1.1 Introduction

After many years of using the same interface, WordPress drastically redesigned to their editor for version 5, it's called Gutenberg. And it provides a richer and more immersive experience by dividing posts and pages into individual blocks of content. Now these blocks are self-contained and are responsible for rendering their own content. And as you've probably guessed, it is also a completely different environment for plugin developers. Since its initial release several years ago, Gutenberg has come a very long way and made blog developers lives so much easier. Hi, my name is Jeremy McPeak, and I invite you to spend some time with me as we learn how to write Gutenberg blogs. There are specialized WordPress plugins that rely on a heavy amount of JavaScript. In fact, they are React components. So let me say this first, I assume that you have experience with JavaScript, and while you don't necessarily need experience with React, it would definitely be helpful. We'll start by setting up our development environment. That has been a boring, tedious, and manual process in the past. But now, WordPress gives us a personalized development environment complete with its own containerized instance of WordPress. From there, you'll become familiar with our blog's individual pieces. You'll learn how our blog works and behaves in the editor. And you'll also learn how to save our blog's content so that it is written into the database. We'll then talk about how to style your blogs both in the editor as well as the saved output. And you'll learn how to add extra features and capabilities to your blog with Gutenberg's inspector components. We have a lot of ground to cover, so when you're ready, queue up the next video and we will get started.