Howdy,
Wow, this is already the fourth year-end message, I send out with this newsletter. There isn’t much, I have been doing so consistently then this weekly newsletter. It’s been such an inspiring journey, thanks to you and the WordPress contributors, extenders and users. Your creations, questions, comments have been wonderful, especially when in-person contact have been sparse and zoom-fatigue set in.
For Gutenberg, the block editor the best is yet to come.
In his State of the Word presentation, Matt Mullenweg mentioned for next year Full-Site Editing in WordPress 5.9, which he called the MVP, minimal viable product, Openverse and WordPress Photos, maybe four WordPress releases and in-person meetings. Work on Phase 3, Collaborative editing, won’t come until 2023. This was not all and below you’ll find an array of Recap posts and media for your perusal.
This is my last edition of the year 2021. I wish you a great time with family and friends and a Happy New Year. I am excited to connect with you again around January 9th with the next weekend edition.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: 2129 users voted at the WPAwards produced by Davinder Si ngh Kainth. It’s all in good spirit and a fun activity. In the category of Page builders, Gutenberg landed on second place behind Elementor and before Beaver Builder. 🙂 Thank you, for those who voted for the Gutenberg Times and the Gutenberg Changelog. Seems we need to do some more community outreach and lobbying next time around. 🤔
PPS: To bridge the gap until the next edition, I sprinkled some Gutenberg highlights of the year sprinkles among the links below: starting with the recordings of Gutenberg talks from WordCamp US 2021 on WordPress.TV.
State of the Word and Q and A
My longtime Webdev friend, Deborah Edwards-Onoro shared her thoughts in Takeaways from State of the Word 2021.
The Posts Status team collected voices from the community after the State of the Word & Q & Two ways.
- Responses to the State of the Word 2021 – Openverse. Diversity. Training. Future generations. A whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. These are our quick takes on SOTW ’21.
- Comments (No. 4) — State of the Word 2021 Analysis The recording of the Twitter Spaces with held after the State of the Word event, moderated by David Bisset
Courtney Robertson, WordPress Training team, sponsored by GoDaddy, also wrote a Recap of both Mullenweg’s presentation and the Q & A.
The Feedback for the 11th Call for testing from the FSE program is in, and Anne McCarthy published the Site Editing Safari Summary.
“As folks dug in, there were numerous enhancements that quickly came to mind as awesome nice to haves. These desired enhancements not only underscores the potential of various full site editing pieces when put together, but also highlights the frustration around the current limitations” McCarthy wrote. She also created a list of GitHub Issue for those feature requests. Check them out and comment if you are interested in those features as well.
Building Custom Blocks and developing for Gutenberg
Before you start thinking about building a custom block, read Tammie Lister‘s Block patterns are better than blocks, published on the Extendify‘s blog.
The Team at Learn.WordPress.org has two workshops for developers and more are coming.
- Registering Block Patterns with Daisy Olsen
- Intro to Gutenberg Block Development with Jonathan Bossenger
Ari Stathopoulos posted a WordPress 5.9 DevNote on Using multiple stylesheets per block
“Blocks will now be able to register multiple stylesheets, and load styles from other blocks when needed. Themes will be able to add styles on a per-block basis instead of loading monolithic stylesheets that are force-loaded anywhere. This has a greater impact on block themes where stylesheets loading is optimized based on the page & layout contents, but can also be used by classic themes.”, Stathopoulos wrote.
He continued: “This change can benefit both block developers and theme developers, further reducing the total page-weight by only loading styles for blocks that exist on a page.”
Justin Tadlock reviewed a new plugin providing chart blocks in this post: Hello Charts Launches a Native Chart-Building Experience for the Block Editor. In the article, he also lists other block plugins that allow you to create charts. There are actually four:
- SB Charts by WordPress plugin developer Herb Miller
- Chart Block by the bPlugins Team from Bangladesh
- Charts Blocks for Gutenberg by Sandip Mondal, and
- Hello Charts, by Luke Carbis, Rob Stinson and Byron Keet.
Hello Charts is not available in the WordPress repository, only from their website. It’s the first block-based product site, I noticed, that sells single block features.
In his last stream before the holidays, Ryan Welcher took his viewer through extending the meme block he created last week, to use images from the Media library. You can watch it on YouTube: Expanding the Meme Generator plugin.
If you prefer not to watch the programming part and just look at the code, you can see all code from the Twitch stream on GitHub. Be aware they are educational and not meant to be used in production.
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.
Block Themes for Theme developers
Maggie Cabrera published the Gutenberg + Themes Digest for this week. She highlights PRs and discussions on four topics:
- Typography supports for group and row blocks
- Nameless font sizes
- Approach to global padding
- Default font sizes renamed
- Template parts in child themes
I suffered from serious flashbacks, when I noticed that Riad Benguella recreated the Kubrick Theme as a block theme. Matias Ventura tweeted a short video on how to change the header color gradient with the site editor. You can study the block theme on GitHub. It might even show up in the WordPress repository.
Justin Tadlock also has a few more thoughts and screenshots Yes, a Block-Based Version of the Kubrick WordPress Theme Exists
