Hi there,
Did you start well into the new year? The first month is almost over. Working from home, I am really looking forward to seeing my WordPress friends at WordCamp Asia in Manila. The team facilitates meeting contributors in one-on-one sessions and to ask questions: It’s called the Human Library and contributors are call Books. My shift is from 10:30 to noon on Contributor Day. You can also meet Ryan Welcher, Nick Diego, Milana Cap, Hari Shanker to mention just a few.
If FOMO (fear of missing out) is real for you, rest assured you can always ping me for a chat, email pauli@gutenbergtimes.com, or message me on Slack or Bluesky. I would be delighted!
In this week’s edition, you’ll find quite a few tutorials, plugins, and podcast episodes and nowadays also AI. I hope you’ll enjoy ready and listening to it all as I did.
Have a fantastic weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Hey friends! 🌴✨ Get ready for an epic adventure at WordCamp Asia 2025 in vibrant Manila!
I’ll be diving deep into the WordPress universe – hanging out at Contributor Day (February 20th) and rocking both conference days (February 21-22nd).Want to connect? I’m totally open to grabbing coffee, lunch, or catching up between sessions at the Philippine International Convention Center.
Check out my public calendar and snag a slot – let’s turn this tech gathering into an unforgettable networking experience! Can’t wait to swap stories, share insights, and soak up the incredible WordPress community energy in the Philippines. Who’s in? 🚀🇵🇭 #WordCampAsia2025
As mentioned last week, DoTheWoo and Gutenberg Times were founded around the same time. Bob Dunn aka BobWP and I chatted about our starts in our 7th anniversary episode: The Evolution of WordPress Content: Insights on Gutenberg, Podcasting, and Community Growth. Bob is the astounding supporter of the WordPress community and raises diverse voices with his network of 12 podcast and hosts. You will always find something or someone interesting to listen to or about.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Aaron Jorbin announced WordPress 6.7.2 Release Planning with RC 1 on February 4 and final release on February 11, 2025.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Jacopo “Copons” Tomasone wanted you to know about an Update to WordPress.com’s Interface: “The updated interface is the latest release in a larger project to bring the experience on WordPress.com much closer to a “core” WordPress experience.” Tomasone wrote and continued “This is just the beginning of a gradual process that will continue over the next few months as we continue to create a more unified and familiar experience across our products.”
Brian Coords published a new episode of the Webmasters podcast. He chatted with Ian Svoboda of Generate Blocks, how the plugin adds modern design tools to Gutenberg. They also discussed all about building on top of the block editor and crafting tools that supercharge your site-building workflow.
In Improving Fediverse Engagement With the Reactions Block, Matt Wiebe introduced Likes, Reposts, and the Fediverse Reactions block, and expanding the ActivityPub plugin. With the Reactions Block, likes and reposts from Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms are automatically added to the end of your posts (if you’re using the Site Editor).
Jeremy Holcombe discussed WordPress dark mode: key benefits and how to set it up on the Kinsta blog. You’ll discover the advantages of dark mode, such as better accessibility, a healthier visitor experience, lower energy use, and meeting user preferences. He also shows you different ways to add dark mode to WordPress with plugins or custom code.
Ali Aghdam from Istanbul, Turkey, and his team soft-launched Blockera – a plugin to add supposedly missing features to the Block editor for designers. The current version feels like a beta of the Pro-version. You’ll find a lot of “coming soon” or “upgrade now” prompts around the interface. It gives you a good indication where the various features will be placed.
I test the additional text features, and they seem to be solid, adding enhanced text shadow and orientation capabilities. An already active community and the process of building public, allows for a fairly fast update cycle. It’ll be interesting to see how this compares to other tools, once the free and pro versions are more progressed. With 195 blocks, it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. You can join the waitlists for the pro version as well as for the Blockera One block theme on blockera.ai. The plugin is available in the WordPress repository.
WooCommerce 9.6 was released and Stephanie Pi highlight in the release announcement WooCommerce 9.6: Fresh new tools and modernizing classics, she highlights:
- Brands has landed
- Smarter defaults for measuring unit
- Product Summary block, enhanced
- More new features and updates
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In episode #153, Nathan Wrigley chatted with Tammie Lister on Modern Theme Development and Artistic Exploration. “The fact that Tammie is both a designer and a technical expert has allowed her to offer a well-rounded perspective on the evolution and future of WordPress themes. We explore the shift from classic themes to the new era of Full Site Editing and theme.json, and discuss whether the slower-than-anticipated adoption of these new tools signifies a deeper trend, or just a transitional phase.” wrote Wrigley in the summary.
Kyra Pieterse of Maxiblocks shared six important reasons for switching to WordPress FSE. Working in the Site editor “simplifies customization, reduces the need for coding, and improves site performance by optimizing speed and functionality. With features like global styling, reusable templates, and responsive design tools, FSE provides a streamlined way to create professional WordPress websites that meet the needs of both website designers and businesses.” she wrote. She dives deeper into each of the arguments in her article.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Ever since WordPress Studio was released, I wondered if I can make it the only local development app. Ever since my agency days, I have been using LocalWP. The latest Studio update: Build Locally, Deploy Globally: Meet Studio Sync for WordPress.com had me wondered if all I need now is Studio. I have probably about two dozen sites in my LocalWP instance for various testing and building scenarios, so I was curious how fast I can migrate a site to Studio. Turns out it only takes a couple of minutes per site to export from Local and import into Studio. You can see a short video and some details on my blog post. How do I migrate my LocalWP sites to WordPress Studio?
In his post on the WordPress developer blog, One hook to rule them all: The many faces of block categories, Troy Chaplin takes a deep dive into the ins and outs of Block categories for the Inserter of the Editor. “The hook is a versatile tool that allows developers to customize the way block categories are organized. Throughout this article, you will learn how to use this hook and build functions to add, reorder and rename single or multiple block categories.” Chaplin wrote.
Carlo Daniele set out to teach developers how to build a Gutenberg plugin to add functionality to the block editor. You’ll lean how to create a plugin without creating a custom block, add a sidebar to manage post metadata, and use block pattern overrides to automate your workflow.
In his latest video, Nick Diego, developer relations advocate for WordPress, set out to show you how you can revolutionize your WordPress development with Cursor AI. He demonstrated how to set up Cursor for seamless WordPress plugin creation by configuring it specifically for WordPress coding standards, and creating structure instructions. As an example, Diego built – AI assisted – a Copy Code block plugin.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com