Howdy,
I am sending this while traveling back from WordCamp Leipzig, where I had great conversations with people from the German WordPress community. I published a few photos on Twitter: here, here, here, and on LinkedIN. Language switching is as difficult as context switching.
WordPress 6.3 Beta 1 is released, as well as Gutenberg 16.1. More below.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
If you haven’t yet, it’s time to reseaver your seat! for next week’s Gutenberg Live Q & A on July 6th, 2023, at 17:00 UTC
Leveraging Gutenberg’s architecture to take plugin development to new levels.
Learn how Gutenberg components and scripts can be used outside the block editor to revamp a plugin’s code base in this Case Study of GiveWP 3.0 with Jason Adams, Director of Development, Jon Waldstein, Lead Developer of GiveWP and co-host Lena Morita, JavaScript Developer on the Components team.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.3
On Tuesday, WordPress 6.3 Beta 2 was released, after Beta 1 wasn’t quite finished the day before. The release team is also preparing a Walk-through for later this month, to introduced many of the new features coming to a WordPress instance near you on August 8, 2023.
Please, help test WordPress 6.3, and report issue you encounter.
Gutenberg 16.1
Gutenberg 16.1 was released led by Isabel Brison and Ramon Dodd. In their release post, What’s new in Gutenberg 16.1? (29 June), they highlight the following functionality:
- Your templates and patterns, your library
- Create your site without distraction
- Text blocks: now with footnotes
- Achieve more with the Site editor sidebar
It was great fun to catch up with Tammie Lister as my guest on the Gutenberg Changelog. I hope you also have fun listening to us discussing the milelong Changelog for this Gutenberg release. The episode and the show notes are already available. The transcript is still in the works.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
Sarah Gooding also reported on the Gutenberg 16.1 in her article: Gutenberg 16.1 Introduces Pattern Creation and Library, Adds Distraction Free Mode to Site Editor, highlighting additional functionality found in this mamooth release.
In his latest video, Unlocking the Power of Navigation in WORDPRESS 6.3: What YOU Need to Know, Dave Smith, JavaScript developer at Automattic and core contributor, walked us through the updates to the Navigation handling in the Site Editor. It helped me wrap my head around all the different aspects of creating mulitple menus, style them and add them to templates and template parts in the site editor.
Anne McCarthy and Emily Clark will co-host a Hallway Hangout to discussion WordPress 6.3 performance improvement on July 27, 2023 at 15:00 UTC to discuss WordPress 6.3 performance improvements led by performance reps Emily Clark and Felix Arnzt and also look ahead to WordPress 6.4.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Mike McAlister advocates for Don’t call it Gutenberg anymore (unless you actually mean to). “it’s time to drop the Gutenberg vocabulary from our day to day usage, unless we’re actually talking about the Gutenberg project or development plugin.” he wrote. In the post he gives a quick overview of the history of Gutenberg development and how the block editor made it into the WordPress.
Rich Tabor published a new Pattern in the directory on WordPress.org: Two Column, Matted Gallery Images. “I really want to keep pushing whats possible with all this new design tooling in WordPress.” Tabor tweeted. With WordPress 6.3 you will have a way to create patterns for your site via the site editor. It used the same interface that allows you to create reusable blocks, now called “synched patterns”.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In his, Benjamin Perez Souto at Yotako,vannounces the new plugin release that allows users to Edit your Figma & Adobe XD designs as WordPress Gutenberg blocks. The tool set of Yotako provides some amazing synergies between AI and various design tools to Gutenberg Blocks.
Ryan Welcher continued his series Creating a block theme for developers with Part 4 and Part 5 on Twitch. If you want to catch up on Parts 1 through 3, they are available on Welcher’s YouTube Channel
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
The recording of this week’s Developer Hours: Exploring Editor Extensibility is now online with Michael Burridge, Nick Diego, and Ryan Welcher giving demos on various ways developer can already extend blocks and the editor experience. They also shared lots of resources and examples.
Igor Benic explained in his blog post How to Programmatically add a block in the WordPress Block Editor. “When working with custom blocks or custom solutions to enhance the WordPress Block Editor, you might need to have a way to add blocks programmatically to the editor.” he wrote and showed how to use – wp.blocks.createBlock – wp.data.dispatch('core/block-editor').insertBlocks to accomplish the task.
Working with Blocks also means getting data via the Rest API. The team of Learn WordPress just published the new course on Introduction to developing with the WordPress REST API. “This course presents a developer-oriented introduction to using and developing with the WP REST API. If you want to learn to use the WP REST API to power your next site build, plugin, or theme, or you just want to understand how it works, then this course is for you.” they wrote.
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
