With Gutenberg, we made the choice to use JavaScript heavily in order build the UI of the editor, not because we’re nerdy hipsters but essentially because it is the perfect fit to address the UI and UX challenges of a heavily interactive interface in the browser.

As a consequence, we’ll start to see a shift in the WordPress community. Plugin developers are required to use JavaScript more in order to extend the editor. Most blocks need to be developed using this technology. The modules Gutenberg provides (Components, data module, i18n, apiFetch…) will also encourage developers to extend other parts of WP-Admin in JavaScript. Instead of writing HTML/CSS screens from scratch and rendering them from the server, developers are able to bootstrap and prototype fully accessible new screens in WP-Admin by composing these components in a small number lines of code.

But when we talk about JavaScript in general, we can think of two different approaches:

Most plugin authors are already writing ES5 code in their PHP rendered UIs or in their themes and the Gutenberg APIs can continue be used this way. But our role as Core Contributors should also be to educate people to get on the ESNext train as it can be a huge improvement in terms of productivity and development experience.

That said, learning ESNext and all the tools involved in the process can be a bit overwhelming if you’re coming from a PHP background without any prior heavy JavaScript experience. To help with the transition, the WordPress community started working and providing tools (Like Create Guten Block).

Using these tools can feel like “magic” though. It works but as a developer, you don’t really know what’s happening behind the scenes. Debugging code can be a challenge if you don’t understand how everything fits together.

For this particular reason, I created the WordPress JavaScript Plugin Starter. Unlike other starters thought, it’s written as a tutorial. Each commit of the repository is a step further in the setup and the README goes through each one of these steps and explains it.

Hopefully, At the end of the day, you’d be able to use the starter as a way to start a WordPress plugin but also master how this plugin works and how all the tools fit together to ship a production ready JavaScript plugins.