If you build WordPress for a living and you want the block era to make sense as a system instead of a pile of opinions — this is the day where it lines up.
Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · WordPress developer and trainer · plugin author and senior freelance developer · 18+ years shipping WordPress sites · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University
WordPress 401 is the senior day for people who write code for a living. By the end of it you will treat theme.json as a design-system contract instead of a config file you copied off a gist, you will have built and shipped a custom block with a real render path, and you will leave with a clear set of opinions on where the block tooling pays for itself and where it costs more than it returns.
Who this is for
- Fit. Agency developers and in-house WordPress devs shipping client work in 2026 who want to stop fighting blocks and start using them on purpose.
- Fit. Senior freelancers building or maintaining custom themes and plugins who want a peer-level day, not a beginner refresher.
- Fit. Plugin authors deciding whether the Interactivity API earns a place in their stack.
- Not fit. Marketing leads and content owners. You will be lost by lunch — book 201 instead.
- Not fit. Site operators who do not write code. 301 is your day.
Prerequisites: you write PHP and JavaScript daily, you are comfortable on the command line, you have shipped at least one WordPress theme or plugin, and you know what wp_enqueue_script does without looking. That is the bar.
What you’ll be able to do after
- Read and write a
theme.jsondeliberately — tokens, settings, styles, per-block overrides — and know exactly when to drop to a custom-CSS escape hatch instead. - Pick correctly between block patterns, reusable blocks, and synced patterns for a given editorial workflow, without defaulting to whichever you used last.
- Build a custom block with
block.json, a working build pipeline, and arender.phpfor dynamic output, so it actually fits the rest of your codebase. - Decide, with reasons, whether the Interactivity API is the right tool for a given interaction or whether you should reach for a small bit of vanilla JS instead.
- Use FSE template parts where they earn their place and ignore them where they do not.
- Talk honestly about the performance and maintainability trade-offs of the block era with a client or a CTO who is asking the right questions.
Curriculum, in four themed blocks
theme.jsonas a design-system contract. Tokens, settings, styles, and the per-block override surface. Where it replaces the work you used to do in CSS, where it complements that work, and where you still need a custom stylesheet without apologising for it.- Patterns, reusable blocks, synced patterns. Three things, three jobs. Picking the right one for a content team that ships, not for a demo. Block variations and the parts of the block API editors actually touch.
- Building a custom block end to end.
block.jsonas the contract.@wordpress/scriptsfor the build. Static markup versusrender.phpfor dynamic blocks. Server-side rendering when it matters and when it does not. Shipping it as part of a plugin without polluting the editor. - The Interactivity API and FSE, on the merits. Where the Interactivity API earns its weight and where a fifteen-line vanilla-JS handler is still the right answer. FSE template parts when they pay back, and the maintainability ceiling I have hit on real client sites. Performance budgets and the trade-offs, with numbers.
Real examples we’ll work through
- A
theme.jsonrebuilt from an existing client theme, with the design tokens extracted and the overrides cleaned up. - A custom dynamic block shipped end to end —
block.json, build, server render, registered through a plugin — that you can take back to your codebase. - An honest performance comparison: an Interactivity-API implementation against a vanilla-JS one, on the same component, with the numbers on screen.
Where this fits in the WordPress training pathway
Shaped for: Agency and in-house developers shipping WordPress for clients in the block era.
From here, the most common next steps:
- WordPress Training 301 — if you also own the operations side of client sites you ship.
The four WordPress courses are role-routed, not strictly sequential — each segments by the work you actually do on a WordPress site rather than by how long you have been around the dashboard. The full training catalogue shows how they sit alongside the Microsoft Office track.
Format, duration, and pricing
401 runs online only, over Zoom or Google Meet, with the recording sent to your team if you need it. The full-day session is the format most agency and in-house teams book; the half-day is a compressed option for tighter scopes. Senior-to-senior delivery is priced separately from the practitioner tracks; pricing is by format, not by group size.
| Format | Online (anywhere) |
|---|---|
| Full-day virtual (6 hr) | $1,995 |
| Two half-days across a week | $3,495 |
| Half-day compressed (3 hr) | $995 |
Prices cover delivery, reference materials, and a post-training summary for engineering leads. Recording provided on request. Custom curriculum work outside the standard scope bills at $275/hr. Final scope and quote confirmed on the discovery call.
Currently booking through Q3 2026. One senior-track cohort per month.
