In The Loop: A WordPress Podcast by Blackbird Digital

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, and TikTok as @InTheLoop_WP, and we’re on LinkedIn too.

Blackbird Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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 Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as @InTheLoop_WP.

Blackbird Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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 Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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 Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP.

Blackbird Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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 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 Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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 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.

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, 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.

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 article to this episode that you can find on Master WP.Please give it a read! https://masterwp.com/intheloop

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 Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit blackbird.digital for more information.

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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, 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 Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit https://blackbird.digital for more information.

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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.

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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 addendum was added to the end to address a recent controversy about whether the WordPress.org theme developers should be “wasting their time” developing a block theme (full-site-editing theme).

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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 That Plugin.

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 soon.

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.

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.

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 about working accessibility into your contracts, and how to impress upon clients that accessibility is their responsibility, too.

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!

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.

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.

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 a soft announcement about our very own open-source workflow script.

In this episode, Megan and Cory chat with Ebonie Butler, Lauren Pittenger, and Ryan Welcher, who work at web agencies of varying sizes. We talk about using WordPress in an agency setting, including common challenges, favorite projects, and career advice.

In this episode, the devs at Blackbird get back together to talk about block widgets, themes, patterns, directories, and other WordPress 5.8 goodies, Advanced Custom Fields anxieties, and part 2 of the highly-anticipated Gutenberg Shuffle series: The Last Custom Field.

In this episode, Megan and Cory are joined by david wolfpaw, a WordPress support superhero and master of analogies.

Today david shares about their path within WordPress and we discuss their experiences providing website maintenance services. We also chat about the philosophy behind the IndieWeb movement, decluttering the internet and much more!

In this episode, Megan and Cory talk to John James Jacoby of Sandhills Development about what he’s working on and how it can help us make better websites. John, AKA JJJ, contributes to Core and Meta, is a BuddyPress & bbPress lead, speaks at WordCamps, and is very generous with his time and knowledge.

John was great to talk to, and we have have an extra-long episode jam-packed with a myriad of topics ranging from Gutenberg versus page builders, getting started contributing, remote work on tiny screens, and surgeons, with a sprinkling of useful plugins John is working on like Sugar Calendar, WP User Profiles, and BerlinDB.

Today, Joe A Simpson Jr joins the show to chat about all things WordPress. He shares his WordPress origin story, as well as how he became the leader of two Meetups. We also chat about his experience as a graphic designer stepping into WordPress for the first time, online events, and connecting with others in the community.

Wow! A lot has happened since our first episode one year ago! Happy birthday to us, I guess?

In this episode, we are introduced to some new faces and discuss our early days on the web, our experiences integrating Gutenberg, some hot topics in WordPress right now, git repositories, and music to code to.