Howdy,
It was a very busy week of meetings, news and live streams. The buzz around the next major WordPress version keeps everyone excited and alert. There is also hard to deal with FOMO*, as we can’t be at two or three places at the same time. And who has time to watch all the recordings?
Well, next week won’t be any different: Monday, the Page Builder Summit will start with 35+ talks around freelance and agency business their tools. Below is a list of all Gutenberg related talks.
The WordPress teams published quite a few posts around the WordPress 5.9 release. It’s not yet Field Guide time, though.
Hope, y’all have a great weekend with reduced screen time.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
PS: The recordings of the last two Live Q & As are available on YouTube. The posts with resources and transcript are in the works.
PPS: In a very short video, Jamie Marsland shows us Why WordPress Gutenberg is a threat to Elementor and Divi. #shorts
*Fear of Missing Out
Gutenberg and WordPress Development
In his post, WordPress 5.9 Feature Go/No-Go, Hector Prieto published the summary of the meeting, the list of features, the recording, and a transcript. The recording is particularly interesting for Matias Ventura’s demo of the current state of the major features:
- List View – Expand-collapse, Drag & Drop
- Auto-Anchors on Headings
- Border support for blocks
- Layout – Gap spacing, Flex & Row,
- Typography Tools across Blocks and styles
- Full-site Editing as opt-in, beta preview.
Throughout the meeting, I heard the language shifting, in an attempt to simplify talking about the various features.
- Now: Block Themes (instead of Block-based Themes)
- Now: Editor (instead of Site Editor or Template Editor)
- Now: Styles (instead of Global Styles)
Sarah Gooding wrote about it in the WPTavern: WordPress 5.9 Go/No-Go Update: All Proposed Features Are Moving Forward
The work on WordPress 5.9 is on track with The Preliminary Road 5.9, Matias Ventura posted a couple month ago, except for the Navigation Screen, that did not get past the backwards compatibility issues. The Navigation Block as a major feature for site-building will be available for Block Themes in the new WordPress version.
If you want to learn more about the status on the Navigation Screen and Block project, the team came together in a Hallway Hangout to discuss the priorities for the WordPress 5.9 release. Daniel Richards posted the Summary: Navigation Editor and Block hallway hangout, including the recording of the meeting. One meeting topic was Backwards compatibility with the current system for the Navigation screen.
The Gutenberg developers also release a new version of the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg 11.7
Adam Zielinski, release coordinator for this version, published the release notes: What’s new in Gutenberg 11.7 (October 13th)
Justin Tadlock took it for a spin and reviewed it for the WPTavern: Gutenberg 11.7 Iterates on Global Styles, Improves Adding Navigation Links, and Adds Column Spacing
Only two more Gutenberg releases (11.8 + 11.9) until Feature Freeze on November 9th, 2021.
Kelly Hoffman and James Koster from the WordPress design team shared their ideas for Site editing IA concepts: How to surface and access new features. (IA = Information Architecture)
They wrote: “Do we want to begin down this path towards a single page app-like experience, or would it be better to keep things separate for now? It’s time to explore and design the IA (information architecture) so that we can begin to paint a picture of how we might merge this exciting functionality in to core.”
You can follow along the explorations via the prototype links on Figma. You are offered two ideas: All in one means one editor screen, reached via the “Appearance” Menu, and you edit templates, post, and pages, template parts or change the styles all on this screen that adjust for the various context. The other idea is to keep post and page editing and site editing features separate, but surface some template parts to be reachable via the post/page editor.
I can see the all-in-one idea working, as it would hide the rest of the WPAdmin for the common content creation tasks, as that’s where many end users get lost or bombarded with plugins or theme upsell and update notices. I also enjoy the alternative design to the “Welcome Guide.”
This is not a quick decision to make. As the second one feels familiar, and the first one very new, I suspect my decision might be skewed by the “known” versus the “new”, instead which of the avenues makes the best sense for the End-User.
If you have an opinion formed, leave a comment on the post!
With WordPress 5.9 only two months away and Go-NoGo decisions made, Anne McCarthy started a second round of collecting questions you might have about Full-site editing. Submit Full Site Editing questions by Oct 27th. McCarthy asked “As it’s possible, please focus questions specifically around WordPress 5.9 as those will be the highest impact to address and not on larger strategic decisions.”
Creating and using Block Themes
Marcy Diaz recounted in “Custom WordPress Full Site Editing Theme Now Live” who she converted her site from a classic theme to a Block Theme. Along the way, Diaz shared her experiences interacting with tools and interfaces of theme.json or the Styles sidebar in the editor for templates.
It started as an experiment, but it came together easier than I expected, and so it’s live on this site now.
Marcy Diaz
In Proposal for Themes To Highlight Block Patterns From the Directory, Justin Tadlock explores Kjell Reigstad’s idea: Designers could not only provide patterns with their themes, but also highlight block patterns from the WordPress.org Pattern Directory to their users. It would reduce the bundle size of the themes, and exposes site builders to the broader range of Patterns in the directory. What do you think about this?
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Speaking of WordPress Block Patterns, Tammie Lister added 14 more inspiring block patterns to her Patternspiration site. I love the alignment of text and photos in 006 and the Chapter list of 002.
Many theme developers are taking their first steps on creating a block theme. Carolina Nymark has a few tips on Troubleshooting block themes. Nymark has been working on block themes for little over a year and has tackle pretty much all problems, you could encounter at the beginning: From syntax errors in theme.json to Template issues.
Building Blocks for WordPress
On his Thursday’s on Twitch live coding session, Ryan Welcher showed us how to create an accordion block that uses the InnerBlock component.
Herb Miller, developer and early adopter of block development, did a deep dive into Internationalizing and localizing block-based plugins. Miller first explains the difference between internationalization, translation and localizing, lists the tools, you’d be using and explains with code examples how to make your JavaScript and PHP code ‘translatable’. An excellent tutorial, that helps you offer your products to a broader audience and empowers translation teams to make your plugin available in many other languages.
Join us on October 28th at 12 pm EDT / 16:00 UTC
Gutenberg Times Live Q & A: Converting classic widgets to blocks
Learn from the BuddyPress team members, Mathieu Viet, David Cavins, Varun Dubey.
David Gwyer published another tutorial on his new site InnerBlocks: How to Use a Popover Component. He starts off with using the official WordPress scaffolding tool for blocks create-block and then walks the process to add the Popover Component to our new block and includes handling of state to manage visibility of the popover. It’s a great real life example of block development.
WordPress Events
October 18 – 22, 2021
Page Builder Summit Take a look at the schedule!
Here is the list of Gutenberg / Block-editor presentations
- Forging the Future with Full Site Editing with Anne McCarthy (10/18 – 9am EDT)
- The Future of Building WordPress Websites with Brian Gardner (10/18 – 12pm EDT)
- What does Full Site Editing Mean for Page Builders? with Joe Casabona (10/19/ 9am EDT)
- Customizing WordPress Block Editor for Client Projects with Birgit Pauli-Haack (10/19/ – 10 am EDT)
- Mastering modern WordPress with Full-site Editing & Custom Blocks with Rob Stinson (10/20/ – 5am EDT)
- How to Build Any Page Layout Using Kadence Blocks with Jake Pfohl (10/20/ – 12pm EDT)
- Building a Custom Blog Archive with Blocks with Mike Oliver (10/21/ 11am EDT)
- RIP Page Builders with Chris Lubkert (10/19 – 1pm EDT)
October 28, 2021 – 1 pm EDT / 17:00 UTC
Post Status: Headless WordPress Webinar
With Experts from WebDevStudios
- Brad Williams, CEO and Co-Founder
- Lisa Sabin-Wilson, COO and Co-Founder
- Greg Rickaby, Director of Engineering
- Amor Kumar, Frontend Engineer
November 4th, 2021,
WPEngine Summit 2021 (EMEA)
starts at 10 am UTC / 6am EDT
With many fantastic speakers, among them CEO Heather Brunner, Chris Weigman, Rob Stinson, Hashim Warren, Grace Erixon, and Brian Gardner
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events site, you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Events, around the world, including WordCamps, WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
