About this episode.

On the podcast today we have Ajit Bohra.

Ajit is a keen advocate of WordPress, having used it and committed to it, for many years. He’s a full stack developer working at Lubus which is based in Mumbai, India. His team works with WordPress as well as offering solutions built with Laravel and React.

He’s on the podcast today to offer up his opinions about the near future in WordPress and why he’s confident that the project is moving in the right direction.

To make matters easier to digest we break up the podcast into three distinct sections.

Starting off with Gutenberg we discuss where the Block Editor is at right now and what Ajit sees as the benefits of a Block based approach to content building. We go into some concrete examples of why Ajit thinks that the Block Editor is preferable to the Classic editor as well as discussing some of the projects that he’s been working on to enhance the editing experience for his team and the community. We also talk about the pace of development and whether or not it’s keeping up with the expectations of WordPress users.

We then move onto a detailed conversation about Full Site Editing which is going to play a pivotal role in WordPress’ utility going forwards. The power that it will offer non-technical users to build out their entire site is an exciting prospect, but right now it’s still a work in progress. Ajit talks about why Full Site Editing is needed to compete in the CMS market as well as how Block Patterns will make site building much easier in the future.

Finally we get into the subject of WordPress’ need to move towards a future in which React is playing a vital part in the software’s Core. Why does Ajit think that the project needed to move away from a PHP based platform; after all, it was easy to work with and people had become very familiar with how to build sites using their PHP skills. It’s a case of having to keep up, and as Ajit says, he thinks that you have to unlearn to learn. We briefly discuss the resources which Ajit used to up-skill, websites that he frequents and courses which he recommends should you wish to take the plunge.

In parts the audio is a little choppy, in fact this is a second pass at recording this episode, but I felt that the message contained within was well worth publishing despite that, and I hope that you do too.

Useful links.

Ajit's Twitter account

Lubus

BlaBlaBlocks

Beginner Javascript

ES6

Javascript 30

React for Beginners

The Net Ninja YouTube channel

The Beginner's Guide to React

Epic React

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