WordPress

The world’s favourite content management system.

I’ve been creating websites for over 26 years, and working with WordPress for over 20 years.

WordPress projects are the main focus of my professional career and I have also contributed to the community as a theme and plugin developer, translation editor and WordCamp speaker and co-organizer since 2009. My open-source plugins are currently being used on over 20,000 websites.

I develop and manage website projects, web apps and API integrations at Swiss web agency Say Hello, supporting clients directly and providing technical and conceptual support to partner agencies.

…oh, and if you’re interested: the very site you’re reading has been running WordPress since 2003, with the first of the current content being published in 2004.

Mark Howells-Mead on stage at WordCamp Zurich — Presenting at WordCamp Zurich in 2019

Programming and design

I’ve either conceived, designed, developed or collaborated on the following projects as part of my work for my employers.

Screenshot of Gantrisch website — Integration of two APIs to the website of a national nature area, drawing data from third-party systems. (Say Hello, 2023)

Single-page application for a garage’s used vehicle selection using the WordPress REST API and React (Say Hello, 2020)

Screenshot of flugbasis.ch — Design and programming of a website with course management and CRM synchronisation (Say Hello, 2019)

Custom website design and programming for a multilingual online shop (Say Hello, 2019)

Deep integration of Gutenberg blocks using React and custom web components. (Say Hello, since 2018)

Interactive map with geolocation, search and a reactive list of club locations (cubetech, 2018)

Express development of a multilingual, media-intensive website for a major Swiss p.r. agency (cubetech, 2018)

Screenshot of the Sportamt Bern website — Dynamic frontend elements using *AngularJS* and the WordPress REST API (cubetech, 2017)

Design and programming of a multilingual WordPress multisite installation and social media collator (Burson-Marsteller, 2008)

Blog posts

Working with, not on, WordPress

5th July 2023

Stepping back from involvement in the future development of WordPress as a system.
Read more
Client-side filters in the WordPress Block Editor

24th May 2023

Using block filters in JavaScript to override theme.json settings on a per-case basis.
Read more
Storing credentials securely in WordPress plugin settings

3rd March 2023

If you’re writing a plugin which needs to connect to a third-party service, there’s a relatively high chance that you’ll need to store credentials securely.
Read more
Automating visual comparison checks of your website

13th February 2023

Using a third-party service to compare your website before and after a technical update.
Read more
Block Patterns and Block Variations of the Query Loop

8th February 2023

Block Patterns, Block Variations and Reusable Blocks. How and why they’re useful and implementable.
Read more
Updated Gutenberg category selector

27th January 2023

Building a single-selection category selector for WordPress Gutenberg using React.
Read more
Using useSelect in Gutenberg to fetch data from the REST API

12th January 2023

A simpler alternative to wrapping a Gutenberg edit component with a higher-order component.
Read more
Building a multilingual WordCamp website

1st December 2022

How I used manual content structuring and the power of the WordPress Site Editor to set up what we believe to be the first non-plugin-based multilingual WordCamp website.
Read more