Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 2, first note:
This is day 2 because I ended up not working on this on Thursday and Friday of last week. I’m back at it today though.
And today’s first task: Fighting with Xampp on Windows.
I was thinking about attempting this with Desktop Server since it’s already installed, but since we’re doing the Gutenberg thing may as well do it properly with no shortcuts.
So far I have it installed but am having difficulty getting it running, (user account control appears to be the bane of my existence), but will keep trying and hopefully will have something to say once it’s running properly.
Next is installing all the tools.
There has been an increase in developer resources around Gutenberg. We collected quite a few here. We’ll update along the way.
This resource from Gutenberg Times looks like it might be a great place to begin with Gutenberg development.
Development note: for the purposes of being able to remember gotchas when developing, I’ve added this development note with this bookmark.
While I’m not sure if this is a function of Gutenberg or not, I needed to manually input the information for the post name but not post excerpt, and I needed to manually input the site name. All of this applies when attempting to parse the information from the URL, which uses the “Parse This” portion of the Post Kinds plugin. This may mean something to look at specifically when migrating that plugin.
Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 1, first note: I’m trying to catch up on the latest with what’s going on regarding Gutenberg, and I can’t help but notice all the noise.
This could be a function of my social media curation, or it could be a function of there really being a lot of noise out there, or it could be a little bit of both.
I’m going to see if I can find some sort of roadmap, although I may need to create one myself.
One final note for this evening.
I’m trying to get John to agree to participate in screen share recordings via Zoom of this process. I figure if we’re doing this whole migration thing, and it’s his idea, he can participate in the work.
I also told him that this is the fluffy bunny stuff he has to do for marketing.
I think he’s still in get-off-my-lawn mode but I’m sure he’ll come around.
Yesterday I posted that I was contemplating migrating this site over to the Gutenberg world. There are a couple of reasons for this, and the most pressing one is that John, (whose greatest hits include experimenting with Gutenberg and Twentytwenty back in November and consequently providing the catalyst for some fixes that went into WordPress 5.3), and I are have decided to professionally pool resources. He’s been working on some smaller projects for me, and he likes kicking the tires on Gutenberg and doesn’t want to give it up for the classic editor.
OK, so we’re doing this. But for this site, it’s going to take some planning. First, there are several custom post types this site relies on, and it also heavily relies on the suite of plugins which enable WordPress sites to participate in the Indieweb movement. I’m definitely not giving that up, so this means that there are going to have to be some contributions to those plugins to make them suitable for Gutenberg use.
I’ve volunteered to be the lab rat for this, since I depend on it and I don’t want to give it up and go back to not-indieweb. I’ve decided to journal the entire process, starting from Day 0 until we get everything finished.
after doing some initial planning, (determining what custom post types are in play, plus post kinds), a separate development environment has been set up, which has Gutenberg installed. John’s using Twentytwenty on a smaller site he’s working on, so I think the development environment will have a Genesis theme for its base install. I’m also chatting back and forth in Indieweb Slack.
I figure if I’m doing this, may as well jump off the deep end. We have a target date of just after Labor Day for launch, and I’m going to do my best to stick to that. And I’m documenting the entire process, challenges and all. It should be interesting.