Howdy,
For a few days, we enjoyed non-humid weather in Florida as Hurricane Elsa sucked all the moisture out of the air and took it with it. Sorry, Northern friends.
For some fun summer reading, I can highly recommend the WordPress 5.8 DevNotes, all handily assembled into a massive Field Guide by Milana Cap.
After the publishing rush around the WordPress 5.8 release last week, this week is certainly a lot calmer. Although I know that behind the scenes, contributors are working hard on getting Block Editor End-User documentation ready, too. 🐝
Hopefully, you have been busy testing plugins and themes for compatibility with the new widget block-editor. July 20th is only 10 days away. WordPress 5.8 RC 2 is out and could use your eagle eyes to spot last-minute bugs and quirks.
What else has happened in the WordPress Gutenberg space last week? I have a few more links for you. As always, you don’t have to consume them all in one sitting, you can always come back during the week.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend and start into your next week!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Gutenberg Development
Gutenberg 11.0 was released and Dave Smith compiled the release notes for the team. This time in the release cycle of the next WordPress release, it’s all about bug fixing. Justin Tadlock highlights a few enhancements in his post. Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I recorded the 47th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog on Friday. Listen in and get a few more ideas of what’s in this Gutenberg 11.0 release. the audio should be available over the weekend.
Matias Ventura updated scope for site editing projects to help the team and the community to track upcoming tasks around the main site editing projects. There are a few separate tracking issues for covering some general improvements and then some broader projects. It covers some general UI features that need to be iterated on, mentioned a Browse mode for the site editor, and lists Infrastructure, Patterns, Styling and the Navigation Block.
Gutenberg and Themes
Carolina Nymark summarized all the Theme features that will come to a WordPress instance near you with WordPress 5.8. It’s the Cliff Notes with actionable code snippets for opt-in and opt-out decisions.
Daisy Olson posted a summary and the recording of this week’s Hallway Hangout Discussion the Theme.json.
The Theme.json Call for testing is still open until July 14, 2021. It has instructions for beginners, Intermediate and advanced WordPress theme developers. It’s a fabulous way to learn and share your feedback.
Maggie Cabrera created an outstanding weekly round-up (#56) post with theme related recently merged PRs, what is discussed and again a great list of overview git hub issues that are waiting for your comments and ideas!
A couple of weeks ago, we had Daisy Olsen, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong on a Live Q & A. First we have a short introduction demo on how to work with theme.json and a discussion on how this new way to organize the settings and styles for your theme change how themes work in WordPress. We also answered interesting questions from the audience. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it here with transcript and resources.
Block Editor for Content creators
This is a first in the almost three-year history of the Block editor! 🙌 🎉
Thanks to the indefatigable Anne McCarthy, content creators can review End-user documentation for the new features before they are released.
- How to use the List View (former Block Navigator)
- The Query Loop Block
- Block-Based Widget Editor
- Template Editor
Now it’s all still a work in progress and there is still time until July 20th.
Anne McCarthy‘s Block-based Widget Editor Demo is now available on WordPress TV. Check it out to seen what’s coming to WordPress 5.8.
Yep, as Grzegorz Ziolkowski said yesterday, Anne McCarthy is everywhere!
Query Loop Block
Even if you are not familiar with the developer term Query Loop, once you look at the examples you’ll instantly realize that this is about the layout of a list of posts you might want to include on your pages, templates or posts. You can change the layout for post title, featured image, excerpt and link. An early version of this was the Latest Post Block.
The design team also implemented a series of Block Patterns of a few nice variations to display a post list on templates, post and pages. It’s a fun feature, and it has taken quite a long time to build. The wait was definitely worth it.
It is mighty and could be the most powerful feature in 5.8 as Justin Tadlock headlined his post Query Loop: The Ins and Outs.
Allison Rivers over the Torque Magazine also published an article What is the Query Loop Block? with lots of great insights and examples. Rivers also has a list of plugins that implemented some advanced features the WordPress version is still missing with its first iteration.
Block Building and Plugins
Reading throught the release notes for Gutenberg 11, I found great gem posted by Riad Benguella. It’s a flow graphic that explains the relationship between the packages that make the post editor.
I find this very helpful to keep in mind when to use which package at which stage or the user interactions.
Rich Tabor, Senior Product Manager, WordPress Experience GoDaddy published A Primer on Gutenberg Block Plugins for the WordPress Block Directory in which he walks you through the process of submit your plugin to the WordPress Directory, as he went through when submitting his Markdown Comment block to the repository.
In the same space, Ella van Durpe published a plugin for private note-taking in WordPress called Hypernotes. Justin Tadlock reviewed it for the WordPress Tavern. Van Durpe explain her comment to the article’s, that the plugin uses some experimental PWA capabilities she introduced to the Gutenberg plugin for WP-Admin.
Alex Standiford, developer at Sandhills Development (makers of the EDD plugin) published a tutorial about API Fetch – The WordPress Library You Didn’t Know You Needed with code snippets and plenty of theory to with them, too.
Standiford also started the WPAcademy with the course WordPress Plugin Development Course, with 37 videos teaching you how to make a beer custom post type, customize the Gutenberg editor, create a new block, and create WP-CLI commands to make testing fast and easy.
Justin Tadlock shared his experience in Taking the Leap: Building My First WordPress Block Plugin. He built a breadcrumbs block as a dynamic block that’s rendered server side.
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.
Upcoming WordPress Events
July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
- 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 20 UTC – FSE: What’s Coming to 5.8 & the Story of the Outreach Program w/ Anne McCarthy
- 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 21 UTC – How Theme Developers Should Approach Full Site Editing w/ Joe Casabona
- 3pm PT / 6pm ET / 22 UTC – Rapid Landing Page Creation With the WordPress Block Editor w/ Daisy Olsen
July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress
- July 22 – 10 PM EDT / 2 UTC – Learn to Build Blocks with Advanced Custom Fields w/ Cameron Jones
- July 23 – 3:20 pm EDT / 19:20 UTC How to Create a Fast Loading Stylish Homepage with Blocks & CSS w/ Davinder Singh Kainth
August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua
September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”
