# Growing Connections in the WordPress Community

As Alpha Particle has grown over the years, we've gotten so many opportunities, made friends and even gotten clients from our connections to and in the WordPress community. Whether you're starting an agency, already work in WordPress or just want to get involved, below you'll find my recommendations for people to follow and ways to participate in the larger WordPress community.

## SVGs: A Flexible Image Format

SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) are a great file format for making sure that images look good at any size! Because they're defined with code, they can scale to any size but since they're also an image format, they can be used in any standard image tag, like so:

## Using Laravel Sail

[Laravel Sail](https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/sail) is a great all-in-one development environment that allows developers to spin up Laravel applications quickly and easily using Docker. However, after picking up a recent project that I hadn't worked on for a couple months, I encountered a strange error:

## Building a Bootstrap Accordion as a WordPress Block

In this post, we'll go over how to build a Bootstrap accordion as a WordPress block using Advanced Custom Fields. This is a useful approach for rapidly building WordPress blocks. It's also a great [stopgap for developers who are still learning JavaScript](/content/blog/building-gutenberg-blocks-with-acf-as-a-stopgap/index.html), since it doesn't require you to write any JavaScript.

## Working with WPML

We've been working on a large WPML implementation lately with quite a few translated pieces of content. If you haven't used WPML before, you might not know that changing the contents of a page that's already been translated marks the other translations as out of date. This means WPML wants you to update them to reflect the content changes you made on the English page.

## Hiring a WordPress Developer

Alpha Particle is expanding and looking for a WordPress Developer who can tackle some of our production WordPress work. This means building custom themes (either completely from scratch or Child Themes) as well as plugins to fit our client's needs.

## Learning to Code with WordPress

WordPress is a fantastic way to start learning to code. You rarely _need_ to learn more than one new thing at a time in order to get building, and you can always find one new skill to learn (or improve) with each new project.

## Deployment Challenges

Deployment is the stage of the software development life cycle most likely to cause problems. Even if your deployment pipeline is perfectly set up, it's the stage of the development process where any bugs you didn't catch while building or during QA get shipped out to your end users. This might mean you need to roll back, or at the very least track down the problematic deploy at some point in the future.

## Creating Custom Gutenberg Blocks with ACF

Creating custom Gutenberg/Block Editor blocks with ACF is a great way to provide WordPress users with the functionality of custom blocks without having to be familiar with Javascript and React. If you haven't tried this workflow before, the experience is largely similar to how ACF was used before the advent of the Block Editor. There is the extra step of having to register the block (using PHP, still no Javascript necessary!) to make sure WordPress knows you're trying to build a new block. But after that's done, you add custom fields to it through the same ACF interface you're already familiar with, and build the template for controlling how the block displays with `get_field` and `the_field` calls just the same as you always have. The code to register a block looks something like this:

## The Snowball Project

The team behind the newly-formed non-profit [The Snowball Project](https://snowballproject.org/) came to us with an idea. They wanted to build a web application that used peer-to-peer influence to encourage the unregistered to register, and the non-voting to vote. They knew what they wanted, but they needed a "virtual CTO" to help them make decisions and an engineering team to make those decisions happen. That's where Alpha Particle came in.