Howdy,
Don’t forget to save the date for the Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about what’s next in Gutenberg on April 24 at 11 pm UTC / 7pm EDT / 4 pm PDT / 1 am CEST
Rob Cairns and I chatted on his podcast about WordPress 6.5 and beyond.
Spring is back in Munich and it’s beautiful. We are really pushing getting out and walking around town, along the river or in our big park, with 5,000 other individualists.
Have a splendid weekend ahead!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Justin Tadlock, and others collected for you What’s new for developers? (April 2024) around WordPress 6.5, Core track and Gutenberg plugin. The table of contents listed 21 separate updates separated for Plugins developer and theme builders.
On April 9th, Aaron Jorbin and the merry band of Core contributors published the WordPress 6.5.2 Maintenance and Security Release. “Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. Backports are also available for other major WordPress releases, 6.1 and later.” Jorbin emphasized. Go and update if you haven’t yet. This can wait.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Release lead, Ramon Dodd, published Gutenberg plugin version 18.1 and highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 18.1? (10 April):
- Set site background images in the Site Editor
- See more with data views
- Pattern schema and insertion
- Swap and edit template parts
Anne McCarthy demo’d in this video WordPress Playground: the ultimate learning, testing, & teaching tool for WordPress. WordPress Playground is an open-source project that makes makes WordPress instantly accessible for users, learners, extenders, and contributors. Thanks to the easy creation of instant, temporary WordPress sites in your browser, you don’t need a server or a test site or local environment. “At a high level, watching this video will give you a glimpse of what it is, what it does, and how you can use it today. I highly recommend getting comfortable using it, especially as we look to the future of WordPress.” McCarthy wrote.
Estela Rueda invites designers and theme builders to provide feedback The new grid experience. The grid aims to enhance the visual layout capabilities within WordPress by making it more flexible and easier to use for various design needs. To gather a wide range of opinions and suggestions, the team is reaching out and encouraging people to participate in the feedback process. By visiting the provided link, users can learn more about the new grid experience and contribute their input to help shape this upcoming feature.
Joen Asmussen highlighted in his Design Share: Mar 25-Apr 5 the design team’s work for the last two weeks, mostly about refinements of the data views.
- Site Editor animation refinements
- Badge fields
- Explore UX around customizing bundled data views
- Bulk actions toolbar
- WP.org Homepage Updates
- Block Naming & Connections
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Anne McCarthy highlighted the features of the Create-block Theme plugin on Automattic’s Design blog: DIY Block Theme and invites you to “learn to use the Create Block Theme plugin, like our designers do, to build your own block theme“
Nathan Wrigley and Anchen Le Roux announced that this year’s Page Builder Summit 7.0 is scheduled for May 20 through May 24, 2024. A stable for the last seven years, the Page builder Summit brings a large variety of experts together to help veteran and new site builders to get better at their craft. They provide insights into technology, business, and the design for freelancers building sites for others. The list of confirmed speakers is like the who-is-who of the business!
Jamie Marsland shows you on YouTube how to Master the Grid Layouts. Most great-looking websites utilize some sort of grid pattern in their page layout. But while many designers accomplish this using CSS Grid, new WordPress blocks let you do it right in the editor. Marsland shows you how to use Grid and Grid Layout blocks to create a beautiful, functional WordPress site.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In his article “Adding some Colors to the Block Theme“, Bernhard Kau discusses how to best add various color options to a block theme. It’s a deep dive into the process, starting with selecting a naming convention and how they appear in theme.json as well as in the site editor’s color picker. Then Kau describes how to apply colors to various sections of the site via the color picker to maintain brand recognition.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Magdalena Paciorek took a A first look at the Interactivity API, and walks you through an examples code for a Donation Calculator. It’s a great way to take a first deep dive into the Interactivity API with a great instructor from Poland. Paciorek is also a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2024.
Iain Poulson, Advanced Custom Fields, mentioned in their release post for ACF 6.2.8v, that the team started adding support for Block Bindings API and Interactivity API. “From Block Bindings to the Interactivity API, WordPress 6.5 brings new opportunities to use ACF data in core WordPress blocks, and new interactivity experiences to ACF Blocks. Some of these changes features require ACF to add compatibility, and this release begins that work.” Paulson wrote.
Scott Kingsley Clark mentioned in his release post for Pods 3.2v update that the framework supports the new WordPress 6.5 Block Bindings API. “Specify your source as pods/bindings-field and then just pass the same arguments you would pass for a normal [pods] Shortcode or block. This will bind that dynamic output to the block you are working with. ” he wrote.
The recording of this week’s Developer Hours: Building custom blocks with the Interactivity API is available on YouTube. Damon Cook from WP Engine demonstrates how he built a form submission block that leverages the API. This example will teach you how to kick-start a custom interactive block using the Create Block package, use directives to assign critical attributes to your HTML markup, create the store, and hook up the client-side JavaScript. The final plugin is also available on GitHub
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
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