Howdy,
Lots happening in the larger WordPress space! More aquisitions and a new service for WordPress plugin business, flippantly named FlipWP.
WordPress 5.8 Beta 2, Gutenberg 10.9 RC released and the first dev notes dropped for the upcoming release. More on that below.
Don’t miss next week’s Live Q & A on June 24, 2021, at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC on theme.json for Theme Authors with our panelists Daisy Olson, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong. Learn and discuss How to get started with building themes for Full-site editing.
What are you working on? Creativity is mushrooming around the WordPress ecosystem and I want to learn from you! Hit reply and let me know! I loved your notes in my inbox! Thank you.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
WordPress 5.8 DevNotes and more
Grzegorz Ziolkowski posted the article Block Editor API Changes to Support Multiple Admin Screens. “WordPress 5.8 is the first core release where the post editor is no longer the only admin screen that uses the block editor. The updated widgets editor screen will also support blocks.”, he wrote. It’s quite technical and developers will appreciate it as it opens the doors to use the bock editor on other admin screen, for instance for plugin dashboards and features. It makes my long time wish possible: replace the “Quick Draft” widget with an instance of the block editor and have writers start writing immediately after login, instead of having to open yet another screen.
Riad Benguella introduces us to the Template Editor coming to WordPress in its 5.8 release. It comes with a series of new blocks to accommodate Site-wide information, like Site Title or Site Logo as well as post parts for the Query Block, like Post Title, Post Excerpt, Feature Image. In total, 13 Blocks that replace some template parts in conventional themes. Some blocks will be made available also for classic Themes to accommodate hybrid themes and to support the gradual adoption of block-based themes.
Justin Tadlock wrote about it on the WPTavern, too.
For Site owners and Content Creators
Hari Shanker from the community team published Talking points for WordPress 5.8 of Meetup organizer, that also helps agency owners and freelancers to quickly get an overview of what is coming in the new version. Hari clusters the upcoming changes per WordPress stakeholders. You’ll find a section for Publishers and users, and another one for site builders and developers. If you want to read just one article, this would be it. 🚀
Chris Lema makes a strong case for Embracing Gutenberg Completely. Out of necessity, he decided to rebuild his site with Gutenberg blocks. All site metrics tools suggested reducing the DOM size of his Landing pages build with 3rd party page builders. With this switch, Chris realized, what he needs and doesn’t need for a highly performing website. His five observations put a few things in perspective for him as a daily writer, he came to appreciate the tools and blocks that come with the block editor.
The team at PublishPress posted a short tutorial on How to Use Nested Blocks in the Gutenberg Editor, as it’s still a little confusing for content creators to navigate, especially Column blocks. The persistent list view coming to WordPress 5.8 will help with this, though.
Javier Acre from the WordPress design team published a Walk through of possible enhancements for the Table Block. He showcases update to the placeholder state, multicell selection, the sidebar, the toolbar and icon improvements. You’ll see mock-ups for each. It’s quite exciting to see, as we probably can all agree that the Table block needs so TLC, 🙂 You can leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments of the post.
Theme builders
Dave Smith has notes on how to test the new Widget Editor that will come with WordPress 5.8. He followed Andrei Draganescu call for testing and logged his experience. To test for backwards compatibility for your existing widgets, you can first create some with the new widget editor disabled using the Classic Widget plugin, and then deactivate the plugins and try to manage and edit the widgets with the block-based editor. You have only a month to make sure your sites won’t run into trouble. WordPress 5.8 will be released on July 20th, 2021.
Join us for our next Live Q & A on June 24, 2021, at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC
Theme.json for Theme Authors or building themes for full-site editing in WordPress.
Host: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Panel: Daily Olsen, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong Register Now
Maggie Cabrera posted the Gutenberg + Themes: Week of June 18, 2021, roundup of relevant discussions, issue and PRs for Theme builders. She covered Full-Site Editing, Global Styles and block-based Themes. Chime on on the discussion and test the new releases. If you are a theme developer trying to catch up with what’s happening with Gutenberg, the Overview / Tracking issues section should get you started. You’ll find links to documentation and tutorials as well.
Episode #45 is now available with transcript.
Next recording June 25th, 2021
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Plugin Developers
Dave Smith published a tutorial on Mocking @wordpress/api-fetch in Gutenberg unit tests. During development you don’t want to hit an external API everytime you run a unit test, these instructions show you how to mock data coming from an API call in your block or site.
Genesis Custom Blocks, (former Block Lab plugin) are a nifty tool to create blocks without going through the pain of learning modern JavaScript. You use the UI to create Field Groups and then add the PHP display code to your theme template. But what if you want to separate the newly create blocks from the theme? Then you could install it on multiple sites, and it would survive a site owners decision to switch themes without loosing content. Rob Stinson has a two-part tutorial for you on How to package up your custom blocks in a plugin.
Jeffery Carandang, a Gutenberg adopter of the first hour, found a new home for his Gutenberg entities: Extendify. Jeffery has been pushing the envelope on what is possible with Gutenberg since it first came out in 2017. CoBlocks, co-authored with Rich Tabor and later sold to GoDaddy, was a favorite block plugin for additional blocks. EditorsKit extended blocks with additional tools. We mentioned his Share a Block directory on multiple episodes of the podcast. After starting at 10up, he didn’t find much time anymore for his love projects, especially the very useful EditorsKit plugin hasn’t seen updates for the last nine months. It now found a home at Extendify.
See also:
- Arthor Grabowski: Extendify is Adopting the EditorsKit plugin
- Justin Tadlock: Extendify Adopts EditorsKit, Increasing Its Block Plugin Collection
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.
