Howdy,
WordPress 6.3 release candidate has been published and with it the Fieldguide with the array of changes for developers is now available. It’s a lot to digest, so we’ll keep this newsletter short. Or rather focused on the upcoming major release. Pick and choose, depending on what’s important to your work with WordPress.
If you have something on your Wishlist for WordPress 6.4, submit a comment: WordPress 6.4: What’s on your wishlist? (until Aug. 15)
Be well and have a fantastic weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
All about WordPress 6.3
This week’s product walk through with Anne McCarthy, Rich Tabor and Nathan Wrigley is now available: WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo – Highlights & Recording.
Jonathan Patani also published the Q & A from the Project Walk through on the Make Core blog: 6.3 Live Product Demo Q&A. You’ll learn that to add a footnote to a paragraph you just place the cursor where the number should go and use the drop-down menu from the block toolbar. Safe yourself the highlight step. Furthermore, “The revisions show changes for all styles, including changes made when viewing the stylebook.” Those are only two of the 14 questions and answers. You can also find a ton of resources that were shared during the walk-through.
Femy Praseeth, release squad member on the docs team, published a Call for volunteers to help with 6.3 end-user documentation. The best advice, I received when starting out in technology was: “If you want to learn anything in technology deeply, you try to explain it to others.” Here is your chance to do both. It’s also a high-impact contribution to the open-source project! As of this writing, there are still 42 tasks in the to-do-column of the project board, waiting for you!
On the WP Briefing Episode 60: Mike Schroder gave a sneak a peek at WordPress 6.3 together with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. All links and transcript are shared on the post.
Carlo Daniele at Kinsta did again a wonderful job reporting on the upcoming major WordPress release. What’s New in WordPress 6.3: A Revamped Site Editor, a New Command Palette, Style Revisions, New Blocks, and Much More!
Doc Pop at Torque Magazine, invited me to speak with him about WordPress 6.3 and what’s coming to WordPress Phase 3 and WordPress 6.4. Torque Social Hour: Understanding WordPress 6.3 with Birgit Pauli-Haack. We discussed and demoed the new footnotes, Details block, Style Variation revisions, Site Editor updates, Stylebook and more.
Anne McCarthy highlights all the accessibility improvements that will come with WordPress 6.3 in this post: WordPress 6.3 Accessibility Improvements,they co-authored with Joe Dolson and Alex Stine, members of the WordPress Accessibility Team
Jamie Marsland explains WordPress 6.3 explained in 240 seconds, He covers the two new blocks, Footnotes and Details, many of the Pattern changes, aspect ratio for image blocks, enhancements to the Site Editor, Style revision and more.
For all the WordPress News outlets, Anne McCarthy provided a Source of Truth for WordPress 6.3 document, actually it’s more like a book with over 8,000 words. In it, they list every single feature and update that went into the WordPress 6.3 release, so journalists and bloggers can dig deeper into things and obtain the history, discussions, and overall genesis of a change. It’s a mammoth of a post.
Dave Smith published a video on the upcoming release: WordPress 6.3 features in 6 mins – the power of the Site Editor is finally unleashed! Smith also shared a ton of links to details for the features, if you’d like to take a deeper dive.
Fieldguide Dev Notes WordPress 6.3
The release doc team assembled a huge Fieldguide with all the Dev Notes covering the big and small changes to WordPress. Here is the list of Block editor related Dev Notes:
- Introducing the Block Selectors API
- Introducing the WordPress Command Palette API
- Layout updates in the editor for WordPress 6.3
- Social Icons block: Applied colors now dynamically update based on theme.json and Global Styles
- Miscellaneous Editor changes in WordPress 6.3
But wait, there is more, quoted from the Fieldguide.
- Anghami has been added as a trusted oEmbed provider. (#49850)
- Support for TikTok creator profiles has been added. (#55784)
- A new
sourceattribute is added to Block patterns allowing them to be filtered by that source. (#58622) - The
Themes REST APIcan now indicate whether a theme supports the Site Editor by adding anis_block_themeproperty to each theme in thewp/v2/themesAPI response. (#58123) - A revisions endpoint for global styles,
/wp/v2/global-styles/revisions, has been added to the REST API. (#58524) WP_REST_Templates_Controllerhas a newmodifiedfield for template and template part objects that returns post modified datetime for Templates. (#58540)- A new public function
wp_get_remote_theme_patterns()has been added to query thepatternsdatum fromtheme.jsonand substitutes current usage of private APIs. (#58460)
Gutenberg 16.2
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #90 – New Testing Call for the FSE Program, Gutenberg 16.7 and WordPress 6.4 with Tammie Lister as special guest, hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack
Sarah Gooding wrote about the latest Gutenberg release: Gutenberg 16.2 Brings Improvements to Pattern Management, Introduces Vertical Text Orientation and highlighted, among other things, the vertical text orientation, illustrated by my tweet. To enable the controls in the typography section, you need to turn it on via the theme.json settings.
"typography":{
"dropCap": false,
"fluid": true,
"writingMode":true,
}
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)Emily Shiola also checked out the latest Gutenberg version in her article: What’s New in Gutenberg: The Latest Version (July 2023) and updated her collection of highlights from every Gutenberg release back to Gutenberg 7.0. in November 2019. I bookmarked the post for later to walk down memory lane.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Nick Diego held a workshop on Builder Basics: Goodbye Reusable Blocks—Hello Synced Patterns (and more) and the recording is now available on WordPress.TV. Reusable blocks are a powerful way to save and reuse content across your site. In WordPress 6.3, reusable blocks will be renamed to “synced patterns.” In this online workshop, Diego explored the new functionality for creating custom patterns and managing them in the Site Editor.
 In 2009, I announced the release of my first breadcrumbs plugin. It was a one-file PHP script that I’d been using in my themes for around a year, and I… Check it out |
In her article: Ollie Theme Previews New Onboarding Wizard in Development, Sarah Gooding reported on Mike McAlister‘s newest work developing an onboarding experience that aims to drastically reduce the amount of time users spend setting up a new site. “McAlister said the interface is all React with largely native WordPress components and a few custom components sprinkled in to handle some of the more unique aspects of the tool.” she wrote.
Mike McAlister posted about the new onboarding Wizard on hit blog as well: In pursuit of a more intuitive onboarding experience.
With LocalWP it is a straightforward tool to set up a new development site for testing or other purposes on your computer. With blueprints, you and configure a standard set-up with a set of plugins and themes. This week, Brian Gardner Introduced the Frost Blueprint for Local. “A Local Blueprint that draws inspiration from Frost, our open-source WordPress block theme. This Blueprint showcases the power and extensibility of Full Site Editing.” he wrote.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Justin Tadlock published the first part of his upcoming Beyond Block Styles series: Using the WordPress scripts package with themes. He walks you through the details of setting up your local development space to get ready for block development. “In Part 2, you’ll learn to design a set of custom block styles. Part 3 will bring it all together into a beautiful and functional editor control. From there, well, you’ll be building some amazing features.” Tadlock wrote.
Yesterday’s Live Q & A: Design Systems and theme.json with David Bowman, Alec Geatches and Joni Halabi was recorded and is available on YouTube. Shared resources
- Repository for the design bridge
- Tutorial
- Develop Your First Low-Code Block Theme
- Using the Site Editor Courses:
- Plugin Create-Block-Theme
- Governing block settings and interactions
- VIP Block Data API
- VIP Governance plugin
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In last week’s Twitch stream, Ryan Welcher explored the existing SlotFills for extending WordPress. It’s an longer version of a previous talk at Developer Hours a few weeks ago . He walks you through all the Slotfill existing in the post editor as well as the Site editor. Welcher e also wrote about on the topic on WordPress Developer blog: How to extend WordPress via the SlotFill system and presented at WCUS 2022.
 In this YouTube Live Q & A, participants learned how Gutenberg components and scripts can be used outside the block editor to revamp a plugin’s code base. Jason Adams, Director… |
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.
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
