Howdy,
I am so excited about next week! Finally, there will be another Six-a-side Festival at the Sarasota International Cricket Club. I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday. I am excited to see all the friends again, most I haven’t seen in three years.
If you are in the area, come on by. It’s a lot of fun, a diverse community, and you can meet cricketers from England, the Caribbean, and the West-Indies coming together to play cricket, party and play cricket again the next day and the next. It’s great fun for the whole family!
What are your plans for next week? I hope you have a fabulous one!
In this edition, you’ll find a vast array of videos, blog posts and podcasts from Learn.WordPress, WordPress TV and around the community. Let’s get started!
Yours, đ
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
If you found the Field guide of WordPress 6.1 too developer centric, yet the announcement post not detailed enough, then let Courtney Robertson, team rep of the WordPress Training team, show you Whatâs new in WordPress 6.1: Misha
Hostinger’s Leonardus Nugraha, member of the WordPress docs team, published WordPress 6.1: Whatâs New in the New Major Release in collaboration with yours truly.
Also, part of WordPress 6.1 is a new default theme. In her post Introducing Twenty Twenty-Three, Beatriz Fialho, design lead, takes you a long for the journey exploring the new default theme and it’s community-submitted style variations.
You’ll find more details about the features of Twenty Twenty-three in the End User documentation article
WordPress 6.1.1 was released, fixing a few bugs on the backend and frontend of the software. Core contributors and release leads JB Audras, Jeff Paul and George Mamadashvili, worked hard to get this out with two weeks of the 6.1 release. This was a really fast turn around.
In his Design Share: Oct 24-Nov 4, Joen Asmussen lists the project the WordPress design team has been working on. The visuals representation of upcoming feature are absolutely exciting. First up are the screens of possible location for the Custom CSS feature, many of you found missing around the block themes. You can also see the design explorations for the interface to make a Group block sticky. You could use it for an ever present navigation bar or a public service announcement. Or an ongoing news ticker banner.
If you use the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin, you might have noticed, that the the info screen with the meta information on word count, or the outline was moved into the List view as an additional tab. The design team also explored more delightful designs for this panel.
James Koster tries to answer how to make it possible to push local block styles to global block styles. In other words, after you modified the look and feel of a single block, how can you make the styles persistent for all the blocks of that particular type on your site.
đď¸ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 â WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
The WordPress meta, design, and marketing teams have been working on the redesign of the Showcase page on the main website. Joen Asmussen reports on the progress in his post A refresh of WordPress.org/Showcase. “The current work represents a starting point that will continue to be iterated upon as additional features, and content changes are explored.” he wrote. He also provides links to the Figma file and the Showcase GitHub repository.
Gutenberg 14.5 released
Nick Diego was the lead for last week’s Gutenberg plugin release. In his posts Whatâs new in Gutenberg 14.5? (9 November) he wrote: “It consolidates the list view and document information, expands margin and padding support while improving spacing visualizers, and sets the groundwork for future releases with numerous code quality improvements and bug fixes.”
Sarah Gooding also reported on the latest release in Gutenberg 14.5 Introduces New âDocument Overviewâ Panel, Improves Block Spacing Controls.
One of the new features is a new Social Link Block for Mastodon accounts, Mastodon, is an open-source decentralized social network, that many feel comfortable as using while Twitter seems to be deteriorating fast.
George Hotelling, WordPress core contributor, wrote a short tutorial on How to verify your WordPress site on Mastodon.
On a side note, I just created the @gutenbergtimes account on the mastodon server at twit.social. If you want to follow, just search for https://twit.social/@gutenbergtimes on any mastodon server, and you can follow me there. It’s a new account so not much going on.
My personal account is https://mastodon.social/@bph.
Gutenberg 14.6 RC is already available for testing. The stable version will be release by Fabian Kägy on November 23, 2022
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Thien Nguyen published his Mindmap Block It’s a cool block that provides the conversion from Markdown input in the block editor to a Mind map display on the frontend. This could get fascinating when Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project progresses, as then you can use this to collaborate on mind maps, too. We’ll revisit this in two years or so. It’s not a free plugin, and it is available on Gumroad with single site or unlimited site levels.
Today’s count is 182 Themes supporting the Site editor in the WordPress Themes Directory. New themes are available by the Block Styles team, Brian Gardner, Blockify, Catch Themes, Wen Solutions, and by Wwwows.
Another recently added theme is Loudness: A New Block Theme from Automattic Itâs an artistic and opinionated theme . Sarah Gooding has the skinny for you.
Rich Tabor and Courtney Portnoy discussed The creative side of blocks on WordPressTV. Rich Tabor walks the viewers through one of his block art creations. It’s quite inspiring to watch Tabor’s exploratory creative process using the block editor. I learned quite a few things about the power of the various color features: gradient, nested group blocks, and how to replace the theme’s primary and secondary colors for the whole site. You’ll also get an introduction to the Museum of Block Art, where Rich and other block artists showcase their creations.
On the Torque Social Hour, host Doc Pop interviewed Roy Sivan and James Tryon about Block Styles Community and plugins built by the two. Gutenberg adopters of the first hour, the team aims to augment the Block editor with Block Styles to make it a professional page builder for power users. They created 160 input fields to customize a site.
The most obvious styles enhancements are the tools to separate the page layout features by screen sizes for desktop, tablet, and mobile. It’s a bit unfortunate to give a product / membership service the same name as a WordPress feature. Plugin developers have the advantage of a shortened implementation time and run into the danger to be passed by core in the long run.
Missing Menu plugin and the newest block theme Gesso were also mentioned on the show.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Daisy Olsen wrote about Demystifying Home and Posts Templates in WordPress theme development, explains the WordPress Themes Hierarchy for both classic and block themes.
In his post Creating Themes from a Pattern-First Mindset, Justin Tadlock helped theme developers interested in block themes to see the power of using pattern in their templates to reduce code redundancy and simplicity.
On Tuesday next week (Nov 22) Daisy Olsen and Justin Tadlock, together with Damon Cook will hold a Hallway Hangout on Future of CSS in block themes. It will be in a casual chat about some Block Theme development-related features that are under active development. Hope to see you there đ
Ganesh Dahal wrote about Managing CSS Styles in a WordPress Block Theme and took a deep dive into the migration from styles.css files to theme.json. “One of the major benefits of moving CSS to JSON is that JSON is a machine-readable format, which means it can be exposed in the WordPress Site Editor UI by fetching an API, thus allowing users to modify default values and customize a siteâs appearance without writing any CSS at all.” he wrote.
Sarah Gooding reports on an update of the Create Theme plugin in her post: Gutenbergâs Roadmap for a âFont Libraryâ Will Give Users an Interface for Registering and Managing Web Fonts. Besides the features: create a new theme, start with a blank theme, create a child theme, or create a style variation, in now sports a dedicated screen for managing fonts. In her post, Gooding also summarized the tracking ticket on the Webfonts API and links to design exploration for a font manager within the core app.
Mike McAlister shows you Three beautiful font pairs to bring your design to life. “With all the new fonts out there, thereâs no excuse to be using tired old fonts on your website. Here are a few fonts that should definitely be on your radar.” he wrote.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Fränk Klein was a guest on the WP Jukebox podcast episode #50 and discussed with host Nathan Wrigley about How Gutenberg and Full Site Editing Are Bringing New Opportunities for WordPress Developers.
Manoj Kumal wrote a tutorial on CSS-Tricks on Creating a Settings UI for a Custom WordPress Block. It’s the third post in the series “Working With External APIs in WordPress Blocks”. The first two post cover the rendering of external data on backend and frontend. The last post on “Saving custom block settings” is coming soon.
Ryan Welcher is back streaming on Twitch again! This week’s topic was Working with Query Loop block variations, a new feature that came with the latest major WordPress 6.1. You can read the dev note on then WordPress make blog: Extending the Query Loop block.
As always, if you read this post two weeks after it was published, you’ll find the recording of the Twitch streams on Ryan Welcher’s YouTube channel.
Jonathan Bossenger and Ălvaro GĂłmez ran a two-part workshop on Developing blocks without React. The recordings are now available on WordPress TV:
- Letâs code: developing blocks without React! â Part 1 – In Part one, the presenters covered the initial files needed to register a block, go over some JavaScript syntax and WordPress dependencies, and then add some styling to our block via a useBlockProps and custom stylesheets. (Presentation Slides)
- Letâs code: developing blocks without React! â Part 2 – In Part two, was about how to add support for attributes, as well as how to implement the pre-existing RichText component. These will enable a user to edit the content of the block. (Presentation Slides)
Dan Knauss of Post Status reported on The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor. He summarized: “The journey to GiveWP 3.0 is well underway â an open, iterative development process that fully embraces WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor. Give cofounder Matt Cromwell and development director Jason Adams share what they’ve learned so far.”
The main reasons for the rebuild are that the plugin match visual experience of the block editor, the need for more form field flexibility and to simplify template building. “Taking advantage of the components and packages of the block editor, as visual builder framework, continually improved and maintained by the open-source project, the GiveWP developers were faster in getting specific features done in a matter of hours rather than months.
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.
Upcoming WordPress events
New Date! December 16, 2022
WordFest Live Returns â the 24-hour Festival of WordPress
February 17 â 19, 2023
WordCamp Asia 2023 – the first round of speakers was announced
Have a look at the schedule of upcoming WordCamps to find one near you.
Learn WordPress Online Meetups
November 21, 2022 – 3 pm ET / 20:00 UTC
Intro to the Site Editor & Template Editor with Wes Theron
November 22, 2022 – 3:30 pm ET / 20:30 UTC
Hallway Hangout: Future of CSS in block themes
November 22, 2022 – 11 am ET / 16:00 UTC Repeated at 5 pm ET / 22:00 UTC
Designing in the Site Editor: A WordPress Block Theme Exploration
November 22, 2022 – 7 pm ET / 24:00 UTC – Repeated at 11 pm ET / 4:00 UTC
Demystifying Gutenberg
December 1, 2022 – 3 pm ET / 20:00 UTC
Builder Basics: Building with Columns, Groups, Rows and Stacks with Nick Diego
December 8, 2022 – 3 pm ET / 20:00 UTC
Builder Basics: Demystifying theme.json and Global Styles with Nick Diego
