Built for Speed, Simplicity, and Storytelling
After years of supporting TEDx Royal Tunbridge Wells, I’m proud to unveil our newly rebuilt website — the first in our portfolio to fully embrace Gutenberg Full Page Editing. This marks a shift not just in design flexibility, but in how we manage content, streamline workflows, and empower the TEDx community.
🧱 Modular Blocks for a Modular Event
To support the unique structure of TEDx events, I developed custom Gutenberg blocks tailored to the core components of every TEDx talk:
- Talks & Videos: Easily browsable and embeddable, with dynamic layouts.
- People: A unified block for speakers, team members, and committee profiles.
- Companies: Used for sponsors and partners, with branding and links.
- Speaker Submission & Review: Built as a Gravity Forms extension, enabling a seamless backend review process.
- Newsletter Signup: Integrated with Mailchimp via a lightweight plugin.
- TEDx Child Theme: Custom-built to reflect TEDx branding, colours, and typography.
⚡ Why I Love This Site
- Speed: With only three plugins — one of which we wrote ourselves — the site loads fast and runs lean.
- Simplicity: Gutenberg Full Page Editing means no page builders, no clutter, and no compromises.
- Scalability: Each block is reusable across future TEDx events, making content management intuitive and future-proof.
- Maintainability: Minimal dependencies, clean architecture, and modular code make updates painless.
🎯 What’s Next?
This build sets the foundation for future TEDx sites and showcases how lean WordPress development can still deliver rich, branded experiences.
We’re aiming to develop the functionlity into our WordPress platform for conferences and exhibitions (currently running on WP Bakery).
https://www.conference-websites.co.uk/
I did a presentation on Gutenberg / Full page editing at WordPress TW the other month. Here is the presentation. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10WqURdq8S_wiUa9lzuynpfShK1jD45GC4KSLMfZ77bs/edit?usp=sharing
