It’s been quite a while since we shared any insights into what we have been doing. But, hey all this while we have been working on interesting and challenging projects, learning new things, expanding the team, sharing knowledge with the community, and toying around a handful of ideas.

This month was quite happening and here are some of the key highlights below:

Ajit spoke at and local Laravel meetup

Learning is an important and integral part of our culture. We promote and reward skill building and see that as an ongoing process to be adopted by each and every one. We have seen folks getting stuck when picking up things. Internally we have been working on helping them craft learning paths to pick and learn things effectively. The entire process and our experience were shared at the meetup.

Sagar and Amit from the team were also present to help attendees with answers and ideas on the same. During the meetup, we happened to have a discussion about WordPress and we were glad to share the latest development happening around. We were excited to share the Block Editor capabilities and WordPress Playground came in handy for the same.

Integrating WooCommerce with Microsoft Business Central

We handle development and maintenance for Maple store, an Apple-authorized reseller. The website is powered by WordPress & WooCommerce and is hosted on WordPress.com platform. Due to their diverse business needs, ongoing development is often required for new features and integrations. All these requirements are interesting to work on. Recently ERP was changed from Microsoft Navision to Business Central. Due to various customization, it was not feasible to connect it to ERP via webhook or connectors. A custom solution was developed to send order data to ERP and also log remote communication. More details to be shared in a future blog post.

Weekly Hackathon

We love tinkering and building things and we have been doing that for client projects and via a few OSS projects. We advocate innovation and creation as it serves as a great way to learn and solve complex problems. We often see folks picking up ideas and leaving it mid-way. We have started with weekly hackathons to foster and boost a culture of working on side projects. Folks work on surprise projects and then present on Friday every week. We have been working on SOP to help the team adopt this efficiently. The goal of this is to get a basic working POC out and keep iterating on it. We can proudly say we already have a few ideas out, some in the making and many in the idea bank waiting to be executed.

Saving time and effort with WordPress Playground

Lately, we have been fanboying on WordPress Playground. It makes WordPress instantly accessible for users, learners, extenders, and contributors. We have been using this left and right to speed up our workflow. We are exploring and diving deep to see to what extent we can push it to make things for us and our clients.

Chrome extension for WordPress Playground

As part of integrating Playground into our workflow, we released a Chrome extension that allows you to launch themes and plugins while you are at the WordPress.org website. This was the result of our own needs and problem-solving.

WordPress Playground generator app

Chrome extension was one way to make things easy for us by having quick access to a plugin or theme playground. Further, we have been exploring Playground to see how we can leverage this. It allows customizing Playground via the query string and we do use this to share with the team so they can click and access things. As our own need, we created a UI generator that allows anyone to generate sharable URLs, embed code, or HTML.

How-To videos for Titan Fastrack

It’s been quite a time being associated with Titan to working on their product motion graphics, packaging design, and how-to videos. We have been part of many products that have been up on their YouTube channel. Continuing the same this month we worked on new product how-to videos.

What’s Next?

The team is planning to attend WordCamps, Meetups, and other industry events. Building useful things and working on more open-source projects. Learn and explore new technologies and share them with the community.