Howdy,
If you celebrate it: Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the weekend with your family and friends.
It’s the first time in over twenty years, when Thanksgiving was just another Thursday in our workweek. Here we have plenty of bank holidays around Christmas and New Year’s. I am not complaining. It was merely one of those first Living in Munich things. Similar to seeing the first tiny snowflakes when walking down the street and temperatures below 49 °F (ca. 9 °C) during the day. 🥶❄️
Stay warm, my friends.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
November 29, 2023 16:00 UTC
Developer Hours: How to extend core WordPress blocks
Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher will discuss how to extend core WordPress blocks and why this approach can be preferred over creating a custom block.
State of the Word 2023 has a landing page now. Matt Mullenweg’s annual keynote address will take place on December 11 at 15:00 UTC on livestream or in person (in Madrid, Spain)
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Andre Maneiro released Gutenberg 17.1 version. 200 PRs by 55 contributors, 3 of them first timers. The release includes several new enhancements, loads of bug fixes, and continued work on Phase 3 features. Here are the highlights:
- Improvements to accessibility and writing flow
- Design tools: block spacing for Quote block
- Other notable highlights
Isabel Brison and I discussed the latest Gutenberg release, Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout. It was a great chat, hope you enjoy it, too. It is also the last episode of 2023. In a few days, it will become available on your favorite podcast app.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8 with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio
Joen Asmussen posted the Design Share: Nov 6-Nov 17, in which he lists the following work of the WordPress design team:
- Sticky Template in template view
- Dropdown component for menus and other use cases
- Date range picker
- Styles Panel
- Settings for the homepage in the Site editor
Anne McCarthy invites you to the next Hallway Hangout: Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 on January 16, 2024, at 21:00 UTC, when she will talk through some of what’s to come in the next WordPress release with a proposed schedule for March 26th. This is being shared early to help encourage more folks to tune in and to build some excitement for this next release.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Watching the pros is always a fabulous way to learn. Brian Gardner, developer advocate at WP Engine, shows you in his video how to create a page with sidebar template in WordPress. You’ll learn how to add columns, how to use the List View, how to group blocks, and change the blockGap, how to add a custom style and make the sidebar accessible for screen readers by assigning a semantic HTML element to it. From beginning to end, a great tutorial.
In the YouTube video, Pro-Themer builds a WordPress website with Twenty Twenty Four, Maggie Cabrera, co-lead on the default theme development and Dave Smith, JavaScript developer on the open-source project, used the Twenty-Twenty-Four theme to build a fictional business site with core blocks only. And I just learned how to change the template on the home page instead of editing the existing template. The choices are gorgeous.
How to replace the default Blog home template in Twenty-Twenty-Four
- On a fresh installation of WordPress with Twenty-Twenty-Four theme,
- Go to the Site editor,
- Click on the canvas to get into edit mode.
- Make sure you are on the Template tab in the sidebar
- Next to “Blog Home” click on the three-dot menu.
- Select the choice to Replace template.
- When you click on it, a modal opens full screen with all the beautiful choices for the home page you can use.
I also shared the video and some screenshots on X (former Twitter)
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Felix Arntz posted some changes you might want to double-check on in Main query loop handling for block themes in 6.4. In WordPress 6.4, a change has been applied to how the main query loop is being handled for block themes. For singular content, the output of block templates (e.g. single.html or page.html) will be automatically wrapped in the main query loop. This might have ramifications for how your theme works.
If you are keen to learn more about the design and development process for this year’s default theme Twenty-Twenty-Four, Rich Tabor quizzed Beatriz Fiahlo and Maggie Cabrera for his article: Introducing Twenty Twenty-Four, that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at “the most expressive and capable WordPress default theme yet”, alongside WordPress 6.4.
Justin Tadlock just published the new Theme Handbook chapters Getting Started and Core Concepts. While the Getting started section aims at new theme developers, it also provides a resource for seasoned theme developers who are learning how to build block themes for the first time. The meat of the matter is to found in the Core Concepts chapter.
- Theme Structure is a walk-through on how a theme’s files and folders are structured following WordPress standards.
- Main Stylesheet explains the importance of the theme’s
style.cssfile and how to use it. - Custom Functionality shows how to use the theme’s functions file (
functions.php) and how to add more functionality to a theme. - Templates introduces how WordPress’ block templates system works and provides pathways for more in-depth learning.
- Including Assets is a guide on including CSS, JavaScript, images, and more in your themes.
- Global Settings and Styles gives a basic overview of how the
theme.jsonfile works in themes with learning pathways to more detailed articles.
With these two chapters now updated/published, it effectively replaces the old Block Themes chapter. The first five chapters of the handbook are now almost entirely focused on block theming, with classic theming relegated to the Classic Themes chapter. There is still more work to be done (get involved!)!
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor
Nick Diego wrote about Redesigning Developer Resources and a call for testing on the Make Met Blog. This project consists of a new design for the Developer Resources section of WordPress.org, which houses the official Code Reference, Block Editor Handbook, Theme Handbook, and much more. The design effort aims to refresh the aesthetics, convert the site to a block theme, and improve the overall developer experience.
With his newest tutorial, Justin Tadlock helps you Getting started with the Command Palette API. Learn build command to toggle a Discussion panel, open the Experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin and toggle the buttons from icons to text and back to site and post editor.
WordPress Developer are called to help with Exploration to support Modules and Import Maps. Luis Herranz, sponsored contributor by Automattic, posted a call for comments on how you think you should be able to leverage the latest web standards for writing and consuming JavaScript code.
In his latest Twitch stream, Ryan Welcher was Looking at block deprecations. and walks you through the nature of block deprecations for static blocks and starts with a very basic block.
If you don’t know what that means, you can also read up about it in Michael Burridge’s article on the Developer Blog Block deprecation – a tutorial.
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