April 2024

Spring cleaning in preparation for bigger things

Later this month will mark the third anniversary of _tw, and I’m hoping to launch a redesigned version of the site to celebrate. As part of that process, I’m addressing some technical debt from when I started: plugin functionality baked into the theme itself.

Because _tw is based on _s, underscoretw.com is based on the generator from underscores.me. And while I knew when I saw it that the underscores.me approach of having the generator code as part of theme wasn’t ideal, I moved forward so I could launch this site sooner.

Three years later, this site is still powered by a theme created by a pre-launch version of _tw that runs Laravel Mix and takes 5–10 seconds to update the site’s CSS, providing an excellent reminder of the relentless pace at which Tailwind has improved over the years.

But I want to be ready to for the sub-millisecond build times promised by Tailwind 4, so I’m preparing to split the existing codebase in two: one repository for the generator, and one for the theme. My goal is to make the theme repository solid enough that I’m comfortable publishing it publicly. Because the generator still leans pretty heavily on legacy code from underscores.me, it will likely remain private for a while yet.

All of which is to say: I wanted to cross some things off of my to-do list for _tw before generating the new theme for this site.

Updated Tailwind Typography fork

I package an updated release of @_tw/typography each time Tailwind Typography puts out a release of its own, and they made two releases in rapid succession after months of silence.

Neither release was critical, so I held off so I could combine this work with planned updates to my fork:

• Automatically disabling Tailwind Typography for selected ACF blocks in the block editor
• Adding the JavaScript powering _tw’s block editor integration with Tailwind Typography to @_tw/typography so that it can be updated there in the event of incompatibilities with future WordPress releases

These changes led to a beautiful commit summary in _tw:

3 changed files with 11 additions and 144 deletions.Code language: Bash (bash)

Improved ESLint configuration

I’ve begun working more with patterns, which has meant more classes beginning with wp-block and wp-element in my projects. Now those are allowlisted for ESLint.

More to come

I’m hopeful I’ll be able to launch an improved _tw site this month, so I look forward to updating you again soon!