Howdy,
Wishing you and yours a prosperous, happy and healthy 2024, with a lot of success, lots of laughter and a lot of love. 🤗
After two weeks of vacation, it’s been inspiring to catch up. Many developers, freelancers, and site builders use the downtime around the holidays to work on their side projects or sit down to write about their learnings. What was your side or writing project? I want to know!
For me, it meant moving the Gutenberg Times to a new hosting space. I feared it to be difficult going from a very opinionated hosting environment to Pressable. I was pleasantly surprised how, with the help of customer service, we got it done in a matter of minutes. What took the longest was the propagation of the DNS server changes over the Internet, that took roughly an hour. The main reasons for the switch was that using WordPress Playground with Gutenberg Nightly didn’t work at the old host. After testing various configuration also on other hosting spaces, I am excited that it worked out of the box on Pressable.
Now, let’s see what others published in the WordPress editor space in the past three weeks.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: The sixth anniversary of the start of Gutenberg Times is coming up this week, and I just wanted to say, it has been a great pleasure curating all the things around Gutenberg for you. So glad you are here with me.
Updates on Gutenberg Times
🆕 As mentioned above, you can now use the Gutenberg Nightly plugin built with WordPress Playground and land right in the site editor screen. If you are interested in the blueprint, it’s available here
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Anne McCarthy invites you to Leap into 2024 with these Site Editor Tools and gives you a list of features and tools, that might have slipped your mind, or you haven’t had a chance to explore. This is an excellent run-down of use cases and update on the current state of the site editor. Learn more about the Command Palette, the Style Book, styling short-cuts, Distraction-free mode, Patterns, and the List view.
Once you are ready to dive deeper into any of the topics, the WordPress Developer Blog covered quite a few topics this year. Justin Tadlock published 2023 Year in Review, citing some numbers and listing all the articles in a sorted way. It’s the best way to catch-up on things you might have missed. And if you don’t want to miss any more articles on the Developer blog, it’s time to subscribe to it. Scroll down on any post of page and enter your email address 🙂 Or subscribe to the RSS feed with your favorite reader.
Gutenberg plugin releases
In his post What’s new in Gutenberg 17.3? (20 December),release lead Madhu Dollu, highlighted:
- Summary of changes in global styles revision history
- Updated preferences panel
- Integration of Gravatar Service for Social Icons
In total, the release included 184 merged PRs by 56 contributors, 6 of them contributed for the first time. Congratulations to the team.
On January 3rd, 2024, Gutenberg 17.4 was released. What’s new in Gutenberg 17.4? (03 January). As release lead, I highlighted the following features:
- Data Views: List of Templates stable
- Style revisions: Stylebook integration and pagination
- Background Images: size and repeat controls.
- List View: Right click access to Block Setting
Sarah Norris joined me on the recording for the Gutenberg Changelog episode 94, and it was a lovely chat about the past three Gutenberg plugin releases and the upcoming roadmap for WordPress 6.5.
We also covered the process of how to migrate a site from a classic theme to a block theme, something, that’s on my to-do list for the Gutenberg Times in the upcoming weeks. Spoiler: The plugin Health Check & Troubleshooting and Create a Block Theme will play big roles. Did you move a site from a classic theme to a block theme? How did you go about it, and what were the greatest challenges? Please let us know in the comments or email me, pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.
The podcast episode will drop in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
HumanMade and BigBite invite you to a WordPress for Enterprise event on January 18th, 2024 to Hear from the global brands doing incredible things with WordPress. It’ll start at 16:00 UTC and will take until about 21:00 UTC “Over the course of 6 sessions, we’ll be sharing the stories behind these amazing projects. Expect case studies, deep dives, and behind-the-scenes access on topics such as security, performance, editorial optimization, AI, and how open source is making a difference in the enterprise setting.” with speaker such as Adam Silverstein, Google, Brian Alvey, WordPress VIP, or Luke Sikkema, The Times, and a few more.
In her post joyful flow state, Anne McCarthy shares her creative process and musing about creating block patterns for the Museum of Block Art. “Using the same software I spend my days toiling over in a creative, unserious way expands my relationship to the work, both energy and perspective wise.” she wrote.
Munir Kamal did some research and shares with the world in this post: Discover the Best Block Slider Plugins for WordPress. A block that has been missing from the core blocks, several plugins offer their variation of the slider. It’s not always the best user experience and there is a school of web developer who like to dissuade site owners from using sliders and even built a slider site with some good reasons why you shouldn’t use a carousel, which is just another word for slider.
Lifter LMS updated their documentation and showcase their Lifter LMS Blocks with videos and instructions on how to use them. Now one of the leading Learning Management systems, built on top of WordPress, enters the next product phase and allows for faster content creation with the already known Block interface built into WordPress.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
For the Developer Hours in December, Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher selected the topic: Modern WordPress development with the wp-scripts package. The recording is available on YouTube, and they shared the mentioned resources as a Google Doc. They wrote: “We explored how the wp-scripts package has become an essential tool for modern WordPress development, such as when building blocks and block themes. If you are looking to streamline your development process, harness the power of build tools, and simplify tasks such as checking for compliance with WordPress coding standards, this session recording is for you.”
You are invited to the January Developers Hours for January 16th, 2024 at 15:00 UTC (10 am EDT) to Build your first WordPress block. In this online event, you’ll be on a walk-through the new tutorial in the Block editor handbook, and you will also learn more about the block development examples on GitHub.
Jonathan Desrosiers informed developers about Updating WordPress to use more modern versions of Node.js/npm: Part 2.
In his tutorial, Extending plugins using custom SlotFills, Ryan Welcher explains how you can use custom SlotFills to extend both an internal and external codebase.
Jonathan Bossenger experimented with the Interactivity API and used WordPress as a game development platform. It’s a fun game, where the logos of other web development platform chase after the WordPress logo. I lasted 25 seconds. How long did you last? “There is still a lot of work to be done to turn this into a working game, but I’m excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned because I can see this turning into a bit of a series of posts”. Bossenger wrote. If you would rather not wait so long, you can take a sneak peek at the code via the GitHub repository: WP-Interactive Game.
Daniel Post created a two-part tutorial on Creating a WordPress options page using React and Gutenberg. “This guide is primarily aimed at people who have some WordPress experience but have never tried “the React way”, but it should be useful for anyone trying to get into into modern WordPress development.” It’s a very thorough tutorial. Post explains all the basic pieces other tutorials might assume prior knowledge of, and steps through almost every line of the code, in PHP as well as in JavaScript, he uses to build this example.
On YouTube, Ryan Welcher posted his latest stream in the Block Developer Cookbook series, Block Developer Cookbook Recipe: Command Palette. “In this flavorful cooking demonstration, initially aired on November 16, we whip up a special culinary command for the all-new Command Palette. Our goal? To deftly toggle the custom fields meta box in the post editor, just like a chef skillfully adjusting the seasoning levels in a signature dish. Let’s embark on this culinary coding adventure together!” he wrote.
Nyasha Green just published her WordPress: Introduction to Custom Block Building on the LinkedIn Learning Network. The course starts with a brief introduction to the Block editor and how to add blocks to a post’s canvas and explain block attributes. In the second module you’ll learn to set up your local environment with LocalWP, 2021 default theme and Node.js. In the chapter Custom Blocks without code, Green explains how to create patterns and synched patterns, and you’ll learn about the Pattern Directory. The fourth chapter, Green, covers Custom Block Building with code, and introduces the learner to the create-block scaffolding tool. The topic covers creating a card with three blocks and some InnerBlocks rules and how to modify the styles for the custom block. It’s a great starting point. The LinkedIn Learning space is a subscription-based learning environment, but you can use a free trial for the first month.
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