Block-Editor Performance, SEO with blocks, Full-Site-Editing and Newspack

Weekend Edition #157

Howdy, howdy,

This week, we experienced a release galore! The core team has been busy pushing out three releases: 🙌 🎉

WordPress 5.6.1 with necessary bug fixes of the December version
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 Apart from updates to the Block Editor, new features will come to WordPress core: lazy-loading iframes, streamlined migration from HTTP to HTTPS, standardize colors for the WP-Admin and more.
Gutenberg 9.9 = 99th version of the block-editor plugin 👏

Dinner is almost ready: Homemade Indian Butter Chicken! It’s late. I leave you to the rest of this Weekend’s Edition.

Have a great weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit

Gutenberg 9.9 a new plugin version with 157 changelog items was also released. It marks the last release of block-editor features for the 5.7 version. All block-editor changes of plugin version 9.3 – 9.9 will make it into the next major WordPress release. WPTavern has the skinny for you.

We, Mark Uraine and I, recorded our 37th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Watch for it to arrive tomorrow in your favorite podcaster.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. The index 2020 is here

Camille Cunningham, content manager at Yoast, published a tutorial for Content Creators on how to manage your readers’ expectations to reduce the bounce rate of your post. She provides detailed tips on how the speed-readers and speed-scrollers stop long enough to read your article. I knew about the FAQ and the How-to blocks of Yoast’s SEO plugin but until today, overlooked all the other blocks available in the Premium plugin.

Also, just published: Another block-based story by Team Yoast. Rich results, structured data and Schema: a visual guide to help you understand.

The Newspack team at Automattic published a showcase of 60 projects they support around the world Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern took the occasion to update the community on the project. Newspack Publishes Showcase with 60 Newsrooms Launched.

The code used to build the newsroom sites is open-source and available on GitHub in 33 different repositories for theme, plugin, blocks, newsletter, content-converter, ads, listings, sponsors and so much more.

In the post Why WP Rocket Chose Gutenberg and How Performance Improved Valentina Orlandi walks you through the various steps their team took revamping their site. You learn how they used Reusable Blocks and Block Patterns, created their Landing page and call to action. They even shared some code snippets. Even if you don’t use WP Rocket on your site, this article can be inspirational for your site revamp.

Update for the FSE Outreach experiments program