Happy Easter if you celebrate it! 🐰 🐣 The Easter weekend has a total different vibe in Munich as it had in Naples. In Naples, it was just a normal weekend, and you could get groceries over the weekend, and other shopping done. Here it is a four-day weekend with Good Friday and Easter Monday as bank holidays and except for Saturday, almost all shops are closed.
On Thursday, everyone was out grocery shopping for the long weekend. We went to our weekly neighborhood market and were surprised by the long queue in front of every stand. People weren’t deterred by the pouring rain. It took us twice as long to make our purchases then in a normal week. I bet the lines would have been even longer without the rain.
We bought the first white asparagus already, some fish salad and graved lachsforelle from the local trout farmer, vegetable from the local farmers and butter and eggs from the local dairy farmers. At each stand, during the cash payment process you have a little chat with the merchant. I cherish these moments in the non-online, the analog world, that hasn’t changed for centuries. Interpersonal connections are so much richer than anything that can happen online, writes she who has been building websites for 28 years. Anyway. What are your favorite offline every day interactions, you cherish?
Now back to the world of blocks, themes, and plugins.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
This week we expected WordPress 6.5 to land. After further deliberation evaluating late bug fixes, the release team decided to move the release date until after Easter and so committers have enough time to review the code and add some testing. The WordPress 6.5 Release Candidate 4 is now available for testing.
Gutenberg 18.0 plugin version was released. You can read everything about it in the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 18.0? (27 March). As highlight, I pointed out: the newly added sitewide color and typography presets you find in Site Editor > Styles section, you can now use the feature image in a Media + Text block and features images now have support for drop shadows. Furthermore, the Grid layout experiments showed some great progress
Core Contributor, Maggie Cabrera and I chatted about the updates in Gutenberg 18.0, the Community Theme project and the Contributor mentorship program in our recording of the 98th Gutenberg changelog episode. As always, it will arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to any of these services and apps:
Apple Podcasts | CastBox | Google | Podcasts | PocketCasts | Podbean
Podchaser | RSS | Spotify
In his latest, Design Share: Mar 11-Mar 22, Joen Asmussen lists the work of the WordPress Design Team. In this post, you also find the links of design resources for WordPress Figma and GitHub spaces in one place. Asmussen shared about the progress of the Grid layout work, Template vs. page content refinements, Template part and proximity selection, color generation and an 18-minute video with Admin updates with Saxon Fletcher.
In addition,
- progress on synced pattern overrides, a feature that didn’t make into WordPress 6.5,
- contentOnly improvements
- Top bar organization exploration
- Save & publish
- Openverse dark mode
- Blocks page v2 (https://wordpress.org/blocks)
Data-liberation initiative invites developers and product owners to a Hallway Hangout: Data Liberation Discussion and Brainstorm on April 3 at 7 PM UTC don’t worry if you miss it, there will likely be a recording. The topics that might come up are around
- Challenges of migrating from third-party platforms to WordPress
- The good, bad, and ugly of exporting WordPress content
- The potential of interoperability between Block libraries and page builders
- What work will make data liberation, and who should work on it
Upcoming events
April 2, 2024 14:00 UTC WordPress developer live stream: Testing WP Playground Jonathan Bossenger will dive deeply into WordPress Playground and all its different permutations, to see what they are capable of, and whether he could replace his custom local development environment with a version of WordPress Playground.
Learn.WordPress and Bud Kraus will present “What’s New In WordPress 6.5?” via Zoom on Tuesday, April 9 at 19:00 UTC*. He will demonstrate the new features coming to WordPress 6.5, such as Font Management Revisions for Styles and templates, and the new data view screens coming to the Site Editor.
Also, April 9, 2024, at 14:00 UTC*1, Nick Diego and Damon Cook invite you to the next Developer Hours: Building custom blocks with the Interactivity API. Damon Cook from WP Engine will demonstrate 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.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
If you are looking for a block-based way to create form, Matthias Kittsteiner has the solution as the Form Block plugin. It comes with a Form creation Wizard, you can use unlimited fields and various field types, comes with honeypot implementation, client and server-side validation and built on consent check. A pro-version is also available at Form Block Pro
Yay Commerce, a long-time WooCommerce extender company, just published a set of blocks as Brandy Blocks in the WordPress Repository, primarily a testimonial block and a 3-column pricing table block.
Rafal Tomal reflected in his post Why I’m Excited About WordPress Again on his journey to Webflow as a site building tool and back and his experience with the Site editor and building the new premium block theme Rockbase. “The full site editor aligns with the contemporary approach to web design, moving away from viewing websites as static, brochure-like pages. Instead, websites are envisioned as dynamic design systems, and the modern WordPress theme embodies this system.” Tomal wrote.
David Artiss, customer success lead for WordPress VIP, is using the new Footnotes block and migrated earlier content. And he shared how he did it: Adding Footnotes in the WordPress block editor
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Theme shop Blockify released a Pattern Manager in the WordPress plugin repository. It helps “you create and edit patterns for WordPress block themes. It automatically exports patterns on save as PHP files to the active themes patterns directory.”
In the #outreach channel, Anne McCarthy posted a question for theme developer and users:
Share your thoughts on what the block theme tag should be in the theme repo
In this trac issue https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7524 , it’s proposed to update the
Anne McCarty #outreachfull site editingtag for block themes. What makes the most sense to you all to include? If folks can take some time to chime in, I’d appreciate it. I flagged twice now for #core-themes, and I am hoping to get more voices in the mix.
Via the WP Slack #outreach channel, theme builders were invited to discuss their workflows and their challenges in a Hallway Hangout. Here the Recap Hallway Hangout: Using Site editor in production for client sites. Hot topics, Navigation Block, Theme.json editor and the implementation of patterns, templates and Global styles between database and file system.
In his blog post, Composing with Patterns, Rich Tabor how patterns are pre-made designs that you can add to your website’s posts and pages. He explains that patterns make it quicker to build nice-looking pages. They also help keep the look of the website the same all over, which is good for people visiting your site. Rich thinks that as people use patterns more and tell WordPress what they like, patterns will get even better and make WordPress easier to use.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Bernie Reiter and Nick Diego took participants of the Developer Hours on the journey exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5. In addition to covering the basics, they looked at practical examples that you can implement in your projects.
Brian Coords shows you in his latest video on YouTube how he uses Block Variations with the Block Bindings API and how you can offer a “no-code” experience for your users with Block Variations. Coords share his code via GitHub
In his latest live stream, Ryan Welcher explored Using Playground to preview plugins, and building a blueprint to show off some features of his Advanced Query Loop plugin. He walks through the process of how to set up a blueprint for the WordPress plugin repository, and then how to create demo content and integrate them into a blueprint as well.
Jonathan Bossenger explains the difference between Static and Dynamic Blocks, for the series of Introduction to Block development. In this video, Bossenger looks at what the difference is between static and dynamic blocks, how to determine which is right for your needs, and the different approaches for development.
If you rather learn by reading than by watching, Joni Halabi, published an article covering a similar topic: Static vs. dynamic blocks: What’s the difference? on the WordPress Developer Blog.
🗞️ Speaking of Developer Blog: This week saw three new articles published;
Exploring the Block Hooks API in WordPress 6.5 by Nick Diego. The Block Hooks API is an extensibility mechanism that allows you to dynamically insert blocks into block themes. Learn how to use the API in your projects in this comprehensive overview.
How to use WordPress React components for plugin pages by Robert Mészáros. Learn how to create a settings page with multiple controls using WordPress React components for a plugin that displays an announcement bar on the front end.
How to work effectively with the useSelect hook by Jarda Snajdr. This article is about the useSelect React hook from the @wordpress/data library. It offers several tips and tricks on how to use it in the most efficient way possible, and answers many subtle questions about how it really works.
If you don’t want to miss any new posts on the Developer blog, head on over there and subscribe via email.
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
