Howdy,
Are you also enjoying that last few weeks of summer-like weather in Europe? How is the weather in your part of the world? After I finish this newsletter, I’ll take a walk through the forest. I haven’t done this for a long time: shinrin-yoku (Forest bathing) is good for the soul. The forest behind my mother’s house has been familiar and hardly changed since I was a kid and lived with my grandmother in the same house. What is your favorite ritual to recover from many hours of screen time during the week? Hit reply or share in the comments.
Today’s newsletter has a little bit about WordPress 6.4 and, block building, much more about theme building and also looking a little bit beyond WordPress with GraphQL and Transformer.
I hope you enjoy it all this week again!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Anne McCarthy held a Hallway Hangout: To chat about the WordPress 6.4 & Evolving the FSE Outreach Program and published a summary with the recording. She goes over the roadmap 6.4 post and identifies the state of the features.
In his fortnightly updates, Joen Asmussen lists the work by the WordPress Design team. In Design Share: Aug 28-Sep8 he highlighted:
- Interface for unlinking a style from inherited source
- Refresh of the Hosting page
- Sketch of a dismissible notification that lets you install missing fonts from the library.
- Templates table
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
In her post on Core Editor Improvement: Commanding the Command Palette Anne McCarthy dives deep into the latest updates to the Command Palette, a new tool available with WordPress 6.3 designed to speed up your workflow. With work underway for WordPress 6.4, she gave a peek preview of what’s in store for the next iteration of this new option in your WordPress creation experience and a reminder of what it’s capable of already.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Anne McCarthy takes a behind the scence stroll on how the Museum for Block Art collaborated with the organizers of WordCamps to highlight some of the art. From Pixels to Reality: Celebrating WordCamp EU & WordCamp US Exhibits
My long-time friend Jen Swisher takes you along the journey of How to Switch from a Classic Theme to a Block Theme in WordPress. She explains first the option you have, and more importantly why you might consider switching. Then she goes into more practical steps on how to accomplish a migration from your current classic theme to a block theme. Eventually, I will have to follow on a similar path when converting Gutenberg Times to a block theme. At the moment I am unable to focus on such a task, but maybe I can sequester myself for a weekend and get it done. Have you made the jump yet? What did you encounter, are there any pitfalls, that surprised you?
Munir Kamal of Gutenberg Hub released the new Query Taxonomy Filter Block to provide users and theme builders a way to extend the functionality of the core query loop. It’s a premium plugin that expands the capabilities of the core query block for more complex layouts and multiple filter options. It also offers a variety of display controls or facets and customization features.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
On his podcast, Within WordPress, Remkus De Vries had a chat with Ian Svoboda about creating courses for the WordPress ecosystem and a lot more: On Block Themes, Custom Block development and a whole lotta WP CLI. The conversation about Block Themes starts at the 13:04 timestamp (On the YouTube version.) Happy to hear the shout-outs to Fabian Kägy and Aurooba Ahmed, as well as the HTML Processor. The discussion of static vs. dynamic blocks, nothing new, but always interesting to hear other developer perspectives.
Justin Tadlock announced the next phase for the Theme builders documentation overhaul: Theme Handbook Overhaul: Phase 3 (Publishing Content) and asked for public review of the last drafts of chapters. The tracking ticket leads you to the single chapters for your perusal. Helping improve documentation is an excellent way to take a deep dive into building block themes.
On this week’s Loop podcast, host Cory Hughart talked to Justin Tadlock on Writing Block Themes about his series of articles on the WordPress developer blog about adding custom controls to core blocks, theme scaffolding, and workflow scripts. They also discuss above mentioned Theme Documentation overhaul. The show notes provide a ton of resources for theme developers
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Save the date: Hallway Hangout: What’s new for developers in WordPress 6.4. On Thursday, October 12, 2023, at18:00 UTC, Nick Diego, Ryan Welcher and Justin Tadlock will host a casual conversation about the most important and exciting developer-related changes coming soon in WordPress 6.4. From Block Hooks and the Font Library to improved Editor flows and the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme, there is just so much to talk about.
This month’s Developer Hours will cover: Building better blocks with the ‘create-block’ package. Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher will host the event and it will take place on September 27 at 14:00 UTC. The two developers will take a deep dive into the functionalities of the create-block package. Developed to simplify and accelerate the process of building custom WordPress blocks, this package has become an indispensable tool for developers of all levels.
Leonardo Losoviz, released version 1.0 of the Gato GraphQL plugin. It’s a rebranded version of GraphQL for WordPress plugin. It brings plenty of improvements, including
- the integration with the (Gutenberg) block editor,
- support for private and password-protected endpoints, and
- the availability of (commercial) extensions to extend the GraphQL schema and provide further functionality.
This version Gato GraphQL is also on its way to the WordPress plugin repository. On the GitHub space, Losoviz shared that he based part of the block feature on the WordPress VIP team’s Block Data API.
Michael Burridge created a step-by-step tutorial on Understanding block attributes. There’s more to block attributes than meets the eye. Attributes contain data needed by your block, and that data can be retrieved from numerous locations, not just the block delimiter. This post shows you the ways.
If you work in React and JSX you might enjoy this very nifty tool: Transform HTML to JSX by Ritesh Kumar. Just paste the HTML of your designs into one box and get well formatted JSX in the second box.
Kumar and 30+ other contributors created transform tools for all kinds of purposes, ie: JSON to JSDocs, JSON to GraphQL, CSS to JS Objects.
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
