Howdy, howdy,
Hopefully, with this edition, I am back curating the Weekend Edition for Saturdays…
At WordCamp Europe, I connected with many members of the German WordPress community and I joined the German WordPress Slack space to learn more about the efforts to organize a WordCamp Deutschland. After meeting sooo many Community Deputies and friends in the WordPress community, it seems I got my motivation back as community organizer.
As mentioned earlier this week, we also have a new Gutenberg Times Live Q & A on our schedule and registration is open now. In “Block First Approach at the Pew Research Center, we will discuss with Seth Rubinstein, Lead Developer, and Michael Piccorossi, Director of Digital Strategy, how they use a mixture of Core and Custom Blocks to streamline their publishing process, and to create powerful charts and quizzes for the Pew Research Center. Join us!
I am already looking forward to my next WordCamp: WordCamp US in September in San Diego. The team is getting ready to update the website and soon will announce the first round of speakers.
Have a great weekend,
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
Gutenberg 13.4
HĂ©ctor Prieto lead this week’s Gutenberg plugin release and published What’s new in Gutenberg 13.4? (8 June). The highlights:
- Support for button elements in theme.json
- Axial spacing in Gallery Block
- Sidebar design updates
- Search Block variations now support query vars
- Performance Improvements
On the Changelog, Mary and I, had a great conversation with Dave Smith around Gutenberg 13.4, WordPress 6.1 and WordCamp Europe.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
General News
David Bisset list in his Post Status post the 9 Things I Learned from WordCamp Europe 2022, mostly reporting from the Townhall Q & A with Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy, but also from talks by Pablo Postigo on the future of frontend development in WordPress and by Feliz Arndt on WordPress performance, among others.
After the release of WordPress 6.0, Roger Montti curated voices from the Advanced WordPress Group on Facebook and on Reddit for the Search Engine Journal. In his article WordPress Community Reacts To 6.0 Arturo he quotes a variety of WordPress users from both communities.
Matias Ventura, couldn’t make it to the Keynote session, Matias couldn’t make it to WordCamp Europe’s Saturday’s keynote. He had prepared some cool things for it and he tweeted about the earlier this week. Some of it he also listed in the Roadmap for 6.1 of the Gutenberg Plugin Phase 2 post.
Sarah Gooding in her post Gutenberg Editor Now In Testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps picked up on Ventura’s tweet that the Gutenberg editor is now also used outside the WordPress context. Tumblr, the microblogging site Automattic rescued from Verizon’s chopping block in 2019, offers it to its users as the new shiny post editor in a Beta version. The developer team at Day One, an Automattic aquisition from last year, is also experimenting offering Gutenberg editor to the journaling app users.
From Gooding’s post, I also learned that the company working on an overall Block Protocol, Hash is looking for a developer to buil a WordPress plugin for the Block Protocol. She wrote: “When the Block Protocol project was announced, it didn’t seem likely that it would use Gutenberg as the basis for its spec. However, the wide usage of Gutenberg across the web cannot be ignored. This forthcoming plugin appears to be more like a bridge or connector that ensures Gutenberg is still relevant in the Block Protocol ecosystem.” There might be big things a foot.
Block Theme building with code
If you wanted to get started with Block Patterns, Ganesh Dahal wrote a Tutorial on CSS-Tricks for you: How to Create Block Theme Patterns in WordPress 6.0. Dahal takes you through the code examples from the WordPress default theme, Twenty-Twenty-Two, that came out with the WordPress 5.9 release earlier this year. You learn how to register patterns and pattern cateogries and how to best organize your theme folders.
In the second part of the post, you learn how to offer patterns without the registration steps with features introduced with WordPress 6.0, the autodetect mechanism from a patterns folder in your theme, or refering to the slug of a pattern from the WordPress Pattern Directory. Dahal also covers the newest feature to add context to the pattern and offer Page Patterns during the page creation process to a user.
Ganash Dahal also wrote the following tutorials on CSS-Tricks:
- How to Create Style Variations in WordPress 6.0 Block Themes
- A Deep Introduction to WordPress Block Themes
Jeffrey Pearce, reminisced about his WordPress journey in Fifteen Years of Building WordPress Themes. He now leads Automattic’s Theme development team.
Anne McCarthy wrote a recap on the Hallway Hangout: Discussion on Full Site Editing Issues/PRs/Designs (1 June) a discussion among Theme builders on what’s missing and what’s stopping people from switching to block themes. Participants also talked about the progress of implementing fluid typography for themes.
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.
NoCode Site building
On learn.WordPress.org Sarah Snow recently published a video on Creating a Front Page for a Block Theme. Her short tutorial walks you through the process to set a page as the front page of your site, instead of the latest posts, and then design the particular page with the Site Editor.
You might also be interested in the upcoming WordPress Social Learning event with Wes Theron, who invites you to Let’s build a homepage together.
If you are just getting the hang of working with the block theme, you might also be interested in another Workshop on Learn.WordPress.org: Understanding the Page Editor vs. Site Editor with Georgina Reeder. It takes your understanding from editing a single page on your site to editing a template that is applied to all pages of your site and figure out what stay’s the same and what is different. Knowing the difference between the page editor and the Site editor, takes you page creatioin process to the next level and you get the tools to act upon your site in a more strategic mind set.
Munir Kamal published a new tutorial on YouTube: Responsive Product Card Hover Effect in WordPress Gutenberg. The purpose teach you how to create the creative content design in Gutenberg using default blocks without a 3rd party block plugin.
WordPress Social Learning Events
The training team scheduled new Social Learning Events covering the Block editor.
June 14, 2022 2 pm EDT / 18:00 UTC
Builder Basics: Let’s Build a Custom Theme (No Coding Required) w/ Nick Diego
June 16, 2022 – 3 pm EDT / 19:00 UTC
Let’s build a homepage together w/ Wes Theron.
Features image: Ian Shane – City Blocks, found via Openverse
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