Howdy,
WordCamp Asia was one of the best, if not the best flagship WordPress event. I met quite a few subscribers to this newsletter in person. What a delight! I also made many new friends in the WordPress community. Over the next week, I will add links to the live stream recordings and, if available, to the slidedecks to the post with the list of talks about the block editor.
There are quite a few posts to be shared over the last 20 days since the last newsletter. It was great to catch-up. I kept my comments short. Many good things happening.
Wishing you a great weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
David Bisset posted the Highlights of Matt’s Q&A At WordCamp Asia 2023. Read the answer to questions about sponsoring contributors for documentation, how to take advantage of WordPress knowledge in time of economic downturn, or how to get the next generation of web creators involved in the project.
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock published What’s new for developers? (February 2023). It’s the first edition of a round-up of upcoming changes relevant to developers of plugins and themes as well as agency/freelancers.
Andrew Ozz posted the Proposal: Updates to the WordPress Release Cycle regarding merging Gutenberg plugin code with WordPress.
Matias Ventura shared in his post Phase 2, Finale, what 6.2 will cover and what is still left for WordPress 6.3 and transition the project to Phase 3: Collaboration and workflows.
WordPress 6.2
WordPress 6.2 Beta 3 was released this week. Adel Tahri, responsible for testing on the 6.2 release squad, posted a call to Help Test WordPress 6.2 with helpful instructions on how to set up local test environment, with a list of things to test and places where to report your findings.
Anne McCarthy posted the Roadmap to 6.2 with a run down of most features coming to a WordPress instance near you on March 28th, 2023.
The schedule until release:
- Beta 4 on February 28, 2023
- Release Candidate (RC) 1 + Dev Notes on March 7th, 2023
- RC 2 on March 14, 2023
- RC 3 on March 21, 2023
- Final release March 28, 2023
You can join the release party in the #core channel, the release team coordinates the work in the #6-2-release-leads channel.
The 6.2 Live Product Demo is scheduled for March 2, 2023, at noon EST / 17:00 UTC. Jonathan Pantani shared the details in his post.
Gutenberg Plugin Updates
JuanMa Garrido published the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 15.1? (8 February)
Sarah Gooding covered Gutenberg 15.1 for the WP Tavern in Gutenberg 15.1 Adds Openverse Integration
Daisy Olsen was release lead for the next version: What’s new in Gutenberg 15.2? (22 February)
🎙️ New episode: Gutenberg Changelog #80 – WordPress 6.2 Preview, Gutenberg 15.2 and 15.3 with Birgit Pauli-Haack and special guest Rich Tabor
The next recording for the Gutenberg Changelog podcast is scheduled for March 9th, 2023, which will cover the Gutenberg plugin releases 15.2 and 15.3 and the dev notes available for WordPress 6.2. We will also answer questions from you and others. Send your questions to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Ben Ritter, founder of Kadence Themes, announced the release of Kadence Blocks version 3. Kadence Blocks plugin has been around since the block editor arrived to WordPress in 2018, and with the rapid development of more design tools, and the site editor, the plugin needed a rewrite and a fresh coat of paint.
In this video, Jamie Marsland revealed the Secrets of WordPress Site Editing, and answers common questions, like how to add fonts, why editor settings might be missing and how you can download good block themes.
In his latest post, Mark Howells-Mead shared his thoughts on Block Patterns and Block Variations of the Query Loop and explored the differences between the two and reusable blocks.
Sarah Gooding reported on the latest Theme published by Automattic: Automattic Releases Bibimbap, a Free Block Theme for Restaurants.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock published the article. Intrinsic design, theming, and rethinking how to design with WordPress. He wrote on Twitter: “This post explores some thinking behind why WordPress doesn’t have many block settings tied to specific device sizes and what the current approach is. It also provides theme authors with some techniques they can use to work within the system. There are tons of thoughts, techniques, and tools related to the subject, which is impossible to cover in a single post. But, I encourage continued exploration from the extender community and sharing what you learn.” You can follow more discussion in the comments of the post.
Hendrik Lührsen and Jakob Trost also discussed the topic on Twitter.
For developers who want to get started or dive deeper into creating Block Themes, ready for the site editor, Daisy Olsen collected a great list of links covering all aspects for the Developer Blog: Block theme resources roundup. She wrote: “Whether you build sites mostly from the site and styles editors or you develop bespoke and custom themes from the ground up, there are always new things to learn. Read on to learn all about block themes.”
In his latest post, James Koussertari, of Gutenberg Market asks What are Hybrid WordPress themes? and gives you the answers, of course.
Anne McCarthy, instigator of the Block Museum of Art, posted Let’s celebrate 20 years of WordPress “This is an opportunity for folks to showcase their creativity and imagination using the features of the WordPress block editor that make it a powerful creative platform. We invite artists from all backgrounds and experience levels to submit their own WP20-inspired blocks and join us in celebrating two decades of WordPress.” McCarthy wrote.
If you are curious, what is all in store for the milestone anniversary, celebration around the WordPress community, follow up on the special website: wp20.wordpress.net
In this article, Donna Peplinksie shared How We Built a Block Theme for Sensei LMS and explains key decisions, the breakdown of the work, and using the Create Block theme plugin to built out the theme.
On her website, fullsiteediting.com, Caroline Nymark posted a new Lesson on Child Themes. “I am very happy with the progress we have made to support block and hybrid child themes in WordPress.” Nymark tweeted. You learn when you still need child theme, and the relationship between parent and child block theme. It’s a comprehensive guide for theme developers. She also answer frequently asked questions, you might have.
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.
 gutenbergtimes.com Layouts are a fundamental part of how block themes work: Layout allows us to define the width of our post content, and arrange blocks horizontally or vertically, right or left… Read more. |
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor
Ryan Welcher started to record YouTube Shorts. For the first one, we also created a blog post with the Quick Tip.
 gutenbergtimes.com https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VgK_Y9wAGXw Ryan Welcher on YouTube Shorts. – Also available on TikTok Ryan Welcher started a recording YouTube Shorts also available on TikTok. Here is a transcript and code example of… Read more. |
Adam Zieliński created an interactive tutorial for the new HTML processor coming to WordPress with 6.2: How to Modify HTML in a PHP WordPress Plugin Using The New Tag Processor API. “If you’ve ever struggled to add an HTML attribute using regular expressions, you know how big of an improvement this is! In fact, Tag Processor was born out of this exact struggle.” He wrote. You’ll find use cases and code snippets in his post.
Brian Coords shared his experience of Hooking into the Block Editor’s Post Publish Panel (with Copilot). Coords walks you through the steps of building a feature for his plugin that taps into the block editor.
Last month, Mark Howells-Mead published a tutorial on Using useSelect in Gutenberg to fetch data from the REST API. The function getEntityRecords enters the stage, too.
