Howdy,
I know it’s still a month or two, but I am officially done with Winter and the cold. I am already looking forward to Spring and nature painting the world with color again.
Next month, I will warm myself up again by spending some time in Manila, Philippines at temperatures between 24° and 31° Celsius. If you are making plans for WordCamp Asia and might have time to meet, please let me know or use my public calendar bit.ly/bph-wcasia.
If not WordCamp Asia, might I run into you at CloudFest at the Europa Park in Rust?
What are your plans for 2025 regarding WordCamp and conferences?
Have a fabulous weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Fabian Kägy published What’s new in Gutenberg 20.0? (10 January), celebrated the 200th plugin release and highlighted the following updates:
- Enhancements for the Style Book
- Starter Patterns get a new UI
- Easily set a Page to become the Posts Page
- Display Block Type Badge for renamed blocks
- More Highlights
Nithin Sreeraj took a closer look at the features in his post Gutenberg Plugin Reaches 200th Release Milestone with Version 20.0
George Mamadashvili made the RC1 of Gutenberg 20.1 available on GitHub for testing. The final release will be on January 22, 2025.
Tammie Lister and I chatted about the last three Gutenberg plugin releases and recorded Gutenberg Changelog 113th episode. We also talked about WordPress 6.8, exploration with AI, storybook and Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1. It was a fun first episode for 2025. It will land on your favorite podcast app on Sunday or shortly after.
🎙️ 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
In his video My Top 10 Website Layout Designs, Jamie Marsland collected his favorite layouts and demonstrated briefly how his assembled them in subsequent videos. It’s a great collection as if you are a site builder, you should be able to rebuild them and have them in your arsenal.
1,086 Block Themes are now available for browsing in the WordPress Theme directory. The latest approved submissions are:
- Trivium by Effe Themes
- FSE Medical Clinic by Creta Themes
- General Food Store by WP Radiant
- Mechanic Car Repair by Titan Themes
- WENS Vivid by WEN Solutions, offering some great front page patterns for restaurants.
- WhiteBlack by Tommaso G. Scibilia. The artist from Sicily, Italy, published his 11th Block Theme since August 2024, that’s about two themes per month. 🎉
Jan Hoek published the Vital Video Block plugin, a tool to help you with your YouTube video display and avoid slow-downs from background loading.
Dominik Schilling updated one of my favorite plugins: Public Post Preview with four features:
- Under Settings > Reading Public Post Preview you can now set a different default expiration time.
- It also shows a link icon in the list of posts so you don’t have to go into the edit screen to obtain the temporary link.
- The list view also lists a filter to see only posts with the Public Post Preview link enabled.
- The Preview drop down of the editor also lists the public post preview.
Colin Newcomer talks you along on getting started with WordPress Patterns. You learn what are Patterns, the synced and the unsynced kinds, and how to management them on your site. The detailed screenshots and instructions make this a great tutorial.
The only missing part is the Synced Pattern overrides that arrived with WordPress 6.6 last summer. This feature allows users to make content-specific changes to synced patterns without altering the underlying layout or design. Nick Diego posted an introduction to overrides in Synced Patterns on the WordPress Developer Blog.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Simon Cooke, business development director at HumanMade, discussed in his post How WordPress’ full site editing supports global scalability. In his view, WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) helps large companies manage websites across different regions more easily. It allows businesses to create consistent design templates while giving local teams flexibility to adapt content. FSE makes it simpler to maintain a unified brand look, support multiple languages, and create websites that work smoothly in different markets. By providing centralized design tools and easy-to-use content blocks, companies can build more efficient and adaptable digital experiences globally.
Brent MacKinnon, invites you to WooCommerce’s January Developer Office Hours: The Future of WooCommerce Themes on January 22 at 22:00 UTC. Ellen Bauer, WooCommerce’s Product Lead for themes, blocks & patterns, will share insights on theme development and block patterns. She will share the new starter block theme replacing Storefront, discus of block-based theming best practices and customization and answer your questions. The Developer hours will be held on the WooCommerce Slack space in the #developers channel.
More updated from WooCommerce Developer Blog
- Order DataStore Caching — A new approach to optimize WooCommerce performance
- New WooCommerce blocks cart item image filter
- Developer advisory: Block Checkout field entities
- Feedback request: Adding order fulfillments to WooCommerce
Fränk Klein took a deep dive in how WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE helps with developing Block themes, as it bypasses the theme.json cache. Learn how to enable it and how to use it. He also offers an array of code snippets for conditional handling in your wp_config.php file, and shares some pitfalls.
Amor Kumar, principal engineer at WebDev Studios, created the Block Starter Theme, so you can “craft your next WordPress block them with a simple foundation”. This project is targeted toward agencies or developers building tightly controlled themes for clients. To facilitate full control of the editing experience, the following WordPress core features have been disabled: Openverse integration, Core block patterns, Core block styles, and search in the Block directory. The readme file lists how to use it and suggests a particular workflow for building a block theme. It’s definitely a great way to get started.
In his post How your plugin can customize the WordPress Command Palette, Steve Bonisteel, technical editor at Kinsta, explains what the Command Palette is, and how its API can be used by plugin authors to provide a streamlined interaction with the block editor.
In his video WP Queries in PHP and JavaScript – Brain Coords provided a tutorial on how to build a custom Avatar block. “I share how I built a custom solution for displaying guest speaker images on my podcast website using WordPress. I combined plugins like Seriously Simple Podcasting and the outdated WP Term Images, then created a custom Gutenberg block to dynamically display speaker headshots.” he wrote.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
JuanMa Garrido expanded the access to the Block Development Examples on the GitHub Repo. He built a TypeScript app using ReactJS and host it on the WordPress GitHub pages. Each example has its own card, that also shows the contributing author. The list can be filtered by tags. The details view links back to the readme.md file for each individual examples with explanations, code snippets and related resources.
In his 404th episode of the WPbuilds podcast, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Alan Fuller, of Fullworks Plugins. They discussed Fuller’s journey from corporate life to WordPress plugin development. The conversation covers WordPress’s evolution from shortcodes to blocks, focusing on Alan’s “Display Eventbrite Events” plugin and its challenges, such as documentation gaps and API limitations. Alan also shares insights on developing for tools like Elementor, tackling support issues, and marketing struggles due to social anxiety. He highlights the role of AI in replacing part-time developers and reflects on pricing missteps. The episode explores WordPress development trends and Alan’s experiences with modern collaboration tools like Slack and GitHub.
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