Howdy,
Seems Summer break is over for many developers, designers, and site builders, and they came back inspired to write and share their learning with the rest of the community. There is a ton of material in today’s weekend edition for every level of WordPress users. Dig in. And if you still us browser bookmarks bookmark it.
Have a wonderful weekend!!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.4 Beta 2 was released this week, and again, two calls for testing will help you familiarize yourself with new features, and also help the underrepresented gender release squad to make it the best version it could be.
- Help Test the Font Library (for 6.5)
- Help Test WordPress 6.4
- FSE Program Testing Call #26: Final touches
Before everyone headed into the weekend, core contributors and release squad discussed the state of the Font Library and concluded, in the words of Tonya Mork, core tech lead 6.4, “The feature is not ready yet.” and “It needs more time. ” Release lead, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, decided to punt the Font Management feature to WordPress 6.5.
Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern has the details for you: WordPress 6.4 Font Library Feature Punted to 6.5 Release
Listening to the WP Briefing: Episode 63: A WordPress 6.4 Sneak Peek you can join WordPress Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she offers an exclusive preview of the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release, accompanied by special guest Sarah Norris, one of the Editor Tech leads for this release. Don’t miss this opportunity for an insider’s look!
Reminder: Nick Diego, Justin Tadlock and Ryan Welcher invite you to their Hallway Hangout: What’s new for developers in WordPress 6.4 on October 12th, 2023 at 18:00 UTC. They will cover, among other things, Block Hooks and the Default theme Twenty-Twenty-Four.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
Anne McCarthy invites you to join her for a Hallway Hangout: Working session on consolidating various navigation modes on November 15, 2023, at 15:00 UTC.
Vicente Canales is released 16.8 RC1 is available for testing. Mainly the release contains fixes and improvements that were necessary after WordPress 6.4 beta testing. Out of 160 PRs, 49 were back ported to the WordPress 6.4 Beta branches. many bug fixes that came from WordPress 6.4 Beta testing or improved code quality.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In the 10-minute tutorial, Using Page Templates, Wes Theron teaches you what templates are, how you can expand them to create full-page layouts with header, sidebar, and footer areas. You will learn how to use, edit and add templates to customize your site by giving your posts and pages their own unique look and feel.
Sarah Gooding researched Why NASA Chose WordPress for Revamping Its Flagship Website and identified 3 major reasons: Ample access to resources, a a plugin ecosystem around real time content analysis, and, as expected, ease of use of the content authoring environment. “The block editor’s flexibility for authoring landing pages and breaking free of a rigid templating system was one of the most important factors in NASA’s selection of WordPress as a CMS.” she wrote.
In their post Get Creative with WordPress 6.4’s Design Tools, Anne McCarthy summarized the upcoming changes to Design Tools for artists who would like to submit new Block patterns to the Block Museum of Art. The new Font Library vertical text orientation, and background image for Group block enrich the block artist’s toolbox, together with the core blocks enhance support for more design tools. Of those, the stretch alignment for column blocks is probably the most interesting one.
Tyler Moore, WordPress YouTuber with 450+K Subscribers , published his first Block Theme in the WordPress repository. Meet Variations – “a block theme and hopefully the last theme you will even have to install. It comes with many templates and block patterns to make creating a website easy.” he wrote.
In his video, WordPress Block Themes are amazing, Jamie Marsland showed how to create custom post layouts, custom post archives, and display custom fields using Block Themes (oh and snazzy CSS Grids with the query loop block),as he announced in his tweet.
Mike McAlister reported the Ollie block theme is now available on WordPress.org! It sports 50 beautiful pattern designs, 7 full-page pattern layouts, and a fully customizable design system with Global Styles. Download Ollie here
Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern, accompanied McAllister on his contributor odyssey to get his theme approved. She wrote several articles (here, here, here and here) to give context and background with comments from the wider community.
On October 17, 2023, at 20:00 UTC, Wes Theron will host an online live tutorial on Using the Query Loop block and Category templates. This will cover the heart of a website that is how to display archive pages and category summary pages.
Syble Harrison celebrates the release of MemberPress version 1.11.7. It comes with Gutenberg Membership Blocks and all MemberPress widgets now also work as Gutenberg membership blocks.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Let Ganesh Dahal take you on a journey Exploring Enhanced Patterns In WordPress 6.3 on Smashing Magazine. Synched patterns (former Reusable blocks) and block patterns give users “the ability to write content once and synch it across pages and posts and modular components to enforce a consistent visual experience throughout a site.” Dahal wrote. Don’t forget to replace “reusable blocks” with “synched patterns”. One of the curses of a fast-moving development project. Features names sometimes change.
Johannes is a wireframe and UX kit that wants to help you with your next WordPress design project. Built by the WordPress VIP partner Be API in France, the tool consists of a library of ready-to-use components in Figma, Hero and other samples templates, styles, and pattern variations. Johannes uses Figma features, including components, auto-layout and variants.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In Developer Hours: Building better blocks with the create-block package, Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher covered the official scaffolding tool for custom block development. Besides the fundamentals, participants learned about other features such as external project templates and variants for dynamic blocks or blocks using the interactivity API.
If you’d like to participate in a live online tutorial, Jonathan Bossenger will hold a session on the same topic on October 12th, 2023 at 14:00 UTC. You can RSVP on Meetup.com The WordPress Create Block tool
Gabriel Rose, developer at 10up, created the Microsoft VS Code extension: WordPress theme.json CSS Autosuggest that provides autocomplete for your WordPress theme.json tokens in your CSS.
Mark Wilkinson of Highrise Digital and co-host of the WP Café podcast, shared his approach and code to make the WordPress search block to only search in a custom post type. Once implemented, users can use patterns to add the feature to their site.
Ronald Huereca wrote a tutorial on How to Create a Permanent Unique ID for Your WordPress Block. Maybe that’s something you were always wondering about. The tutorial is reach on code examples and gives you step-by-step instructions to follow along.
Next in his series Block Developer Cook Book recipes, Ryan Welcher tackles the Formats API in his latest video. “Uncover the secrets of the Format API to flavor your text, just like a master chef creates unique sauces.” her wrote in the description.
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Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
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