Hi there,
This weekend I am at WordCamp Leipzig and spent Friday night and Saturday with about 70 WordPressers from the German community. It’s my third year attending this small, low-key WordCamp. This year, it had way more session submissions than speaker slots, and it sold out tickets with a waiting list. Congratulations to the organizing team. 🎉
With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) set to take effect on June 28, 2025, the selection of three talks focused on accessibility is both timely and highly relevant-making them especially interesting to me. I am also looking forward to Hans-Gerd Gerhard’s walk through practical examples for block theme implementations. Talks on site performance, e-commerce, error handling and UX for Gen Z round up the session schedule. Although it’s a low-key WordCamp the video team is amazing. The sessions will be recorded and uploaded to WordPressTV the same or the following day. Session are in German, though.
Save the Date for WordCamp US! It’ll take place from August 26 to August 29. 2025. The call for speakers and sponsors will come out on May 19, 2025, so keep an eye out. If all goes well, I will return to WordCamp US after three years, to finally see my WordPress friends from a previous life again. 🎉 Will I see you in Portland, OR, too?
I could call today’s newsletter, The Plugin Edition, as it mentions 14 plugins that will help with content creation, making a visual impact and organizing your site. It’s actually 16 plugins if you count Gutenberg and WooCommerce as well. Have fun browsing, and please hit reply if you have any opinion or other plugins to mention. Listing those plugins here doesn’t mean I recommend them, you would need to test them for yourself. I just wanted to surface them as it’s a bit difficult to find new plugins in the WordPress repository.
Have a lovely weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
George Mamadashvili released Gutenberg 20.8 on May 14, 2025. Here are the features, Ellen Bauer and I discussed on the podcast episode”
- Create block package: added flag for text domain during scaffolding. (69802)
- Guide component customization: next and previous button text. (69907)
- Search functionality for page templates and patterns. (69667)
- Meta box fixes and widget editor locking. (69958)(69984)
- Ability to edit HTML for invalid blocks.(69902)
- Spacer block update preventing negative width in row blocks.(68845)
- Box sizing property updates to prevent design overflow.(70014)
- Block bindings API documentation improvements and limitations.(68583)
- Block Styles: add copy and code for style_data to documentation (69920)
The changelog is available on the GitHub repo.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Mike McAlister announced the release of Ollie Pro 2.0. The update introduces a redesigned dashboard, a setup wizard to streamline site configuration, and starter sites, with which users could launch a complete website fast. For developers, a child theme creator is included to enable safe code customizations. The release also expands the pattern library with hundreds of professionally designed layouts and styles, all accessible through an improved pattern browser.
Michael Pretty, code wrangler at WooCommerce, recently shared some great news: WooCommerce 9.9 will bring significant admin performance improvements. In his post, he outlined the key factors and changes behind faster admin screen rendering and quicker action execution for Woo merchants. These updates promise a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when managing your store. You can start testing the with the Woo 9.9 Beta version. WooCommerce 9.9 is scheduled for release on June 2, 2025, just before WordCamp Europe.
If you often write tutorials with code examples, you need to check out the Code Block Pro plugin by Kevin Batdorf. You can make your code look as beautiful as the rest of your site. The plugin offers dozens of different themes, and specific syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages. If you feel the code section gets too long with the “Click to see more” feature, you can collapse code blocks at any line, letting visitors expand only what they need. Also, very handy are line highlighting and blurring of surrounding code, which helps readers to quickly recognize the code section that you want them to focus on. I’ve only scratched the surface of what Code Block Pro can do in my own posts. You can get the plugin from the WordPress repository.
In her latest tutorial, Anne Katzeff explored how the Row and Stack blocks expand the layout and design possibilities for your site. She discusses all the different settings, and styles options for these Group block variations.
Hans-Gerd Gerhards introduced his “Plugin Shrinking Logo Sticky Header”. The plugin lets you “add a modern sticky header with smooth, animated shrinking effects for both the header and the site logo.” You have full control over the heights for default and shrunken states and also use your site’s colors for styling. The post also entails the link for downloads videos and screenshots. The plugin in in the approval queue for the WordPress directory.
More single blocks and block collections from the WordPress plugin repository
I am amazed at the creativity of plugin authors to always find missing features to add to WordPress. Some even you didn’t know you were missing. 🧐 Over the last few days, I found several single blocks and block collections in my RSS Feeds. I have not tested them. Use at your own risk. If you do try some, please let me know how it went. Email me.
Nasio Blocks by Nasio Themes – A newcomer on the WordPress repository. Welcome to the WordPress space! 👋 “Post slider, Content slider, Gallery slider, Accordion and Icon blocks. Features a template library with predefined demo content (block patterns) to speed up the page creation process.” so they say.
Flipbox Block by GutenbergKits “Flip box Block – “A flip box is an interactive UI element that flips between two sections on hover or click.” and “You can create unlimited design possibilities”. I remember when I build such a flip box w/ vanilla JavaScript in a static HTML page for a memory game some time in the early 2000s. Now I just can install a block for it.
Photo Block by Ronald Huereca, in his 20th year of his WordPress.org account. 🎉 He built into it advanced image customization, full caption support, responsive styling, and global styles. Alone from the screenshots on the plugin page I feel a bit overwhelmed with the vast number of customizations.You’ll find a ton of filters, too. To see it in action, you can spin up a demo site
PIBE – Parallax Image Block and Effects by Emiliano Lorenzi, also a newcomer to the space! Welcome to you, too! 👋 His plugin “allows you to add modern, animated images to your site, whether you want to add depth with parallax, capture your visitors’ attention with hover transitions, or highlight content with stylish overlays.
Bhargav (Bunty) Bhandari, WordPress developer author of the Thread and Polls blocks, has released a new plugin called: Explicit Media Block. This block is an image/media block public likes and shareable links, turning your site into an interactive content hub, Instagram like as you so will.
Primekit Blocks by SupreoX Limited with contains three blocks. The most intriguing would be for me the Animated Text Block to show for animated text effects for your headings and content. The other two are Call to Action (CTA) block and a Copyright block.
Groundworx Carousel by Johanne Courtright, a longtime WordPress developer and freelancer from the US, published her first plugin in the repository. With the carousel, built with native core blocks, you can display slides with any inner blocks. Using the Splide.js library it supports responsive options, breakpoint-based layouts, and advanced design controls. On GitHub, Courtright also provides instructions and code examples on how to extend the plugin to fit any site’s needs.
Better Navigation Block Styles by Marc Tönsing. Tönsing aims to refine the native mobile menu with to ensure better spacing, alignment, and readability by injecting Additional CSS.
Cycle Block: Lite by Ghost Labs, also a newcomer to the WordPress repository, Welcome! 🎉 The team’s first plugin enables user to display different content for each page load. You can rotate headlines, and create randomized call-to-actions. The description and screenshot offer more use cases where this plugin might be helpful. On their website you find a few more plugins: City blocks for location-based content and Ghostwriter block, using AI for content creation.
WPMozo Blocks and Addons by Elicus provides plenty of Custom blocks to use, a few sliders, a flip box, tilt image, before-and-after comparisons block. You can see it all in action on the demo site. I found the interactive image card to be quite interesting. The Separator block is probably one I would use if I had to spruce up a wall of text or so.
Which reminds me: On the WordPress Developer blog, Justin Tadlock wrote a tutorial about Building a custom style for the Separator block, just in case you are tempted to get into block style building without creating a Custom block.
That’s it for now. Please keep in mind that I don’t have any aspiration to be comprehensive when curating plugins. I would also be delighted, if you want to email me asking me to check out your plugin.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Felix Arntz, a developer at Google and the author of the AI services plugin, has authored a tutorial detailing the process by which individuals can utilize this plugin to create artificial intelligence tools, such as an image alt text generator.
Bernhard Kau published a tutorial on how to add a custom panel to Query Monitor. Query Monitor should be in every WordPress developer toolbox, and how to customize it is a very useful skill to have.
In last week’s live stream, Jonathan Bossenger explored how to use the Feature API. He figured out how to hook up Woo’s LMS, Sensei and register its lessons as tools. Then he instructed an AI agent to create a lesson from a markdown file.
Automattic introduced a new Feature API for WordPress. It allows AI agent tools to interact with sites in more structured ways—unlocking new possibilities for plugins and automation.
Jamie Marsland posted on LinkedIn, why that’s important: WordPress Is Sitting on a Goldmine — And the Feature API Just Dug the First Tunnel
Nick Diego has tested the latest WordPress Studio v 1.5.1 release and wrote a tutorial on how to use the new features: Customize Your WordPress Development Workflow: New Preferences in Studio. I made Studio my only local development tool installed.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
2 Comments
There are some really great plugins in this issue. I like the Separator Block and might have a use for it in an upcoming project. The Cycle block is also quite interesting.
Thank you, Derek, for reading and for your comment. Yes, the Separator offers a low key method to break up the wall of text. I also like the plugins that offer interactivity like flips and comparisons. Depending on the purpose of the site, I might however be cautious. One need to test the plugins for accessibility.
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