Howdy,
What a great experience WordCamp Asia and Taipei, Taiwan was! I went a few days early so I could do some sightseeing. The city combines the traditional, the unconventional with the 21st century high-tech vibe. I will share photos and details in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, you can browse the official photo album of the WordCamp.
The WordPress Community organizers of Asia did a fantastic job bringing all the cultures of the region together again. It was interestingly enough, marketed as the Premier Open-Source event for the Web. It’s a strong argument to be made that’s what attracted about 36% of local and first time attendees. It was again super well organized! It was heart-warming to see and hug so many friends and make new ones. I love the WordPress community.
So, now the downside of me traveling was that I didn’t publish during my trip. This weekend’s edition is again huge. Get your favorite beverage, and let’s see what happened in between.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
PS: I might have missed something awesome, please let me know and I add to next’s week’s edition.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
During the break, Joen Asmussen published two Design shares: Design Share: Feb 26-Mar 8 and Design Share: Feb 12-Feb 23, where he highlights the work the WordPress Design team has accomplished lately.
There is a lot of work being done for the upcoming revamp of the Learn.WordPress.org site. You can see the exploration for Learn video thumbnails.
For the editor, designers are working on placeholders, for the group and columns blocks. “Threading the needle on setup states that provide convenient shortcuts when inserted empty, yet still scale to very narrow contexts when they are inserted, for example, in a 100px thin column, is a tall order. ” he wrote.
He also visualized the work on Social Icons, Inspector controls (dev speak for options in the editor’s sidebar), a refreshed Select Mode and a new icon for the Metabox modal.
The team continued work on the redesign of WordPress.org. Forums and pattern directory are next.
In the monthly roundup post on the Developer blog, What’s new for developers? (March 2024), Nick Diego collected 28 developer relevant changes in this round-up post. You might want to reserve some time going through it.
WordPress 6.5
WordPress 6.5 Release Candidate 2 was released March 12, 2024. It’s really time test and make sure your plugins and themes are compatible.
Final release is scheduled for March 26, 2024.
In her post Unblocking WP6.5 – Font Library and Synced Pattern Overrides Josepha Haden Chomphosy explained the decisions on two discussions about Font Library’s default upload directory and naming patterns for the Synced pattern overrides feature. TL;DR Font Library is still in the release, Synced pattern overrides was punted to WordPress 6.6
With the release candidate, the documentation release leads collected, published the Dev Notes about new features and updates and compiled WordPress 6.5 Field Guide.
Block-centric Dev Notes for WordPress 6.5
Leonardo Nurugha, documentation co-lead of the release, offers a preview: What’s Coming in WordPress 6.5.
Carlos Daniele took a deep dive into the most important features for the Kinsta Blog: What’s new in WordPress 6.5: Font Library, DataViews, Block Bindings, Interactivity API, and much more!
Courtney Robertson published a What’s new in WordPress 6.5 walk-through and separated the updates for site builders and users from those relevant for developers.
And if you want to drink from the fire hose about updates in WordPress 6.5, Anne McCarthy has the ultimate WordPress 6.5 Source of Truth for you. In this over 10,000-word opus, you’ll find the updates tagged for each group of WordPress users they would be relevant to end users, theme or plugin authors, developers, site admins, and enterprises. For selective reading you could use your browser’s “Find on page” feature and search for these tags. She lists 15 priority items, with an array of 26 sub-items, and then another 23 additional items, and closes with information about items that didn’t make it into the release for one reason or another.
You could also go the other direction and watch Jamie Marsland explain WordPress 6.5 in 250 seconds.
Gutenberg plugin releases
Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9 together comprised of 360 merged Pull requests.
Joni Halabi, senior software developer at Georgetown University, and I chatted about the new features in Gutenberg as well as what’s coming in WordPress 6.5 in our 97th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. As always, the latest episode will drop into your favorite Podcast app over the weekend.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
Grant M. Kinney, core contributor, sponsored by Automattic, lead the release of Gutenberg 17.8 and highlighted in the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 17.8? (28 February)
Andrew Serong, lead the Gutenberg 17.9 release. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 17.9 (13 March) he highlighted:
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Eric Karkovack did a deep dive into How to Create & Manage Block Patterns in WordPress. It’s a fantastic tutorial explaining what patterns are and how you can create your own with the WordPress Site editor.
Paul Halfpenny introduced a new plugin called PersonalizeWP, which allows you to use personalization features within WordPress. “The plugin can help you tailor your content for your website visitors using the Block Editor to define what appears for them based on the conditions you choose.” he wrote. Learn more about pro version and all the features on their website
Jamie Marsland and Brian Coords discussed in this video How to Fix WordPress Gutenberg! Specifically, they walk through some usability issues of Block themes and the Site editor.
A similar discussion followed Anne McCarthy’s post about overlapping problems from last month in a Hallway Hangout. McCarthy posted the Summary of Hallway Hangout on overlapping problems in the Site Editor
Did you know you can install and use the Gutenberg block editor, built for WordPress, in Drupal! This video on YouTube walks you through the steps: Getting Started with Gutenberg (Block Editor) in Drupal (2024)
Rich Tabor introduced his new block: Cards. “This block is technically two blocks: a “Cards” block and a singular “Card” block, which is repeated—reminiscent of the WordPress Buttons block. Even now, I find it incredibly helpful to look at the source code for official WordPress blocks, which has all the tried-and-true methods for just about any type of block you’re looking to build next. Don’t reinvent, iterate.” he wrote.
In his video You won’t believe WordPress can do this! Jamie Marsland shows off the Cover Block magic possible with the WordPress Core. He shows you five different effects: the magical Parallax, the Scroll Snap, the Font Reverse the animation, and the Rick Roll.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Claudio Rimann shared his latest article Git going with FSE and Block Theme Development “Working with Block Themes and versioning in Git didn’t play together as nicely as I was used to. Here’s how we adjusted our workflow to make it work for us.” he tweeted. It fits into a discussion that also happens in the Make WP Slack #outreach channel
The video of a workshop called “Developer Hours: How to build modern web layouts” available on YouTube. In this one-hour workshop, Justin Tadlock made it all about learning to make website layouts with WordPress blocks. It was really helpful for anyone who wants to figure out how to put together different blocks to make cool and useful website designs.
Tadlock also looked at some website layouts people had made without blocks and showed how to make those using blocks instead. In the later part of the workshop, he gave some helpful tips, like when to use your own extra styling, how to make blocks look special, and when to turn your design into a repeatable pattern. This is great for making your site look just right but also keeping it easy to use. The examples are available for download from GitHub
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor
Keith Devon and Mark Wilkinson from Highrise Digital discuss WP CafĂ© #80 | New features coming in WordPress 6.5. They cover the discussion around McCarthy’s overlapping problems post. Then they move on to cover the Block Bindings API, Interactivity API, and some design tools coming in the new version.
Mark Howells-Mead shared his views on the WordPress Interactivity API, pointing out that while there are simpler methods to create interactive interfaces, such as using plain JavaScript or React, learning a framework like the WordPress Interactivity API entails understanding both the core concepts of JavaScript and the specifics of the framework itself.
In this episode of the Do the Woo – Inside Woo show, The Collaboration of the Interactivity API with WordPress and WooCommerce, BobWP (Bob Dunn) chats with WordPress and WooCommerce developers Carlos Bravo and Lucio Giannotta about the collaboration between WordPress core and Woo working with the Interactivity API, a new framework for WordPress developers.
Brian Coords reported for the WPTavern on The Block Bindings API Brings Dynamic Data to Blocks. “As the block editor continues to evolve its content management capabilities, the lack of support for custom fields has been one of the key roadblocks for users and developers. While custom fields in WordPress are still widely used, in the block editor they’ve been relegated to a drawer at the bottom of the screen, and haven’t been as deeply integrated as many would like. With the coming Block Bindings API, things are about to change in a very good way.” he wrote.
Eric Karkovack explored Why Keeping up with Gutenberg Is a Challenge for Developers. “Let’s say you have a #WordPress block plugin. What do you do when WP core offers overlapping features? I spoke to some developers about the challenge of keeping up (and adjusting) with Gutenberg.” Karkocack tweeted.
Nick Diego invites you to the next Developer Hours on March 26, 2024, at 14:00 UTC (9 am EDT). He tweeted: “While Block Hooks were introduced in WordPress 6.4, I’m very excited about the upcoming enhancements in 6.5. So many more tools for plugin developers. Join me and Bernie Reiter for Developer Hours: Exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5.
Bernie Reiter also wrote the Dev Notes about the Updates to Block Hooks in 6.5
From the WordPress Developer Blog
In his latest post, How to register block variations with PHP, Justin Tadlock provides a step-by-step walk-through of how to register block variations using PHP in WordPress 6.5.
Nick Diego posted An introduction to block-based mega menus and explored how to build a Mega Menu block that integrates with the Core Navigation block using new features coming in WordPress 6.5.
Justin Tadlock posted Introducing Block Bindings, part 2: Working with custom binding sources. The second tutorial in a two-part series that introduces the Block Bindings API in WordPress 6.5. Part 2 focuses on registering and using custom binding sources.
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