Howdy,
Last week’s Live Q & A on Layout features went really well, with numerous participants. The post and the show notes are still in the works. The recording is available on YouTube, should you want to revisit parts of it or missed it entirely.
Now that feature freeze for the major WordPress release is only three weeks away, the contributors would appreciate it if you could heed the 20th call for testing from the FSE Outreach program. You can help find quirks, bugs and annoyances, so they can be fixed before February 7th and during the round of beta version of the release.
Have a lovely weekend!
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Gutenberg 15.0 release candidate is available for testing. Sticky positioning, resizable Site editor, updated to the Page List block, modify block style variations from global styles, and a lot more refinements are coming to the Gutenberg plugin
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
Last April, a group of contributors started working on research on how to best implement an API for to make blocks more interactive. This week, JuanMa Garrido shared a progress report: Update on the work to make building interactive blocks easier.
The resources linked in the post are mostly code internals, so they are definitely very technical at this point. With that said, understanding how the new API works, will not be necessary for developers to use this new standard. A standard proposal will be published the next few months. So for now, this is all bit technical and architectural. The work on the underlying framework is shared on this GitHub Repository
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Munir Kamal, GutenbergHub, shows you in his latest post How to Find and Use Block Patterns in WordPress. You learn, how to find patterns in the post and site editor, how to navigate the WordPress Pattern Directory and how to install the patterns via the plugin Extendify Patterns and Templates
If you want to create your own patterns, but don’t know how to code them, you can use the plugin Blockmeister – Block Pattern Builder.
Sarah Gooding reports on the Lettre Newsletter Theme Now Available on WordPress.org, It can be used with the newly release newsletter feature in Jetpack plugin or as a stand-along theme. “The theme puts the focus on the subscription form, which is the most important thing a newsletter landing page can do – make it easy for people to sign up. Beneath the form there is a link to read all the posts, followed by another subscription form. All of these elements in the home page design are blocks, making it easy for them to be removed or rearranged.” Gooding wrote.
Will Morris explained the three ways add a Table of Contents in WordPress in is post for the Torque Magazine. The three ways are:
- Install a plugin
- Use on the Custom Table of Contents blocks
- Create you Table manually in the Block Editor.
Soon you will be able to use the core Table of Content’s block once it comes out of the experimental stage. It’s already available via the Gutenberg plugin.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In his post, Justin Tadlock, walks you through the layout classes in WordPress 6.1. With the latest release of WordPress, the software has now centralized its layout definitions, created semantic class names, and reduced code duplication on container blocks. “Originally, this post was intended to be a quick look at the changes to the system for theme authors. However, given the heftiness of the topic, it has evolved into a full overview of the layout framework.” Tadlock wrote.
In his second post published on the Developer Blog, Using the box shadow feature for themes, Justin Tadlock took a look at the box shadow support, that what just released in Gutenberg 14.9. As it happens with similar features, the first iteration of box shadow support is only available via code. The interface for the site editor screens are still in the works.
Daisy Olsen held her inaugural live programming session on Twitch this week. The recording is now available on YouTube. In this stream, she talked about:
- using LocalWP for local WordPress development,
- the Create Block Theme Plugin, and
- took a look at the code from a couple of existing block themes.
You need a Twitch account and follow DaisyonWP to get notified when she goes live.
In his latest post for CSS-Tricks: Styling Buttons in WordPress Block Themes, Fränk Klein, takes a detailed look markup of various buttons and how to style them via the theme.json properties.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Tom McFarlin continued his series A Backend Engineer Learns to Build Block Editor Blocks with Part 5 in which he covers adding color controls to a custom block for the use case, when you want to give the user the option to select the colors for the block themselves.
McFarlin, recommend the previous articles first as they build on top of each other. So far, he published:
- Required Tools, Plugin Structure, Dependencies, Block Metadata
- The Backend, The Frontend, Functionality, Styles, a Working Demo
- Block Attributes, Editable Content, Components, Editor Styles
- Saving Data, Styling the Frontend
Phil Sola create a Custom Color Picker for WordPress. Sola added some improvements to the existing color picker. It’s more an experiment rather than a full-fledged solution. His exploration might also be an inspiration for others to start experimenting with WordPress component library.
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
February 4 + 5, 2023
WordCamp Birmingham, AL
February 17 – 19, 2023
WordCamp Asia 2023
Check the schedule of WordCamp Central of upcoming WordCamps near you.
Learn WordPress Online Meetups
January 17, 2023 – 3pm / 20:00 UTC
Patterns, reusable blocks and block locking
January 19th, 2023 – 10:30 ET / 15:30 UTC
Live stream: Building an Advanced Query Loop block variation plugin w/ Ryan Welcher @ryanwelchercodes
January 19, 2023 – 7 pm ET / 24:00 UTC
Let’s make custom templates in the Site Editor!
January 20, 2023 – 3 am ET / 8:00 UTC
Let’s make custom templates in the Site Editor!
January 20, 2023 – 10:30 am 15:30 UTC
Block Themes and WordPress: Live Stream w/ Daisy Olsen @daisyonwp
January 23, 2023 – 10 pm ET / 1 am UTC
Patterns, reusable blocks and block locking (APAC time zone)
January 26, 2023 – 10:30 am ET / 15:30 UTC
Live stream: Reviewing developer-focused features in Gutenberg 15.0 w/ Ryan Welcher @ryanwelchercodes
January 31, 2023 – 3pm ET / 20:00 UTC
Creating a photography website with the block editor
