Howdy,
For many of us it’s Christmastime, a time for family, friends, and love, anticipating the holidays and the New Year. As the German poet Erick Kästner wrote: “Will it better? Will it be worse?, one asks every year. But let’s be honest: life is always life-threatening.” 1 Happy 2nd Advent!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
1 “Wird’s besser? Wird’s schlimmer?, fragt man alljährlich. Aber seien wir ehrlich, Leben ist immer lebensgefährlich.” — Erich Kästner
WordPress 5.9
The release squad shipped WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 Tuesday night.
The test team published instructions on how you can test this release and help ensure it’s the best version that can be shipped in January. Help test WordPress 5.9 Features. The post covers the best test environment for all skill levels, and some tips for testing. For each feature, you can read a brief description with the suggested testing focus. As many features were built for users to build sites without touching code, the emphasis is on workflow and ease-of-use for WordPress users. Any feedback from this test will be welcome as it could improve the final version considerably.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Nathan Wrigley hosted Marcus Kazmierczak, Zack Krida and yours truly for the episode #10 – What’s in WordPress 5.9, and What Is Openverse?
Gutenberg 12.0.1
From last week, Gutenberg 12.0 the release notes are now available on the Make Blog: What’s new in Gutenberg 12.0.0 ( 24 November) by Ryan Welcher.
Ryan Welcher was also our special guest for the Gutenberg Changelog episode 56 when Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I discussed the Gutenberg release
If you are not a podcast listener, Justin Tadlock at WPTavern has the skinny for you. Gutenberg 12.0 Focuses on Cleanup and Minor Enhancements
- Gutenberg 12.0.1 came out shortly after to add caching to
WP_Theme_JSON_Resolver_Gutenberg::get_user_data_from_custom_post_type(). (36584) - For Gutenberg 12.0.2, the team fixed a bug with Block Styles: Check for existence of scroll container. (37010)
- The next version is already in the works. Gutenberg 12.1 RC is now available, too.
📢 New Episode #56 is now available! 🎙️
Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss Gutenberg plugin release 12.0 with their special guest Ryan Welcher, developer advocate at Automattic.
Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast
🎙️ Spotify | Google | iTunes | PocketCasts | Stitcher |
🎙️ Pod Bean | CastBox | Podchaser | RSS Feed
All things Block Themes
For the Episode 21 of the WP Briefing podcast, executive director of the WordPress open-source project, Josepha Haden Chomphosy invited Jeff Ong and Maggie Cabrera from the Theme team. They discussed the future of theme building and the upcoming WordPress default theme Twenty-Twenty-Two. They also clarify additional terms around themes.
Ben Dwyer of the WordPress Themes team compiled this week’s Digest: Gutenberg + Themes: Week of November 29th, 2021 – the 74th weekly round-up of important theme topics, issues, and PRs that could use community input and review. Dwyer changed the format a bit. Instead, a list of PRs and Issue titles and numbers, he provides a summary of the various topics, this is certainly helpful for theme developer keeping in touch with Gutenberg.
Alex Lende published more details on how VS Code works with Theme JSON Schema for Code Validation, Tool Tips with hints, and Auto-Complete. The demo GIFs also show the short-keys to use to make it all work. Very nifty!
Michael Burridge informs developers via the WordPress Make Blog that “the directory names in block-based (FSE) themes are changing. The name for the directory containing template files will be templates, and the name for the directory containing template part files will be parts.” You can read more details in his article: New directory names for block-based (FSE) themes
Courtney Robertson posted a tutorial on Customizing images with WordPress duotone filters. Learn how to configure duotone settings for your client sites, to make images really shine.
Fränk Klein shared what he learned building a Hybrid Theme. After some definition of the terms, Hybrid theme, Universal theme and block theme, Klein takes you along his journey to explore how theme.json and PHP can mix. How can WordPress 5.8 features help refactor existing themes and bring them more inline with the block editor? Even if they don’t fully embrace full-site editing, there are ways to make classic themes work better. It’s also not without challenges. Klein has some insight here, too.
David McCan wrote in his article Full Site Editing and Custom Post Types: What You Need To Know about what tools you need to create the single and archive templates for Custom Post Types. McCan concluded: “The big deal with Full Site Editing is that the ability to create templates for Custom Post Types is being built into WordPress core.” You will still need third-party blocks that support custom fields, thought. McCan has tested a few shared what he learned.
Full-Site Editing
Anne McCarthy published a walk-through the new, powerful Navigation Block site builders will soon us with full-site editing experience: Exploring the Navigation Block for WordPress 5.9. McCarthy wrote: “The Navigation Block is an advanced new block that enables you to edit your site’s navigation menu, both in terms of structure and design. This video seeks to give an initial look at this new block, provide a demo to help you explore it on your own, answer some top questions, and share some context around what’s to come next.”
FSE Program Testing Call #11 until Dec 7
You only have a few days left to participate in the separate FSE Program Testing Call #11: Site Editing Safari. Its deadline is December 7th, 2021.
If you prefer an Italian version of the call for testing, Piermario Orecchioni published the translation: ESF Program Test Call # 11: A Site Editing Safari.
Akira Tashibana posted the Japanese version of the FSE Call for testing #11 FSE プログラムのテスト募集 #11: サイト編集の探索
Carrie Dils prepared a one file import for LocalWP to have an easy way to set up a test environment for the FSE Call for Testing.
Building Blocks and developing for Gutenberg
The fantastic co-hosts of the WomaninWP Podcast, Tracy Apps and Angela Bowman had an honest conversation about Gutenberg with Tara King, director of Developer Relations at Automattic.
This year’s array of year-end post starts with Brian Francoeur‘s post WordPress: Where It’s Headed in 2022 He wrote: “WordPress is fighting back with genuine innovation, evolving the WordPress core and ecosystem to meet the needs of its users” and he doesn’t mean just the block editor. He gave us a view on all things that are happening in the space, including performance team, and decoupled WordPress (others call it headless).
DJ Billings wrote about an exciting new use case for Gutenberg: Newsletters. She wrote “Newsletters are back, and they’re on the rise” and identified Gutenberg as “a powerful email builder”. You might have guessed it, Billings then turns fast to Newsletter Glue as a Gutenberg-first tool to use WordPress to also composed emails. Full disclosure: For the last twelve months, we have been assembling the weekend edition also with Newsletter Glue.
WordPress Social Learning events
December 14, 2021 – 3 to 4 pm ET / 20:00 UTC
Create a simple block from existing blocks
Host: Wes Theron
Speaker: Alex Standiford
The WordPress Learn team will schedule more Social Learning events on its Meetup.com space
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events site, you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Events, around the world, including WordCamps, WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
