Howdy,
Although, I found great content for you and I was co-leading the Gutenberg plugin release, it felt like a quiet week. No family drama, no moving stress. Nowadays, I cherish the quiet moments, when I can sit and read a book, that’s not technical in nature. Or just sit with loved once and chat about life, or go for a walk along the Rhine. Or take a stroll through Tinguely Museum. What are your moments of quiet, you cherish, and you don’t have enough of?
This will all change again next week, I am confident. 🤷🏻♀️
How was your week?
Hopefully, you can take a quiet moment for reading through this newsletter. Enjoy
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
This week, Gutenberg 15.6 was released. Nick Diego and I were leading the release and published the release post: What’s new in Gutenberg 15.6? (19 April). We highlighted
Sarah Gooding also reported Gutenberg 15.6 Introduces Experimental Details Block and Command Center for Site Editor.
Nick Diego and I also recorded the Gutenberg Changelog episode 82 together and discussed not only the latest release but also what’s in the works, like revisions for Global Styles, or a Pattern creator. It was a great pleasure speaking with Nick again on the podcast. The episode 82 will arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
A new call for testing is available for you! In FSE Program Testing Call #21: Front Page Fun, Anne McCarthy invites you to create and modify the front page of a site utilizing patterns that are available on a pre-built site, thanks to the InstaWP service. Share your experience on the post by May 8th, 2023.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Wes Theron posted a video on Building a page with only patterns. In this demo, he used a variety of patterns to create a Services Page. Patterns allow you to add beautifully designed, ready-to-go layouts to any WordPress site with a simple insert or copy/paste.
Jason Adams, announced GiveWP’S Block based: Visual Donation Form Builder in Beta. We discussed in an earlier edition that GiveWP is rebuilding their powerful Donation plugin with a block first mindset. The revamp started off with the WordPress own components and scripts to build the interface, and the GiveWP team augmented it with custom code where necessary. The Visual donation Form Builder is the first product to come from this effort. More info is also available on YouTube
If you work at an agency that helps their nonprofits fundraise using the GiveWP plugin, this beta test is for you. Furthermore, if you work at a nonprofit organization and are responsible for fundraising and building campaign related forms for your website, this beta test is for you. It gives you an early insight into what coming to GiveWP with its 3.0 version, and also a better feel for what will be possible with the new form builder that isn’t available right now.
Munir Kamal released his AI Writer on Gutenberg Hub Shop – plugin that integrates ChatGPT into the Gutenberg canvas. Your writing prompt is return with content, and then you can also ask for some rewrites, translate into various languages. You would need an OpenAI API key to enable the plugin, after you paid and installed the plugin.
Alexandra Yap, Stackable wrote a tutorial on How to Use Countdown Timers for Marketing Campaigns. “Countdown timers in web design are digital timers that display the remaining time until a particular event or deadline. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use countdown timers to boost your marketing campaigns.” she wrote. Congratulations to Benjamin Intal and his team to passing the milestone of 80,000 active installations of their plugin Stackable.
There are now 282 Block Themes in the WordPress repository. Here are three you could test.
- Abisko by Anders Noren, also mentioned on WPTavern
- Spectra One by Brainstorm Force, developers also of the classic Astra theme, also reviewed by Jamie Marsland, PootlePress
- CTLG by Automattic, specifically designed for creating lists, directories, and catalogs
What’s the difference between a block theme and a classic theme? Jamie Marsland explains it in a few minutes in this video WordPress Block Themes vs Classic Themes: A Beginners Guide
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Justin Tadlock wrote tutorial on how to work with Per-block CSS with theme.json. “theme.json supports enough CSS features to cover most common styles. But it cannot reasonably cover every scenario and still have a matching design tool in the editor UI, which is an important consideration. If the interface covered every possibility, the user experience would suffer.” Tadlock wrote. He also answers the question, why not add everything to a style.css and be done with it. Learn how to add custom CSS per block. Tadlock also added a few thoughts on pitfalls, and has some tips and tricks for you.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Nathan Wrigley talked to Steve Brunner and Timothy Jacobs, both founders of a SaaS app called Engine Awesome in the latest WP Jukebox podcast: #72 – Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs on Using Gutenberg Outside of WordPress. They discussed Gutenberg, but not how you might expect. It’s Gutenberg outside of WordPress, but Gutenberg nonetheless.
The recording of the Developer Hours: Introduction to the Interactivity API with Michal Czaplinski is now available on WordPressTV. It featured a live product demo of the Interactivity API. Michal is one of the developers on the team that brought the Interactivity API to fruition. Following the demo, Michal answered attendees’ questions.
Ryan Welcher uploaded the recording of his 3rd edition of “Bring me your Issues” series to YouTube. First he gave an overview of the Gutenberg 15.5 release and the showed how to create a custom external template for APIs for the create-block scaffolding tool.
The latter was also a topic of a Gutenberg Times Live Q & A with Grzegorz Ziolkowski and Fabian Kägy a couple of years ago, with demos and additional background: Tooling: Using Create-Block Scaffolding and 3rd Party Templates
Ajay D’Souza showed you in his post WordPress block development: Building multiple blocks, how to use the create-block scaffolding tool to add blocks to your plugin.
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.
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
