that intrigues you! Send your questions and fan mail to podcast@blackbird.digital, follow us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP, and visit https://blackbird.digital for our marketing, design, and development services.

Episodes

September 13, 2023 68 mins

Cory is joined by Justin Tadlock of Automattic to talk about his series of articles on the WordPress developer blog about adding custom controls to core blocks, theme scaffolding, and workflow scripts.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Instagram, Threads, Twitter...

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Cory and Phil are joined by Scott Kingsley Clark of Pagely and the Pods Framework. We talk about Pods vs ACF (in a friendly non-competitive way), the Core Fields API project, and the JavaScriptification of the WordPress admin.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Tw...

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May 17, 2023 77 mins

Cory, Phil, and Jack talk about the recent explosion of machine learning algorithms, how they will affect what we do as developers and designers, and how we do it—if we still have jobs at all.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP.

Blackbird ...

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Aurooba Ahmed and Brian Coords are back to talk to Cory and Phil about their new podcast, viewSource—well, new as of January 2023. We talk about why they started it, who it's for, and why we keep putting ourselves out there.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on ...

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March 15, 2023 79 mins

Cory and Phil interview Fränk Klein, founder of and educator at WPDevelopment.courses and Principal Engineer at Human Made. We talk about some considerations for WordPress at scale and how that affects architectural choices, how WordPress as a project is or is not keeping up with modern industry standards, and why you might consider using the site editor for your next enterprise client.

If you have questions about WordPress website...

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February 15, 2023 68 mins

Cory and Phil kick off 2023 with a look at what we changed about our custom theme workflow last year, including a particularly vigorous discussion about template tags, and some goals for new things we want to try this year. We also couldn't help talking about admin page redesigns. And there's even a question for you, dear listener, about social media.

If you have questions about WordPress, website development, contributing, or anyt...

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December 21, 2022 102 mins

It’s an In The Loop holiday special! Cory and Phil listen back to clips from every episode this season and judge themselves harshly. If you haven’t listened to all of the season 2 episodes yet, or if you’re curious about our thoughts since the episodes aired, you won’t want to miss this. Thank you to all of our season 2 guests, and to all of the new and returning listeners!

If you have questions about WordPress website development,...

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Cory and Phil interview Brian Coords of Howard Development & Consulting and Editor at Master WP. We talk about connecting with the wider WordPress community as an agency, how we’ve been experimenting with Gutenberg for client sites and how it’s affected our entire process, theme scaffolding and Understrap, and why it still makes sense for us to build “hybrid” themes even though we like Gutenberg.

Brian is writing a companion ar...

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October 12, 2022 58 mins

Cory and Phil interview Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital, an agency and plugin company that specializes in accessibility. We talk about their Accessibility Checker plugin, how it can be useful for agencies and their clients, and the journey of building it, as well as Amber’s involvement as Lead Organizer of this year’s WordPress Accessibility Day happening November 2, 2022.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, ...

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September 14, 2022 69 mins

Cory interviews Ryan Welcher, a Developer Advocate at Automattic focusing on the Gutenberg Project, as a special follow-up to our last episode, titled “We Like Gutenberg, We Swear!”. We talk about his WCUS talk, being a Developer Advocate, how to write to post meta with custom blocks, scaffolding with the @wordpress/create-block package, the convenience of ACF fields, and more.


## Links

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanwel...

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August 17, 2022 65 mins

Cory Hughart and Phil Hoyt talk about the reality of the current state of Gutenberg for certain tasks that agencies deal with every day, including what the decision-making process looks like for when to create custom post types and when you might want to disable Gutenberg entirely. We also talk a bit about an upcoming update to Advanced Custom Fields Blocks which brings it more in line with native Gutenberg block development.

An ad...

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Cory and Phil interview Lesley Sim of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that lets you write your newsletter in WordPress and connects to several different email services.

We talk about the journey from digital agency to WordPress plugin company and whether it’s feasible to be both, Newsletter Glue’s Gutenberg-based features, different plugin business models and how contributing factors in, and a new YouTube series called Glam Tha...

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June 15, 2022 69 mins

Cory and Phil interview Aurooba Ahmed of Aurooba Makes, a full-stack WordPress developer, WordCamp speaker, and serial plugin, tool, and course author.

We talk about developing for Gutenberg, goings on with ACF and whether it’s still a must-use plugin (pardon the pun), the myriad of free plugins and tools that Aurooba has built for the good of all, and a teaser of some resources about React for WordPress that she’ll be releasing so...

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May 18, 2022 67 mins

Cory and Phil are back for a Dev Chat discussing the impending WordPress 6.0 release, version numbers, market share, and full site editing in the wild.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP or send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital.


## Links

(3:04) WordPress Version Numbers: http...

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Cory and Phil interview Allie Nimmons, founder of Beedia Productions, a LinkedIn learning instructor for WordPress, cohost of the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, and frequent WordCamp speaker.

We talk about Allie’s path through WordPress and how her background in theater complemented those skills, as well as the thrills and challenges of creating educational content for a rapidly-developing software like Gutenberg.

If you have qu...

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Cory and Blackbird senior designer Jack Watson interview Bet Hannon, web accessibility advocate and founder/CEO of BH Business Websites, an agency that designs, builds and maintains accessible sites. Bet was a speaker at WordCamp US 2021 and is a co-organizer of the Bend, Oregon WordPress Meetup.

We discuss why and how to do accessible WordPress sites, the good and (mostly) bad of accessibility overlays, some sound business advice ...

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February 9, 2022 74 mins

Welcome back to a new season of In The Loop! We have some excellent guests lined up this year, but we start off 2022 with a Dev Chat between Cory Hughart and Phil Hoyt about the recently released WordPress 5.9 and Full Site Editing, open source compensation, video games, and Valentine’s Day.

On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2022, take some time to show your most beloved plugins some love and leave a review!

If you have questions ab...

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December 23, 2021 54 mins

Our final episode of 2021 is here, closing out Season 1 of In The Loop! Today we’re taking a look back at the first 10 episodes with some highlights, so if you have only listened to one or two this should give you a taste of what the other episodes have to offer. There’s a secret tape I found full of holiday spirit and an important announcement near the end.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, o...

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Megan and Cory chat with Mike Demo about his open source adventures and his current role at Codeable. Demo shares about the Codeable platform and their expert community and gives lots of great advice for freelancers and dev agencies.

If you have questions about WordPress website development, agency life, or anything else web-related, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Twitter @InTheLoop_WP...

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October 1, 2021 54 mins

We’re back with another Blackbird Dev Chat between Megan Rose, Phil Hoyt, and Cory Hughart. In this episode we talk about the WordPress 5.8 release and how that has dramatically affected theme development for us, an update about Advanced Custom Fields and escaping output, a long discussion about what “barrier to entry” really means, some old news by now about one particular Automattic acquisition that happened over a month ago, and...

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