Phil Johnston
Senior Staff Software Engineer at WP Engine
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhil Johnston is a Senior Staff Software Engineer based in St. Catharines, Ontario, with deep WordPress roots dating back to building headless Flash apps in 2005 and co-founding a WP theme company in 2008. He has a proven track record of shipping widely used plugins and tools—MP Stacks, All Access, Tip Jar (processing over $1M), Pattern Manager—and has contributed to high-impact projects like Gutenberg and Advanced Custom Fields (3M+ users). At WP Engine he’s advanced core integrations (including adding Okta SSO to a popular Electron app) and focused on backend improvements to template rendering and block editor stability. Phil combines entrepreneurial product instincts with long-term open source stewardship, comfortable moving between plugin productization and core platform engineering. Notably, his work blends e-commerce payment flows and editor-level performance fixes—an uncommon mix that accelerates both developer experience and revenue-facing features.
6 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Humber College
Github Skills (9)
wordpress10
editors10
blockly10
blocks10
php10
editor10
gutenberg10
html5
javascript4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
WordPress/gutenberg
Feb 2020 - Jun 2021
The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 5 commits, 10 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the WordPress Gutenberg block editor project by modifying core PHP files within the block library and template loading functionalities. Their work focused on refining template part rendering, including the removal and modification of filters like `the_content` and `wp_make_content_images_responsive`. Additionally, the user improved the integration of custom blocks within the Site Editor page and fixed issues related to oEmbeds in block template parts. These changes suggest a focus on improving the core functionality and performance of the block editor.
block-editorwordpressgutenbergwordpress-pluginbeyond
johnstonphilip/gutenberg
Feb 2020 - Oct 2020
The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
Contributions:24 pushes, 9 branches in 7 months
block-editorwordpressgutenbergwordpress-pluginbeyond
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