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WCUS 2024: Creating Client-Friendly Editing Experiences

September 18th, 2024

This week I’m talking at WordCamp US with a session called “Creating Client-Friendly Editing Experiences.” The session will cover important considerations to ensure you’re aligned with clients about what they are looking for in an editing experiences, choices you can make when setting up an editing experience to better align with what they’re after, and how to best set clients up for success when a project completes.

In the development part of your process, various choices can be made to better tailor an editing experience for a client. The fact that the editing experience for WordPress does not have to be the same for every client is such an incredible superpower because what works well for one client might not work as well for another.

Instead of getting in the technical weeds of the various ways the block editor experience can be curated in my session, where doing so which might alienate non-developers or people who build a different way in WordPress (as well as leave time for nothing else given the many, many different ways you can influence this experience), I wanted to provide a list of links and videos that I personally found helpful when researching the different options available to tailor the block editor experience.

Curating the editor experience

The block editor handbook is a helpful resource for diving into more topics relating to customizing the block editor for your clients. Their how-to guide on curation of the editor is especially useful, diving into topics like block locking, patterns, theme.json and more. An article on the WordPress Developer blog called “15 ways to curate the WordPress editing experience” is also worth checking out.

Mastering theme.json

If you are tailoring a block editor experience, you’ll absolutely be touching the theme.json file for something. Understanding the ins & outs of this file and how you can use it to customize the formatting controls on a block, remove them altogether, influence the styling of a block, and more, is incredibly important. Here are some articles to dive in further there:

Block editor simplification

Removing unnecessary elements in the editing experience reduces client overwhelm and helps them more efficiently find the pieces relevant to their project.

Block templates

Block templates can be effective at both reducing the amount of manual action for a client (preventing them from needing to add the same blocks to every post of a post type) and helping clients avoid blank page syndrome.

Videos

Here are some misc. videos that are insightful when building an editing experience:

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