Howdy, howdy!
This week the #core-editor team released Gutenberg plugin version 10.0, making it their 100th version. Congratulations to all the WordPress contributors! Although the GitHub repo counts 722 contributors, many thousands more contributors have been involved in the making and improvment of the block editor. You can read Riad Benguella’s reflections on the WordPress News.
That’s not all that happened this week. Below you’ll find all the links you need to get your 47 questions about Full-site Editing answered, or how to test the next iteration of the Site Editor to build a homepage or learn about new plugins and themes. Enjoy and get to work! Ha, ha!
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
Full-Site-Editing on its way to the MVP
Maybe “Prototype” is a better name than MVP for the upcoming version of the Site Editor. Can you help test it? Anne McCarthy published the Second Call for testing for the #fse-outreach-experiment program.If you are interested, you are asked to build a homepage with the tools available and report on your observations, discuss quirks and file GitHub issues.
Kjell Reigstad published his weekly list Gutenberg + Themes topics for the team. Their Meeting Notes also list a few possible avenues for ‘bridging the gap between traditional themes and block themes’ It’s a fascinating list of issues and thought models. You can follow along with one, GitHub Hybrid themes: Templating hierarchies and make your opinions and use cases heard.
It’ll be interesting to see which of the various scenarios will make it into Core later this year. And now is the time to contribute and participate in the discussion.
47 Questions and Answers about Full-Site Editing
Anne McCarthy published the answers to all 47 questions from WordPress user sent in via the survey in February 2021. Where the answers are still pending, she provided links to GitHub issues, so people can follow along the development and contribute. For some questions, you’ll find short videos as answers. McCarthy grouped the questions by topic and created separate posts. Here is the list:
- QA about the overall project
- QA about templates
- QA about themes
- About restricting access & functionality
- About general functionality
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Block-Based Themes
The Material Design team at Google released a WordPress theme and accompanying plugin into the WordPress repository. It uses the customizer extensively and make use of starter content. A startup guide helps a site owner to assemble the new site in easy steps. The experience is clear, smooth and intuitive. Within a few minutes I could design a decent looking site. It is definitely worth your time to test it. Jonathan Bingham, Material Design product manager has the details and a video
On the WPTavern, Justin Tadlock reviewed two themes this week.
- GermanThemes Basic with Custom Patterns by Thomas Weichselbaumer, now available in the WordPress repository.
- Phoenix by Imran Sayed, which as was added to the Gutenberg team’s Themes Experiments. Take a look at Sayed’s demo site.
Developing for Gutenberg
Beyond reflections on the 100th version of Gutenberg, of course, Riad Benguella, also published the release notes: What’s new in Gutenberg 10.0? (17 February). There again a quite a few updates to APIs and Theme.json files.
For the upcoming WordPress 5.7 release, Jean-Baptiste Audras introduces the new dynamic hook to filter the content of a single block. It is now easier to modify the content of a block before rendering it on the front end of a site.
If you are looking for a course on Custom Block Development, recently Ali Alaa, updated his Udemy Course: Gutenberg Blocks for WordPress and React Developers.
Giorgos Sarigiannidis shared in his post An easier way to tell apart Gutenberg blocks on the Editor, code snippets of an CSS only solution to help users identify blocks and sections in more complicated layouts of nested blocks. You should be able to paste the code into your editor styles.
Block Editor for Content Creators
The official end user documentation has a new page: Keyboard Shortcuts in Block Editor, with a comprehensive list of Keyboard shortcuts for Window and macOS.
Contributors also updated the information about the Image Block including the inline editing features.
Ashley R. Cummings has 15 Gutenberg Tips & Tricks to Save Time in Your Day. Just in case you are looking for an article you can share with customer and writers, who are just starting getting accustomed to the block editor.
Plugins for the Block Editor
Justin Tadlock followed up on the Frustrations and Finding the Right WordPress Block Plugins. In answering the reader question, Justin took stock of the current plugin ecosystem around blocks and tools for the block editor. Tadlock also list a set of single-use plugins. It’s a good motivator for me to revamp the slightly outdated post of 98 Plugins for the Block Editor from June 2019.
In his February 2021 Plugin Roundup, Nathan Ingram showcased thirteen plugins from the WordPress repository, including two block-editor related plugins:
WP Image Mask by Bogdan Bendziukov. Ingram notes, that it adds a nifty Image Mask setting to the standard Image Block and includes a few basic shapes – “but what’s really cool is that you can use
a custom image as the mask. Icons, logos, shapes, etc.”. I have to agree. It’s a pretty cool plugin!
Ingram’s second plugin recommendation is called Block Conditions by Chintesh Prajapati. It allows you to hide WordPress blocks under various conditions: show and hide based on screen size, logged in/out, and location. You can also define responsive breakpoints on the settings page.
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WordPress Events
February 23rd, 2021 – 4 pm / 21:00 UTC
WordCamp for Publishers meetup
Panel Discussion: “Career Growth and Development in WordPress and Beyond”.
February 27, 2021
WordCamp Praha
March 4, 2021 11:00 AM ET / 16:00 UTC
WP Engine DE{CODE} 2021
With an awesome line-up of speakers!
April 16th – 18th, 2021.
WordCamp Greece 2021 Online.
The organizer published the call for speakers.
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
