Howdy,
The WordPress 6.4 release is fast approaching. This week I tested two new features. I am excited about that content creators and designers will be able to add a background image to group blocks. I see a few more decorative, wall paper like backgrounds for quotes, or call out paragraphs in our future. Furthermore, site owners and theme builders can look forward to a new Font library with font management capabilities via the Global Styles sidebar.
You can upload fonts and server them to visitors locally and keep within privacy guidelines. Jeffrey Pearce posted A call for testing on X (formerly Twitter). For more information, I added some details in this post on this site.
For novices to the intricacies of Typography, Mary Baum started an exciting series on the Developer Blog.
Hope all is well. Cu you on the Interwebs.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Last Monday, I was part of This Week in WordPress #266 – “Weirdy bespoke CMS” with Katie Keith and Bob Dunn, hosted by the fabulous Nathan Wrigley. We talked about last week’s news around the WordPress space. Gutenberg updates, about LMS Working group, and Automattic’s One Hundy (100-year plan) Bob’s booth take-over and Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt joining Post Status, Enterprise Guide to WordPress and a lot more. It was great fun and quite enlightening.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Joen Asmussen again shared the work of the WordPress design team in his post Design Share: Aug 14-Aug 25. You’ll find illustrations and links on
- the iterations on the new design for the themes directory,
- the way how to list user patterns by category
- the workflow to control styling nested elements through inheritance
- Better display for the audio component and search results for the Openverse site.
- User interface to control the Lightbox feature for Image block
- Font Management for Google Fonts
- First round of designs for List views for the Admin space.
After nearly 3.5 years of feedback loops, knowledge sharing, and community building and WordPress 6.3 concluding the Phase 2, Anne McCarthy outlines in her blog post Evolving the FSE Outreach Program, what will happen next. Details on the timeline, the shift from new feature to adoption and the hand-off of future calls for testing to the WordPress test team, are all explained in the post. Anne McCarthy has been a fantastic community builder and communicator running this first of a kind outreach program. Their work was groundbreaking and provided a blueprint future outreach programs can build on.
Gutenberg 16.6
In his release post, What’s new in Gutenberg 16.6? (06 September), Vicente Canales highlighted the new Block hooks, formerly known as Auto-inserted blocks, and improvements to the block toolbars by tieing the toolbars of child blocks to the parent block’s toolbar.
Sarah Gooding also reported on the Gutenberg 16.7 release in her article Gutenberg 16.6 Introduces Block Hooks, Improvements to Toolbars on Nested Blocks
For this week’s Gutenberg Changelog episode 89, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Nadia Maya Ardiani and my special guest. Ardiani is a content creator at Hostinger and contributor on training and documentation teams working on translations. We have been in touch since we met in person at WordCamp Asia. In this new episode, we tackled the Gutenberg 16.6 release and talked about more features in the works. The episode will drop into your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
TIL: The diner in Maya’s background is called warkop/warmindo, which is the short for warung kopi (coffee tavern) or warung indomie (instant noodle diner)
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
JR Tashjian, senior developer at GoDaddy, has been working on OmniForm for a while, and he just released it in the WordPress plugins directory. OmniForm specializes in essential form types, such as contact and feedback forms. The feature list includes:
- 20+ form fields blocks, including text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more
- Pre-built form templates or create your own from scratch
- Manage form submissions within the admin dashboard
- Email notifications for new form submissions
- Customize form styling
- Spam protection with Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, and Google reCAPTCHA.
Patricia Hillebrandt, code wrangler at WooCommerce, published the release notes for WooCommerce Blocks version 11.0.0 With the latest release of WooCommerce Blocks, users can leverage the Product Collection Block and the improved interactivity of the Product Button to create appealing product displays and enhance the shopping experience on their websites.
Sarah Gooding reported on the new release for the WPTavern: WooCommerce Blocks 11.0.0 Adds Product Collection Block in Beta, 10.9.0 Integrates Product Button with the Interactivity API
The Torque Magazine published Nick Schäferhoff‘s post about Mastodon and WordPress: 8 Ways to Make Them Work Together. From site verification and social icons over displaying your feed on your site or your client’s sites, to automatically posting from WordPress to Mastodon, Schäferhoff gives comprehensive instructions and illustrations for a complete integration of WordPress and Mastodon.
On Learn.WordPress you can now watch the new tutorial: Intro to the Site Editor. You can create and launch your entire site within the Site Editor. In this video tutorial, Wes Theron, provides you with an overview of accessing and using the Site Editor and you learn about all the tools you need.
Steve Burge published for KinshiPress the tutorial on how to use a Time to Read Block in WordPress, via the Gutenberg plugin.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Anton Plauche has published a detailed tutorial for responsive design implementation by extending the core columns block. In How to Build Responsive Designs in the WordPress Editor by Extending the Core Columns Block, Plauche shares example code to add our additional breakpoint functionality.
With Gutenberg 16.6, Nick Diego updated the documentation for Block Variations to clarify different properties and to add notes regarding implementation. He also merged the new page on enqueuing assets in the Editor
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
