Howdy,
This week, I started my month-long hiatus from social media. It’s a completely arbitrary timing of my bi-annual ritual. Gutenberg Times post will be shared on LinkedIn and Mastodon, automatically posted using the built-in Jetpack feature. I’ll be back after Thanksgiving Nov 29th for a few weeks before I start my year-end vacation. You might see me posting from Core Days in Rome, Italy, though. I am excited to meet contributors there and post one or two selfies.
Speaking of Rome: it will be my first time there, and I booked a tour of Vatican City at 7am to beat the crowds. I got a few chuckles of disbelieve from hubby and other family members as I am normally not an early riser… I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Have a splendid weekend ahead!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: Voting for WP Awards 2024 is now open, produced by Davinder Singh Kainth. Consider giving your vote to the “Gutenberg Times” in the blog category and to “Gutenberg Changelog” in the podcast category, please. 🤗
PPS: Reminder: November 5th at 17:00 UTC: WordPress 6.7 Highlights and Q & A with Jamie Marsland, Nick Diego and Rich Tabor Live on YouTube.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Nathan Wrigley of WP Builds invited me to start a new podcast series called “At the Core” and to discuss with him what next for WordPress. The first episode arrived on people’s podcast app this week: At The Core with Birgit Pauli-Haack – Episode 1. Wrigley is a master moderator and host. It was a great pleasure being on this show with him. We discussed a heap of information: about WordPress 6.7, WordPress Playground, Gutenberg experiments, and the 2025 default theme. And a lot more. Listen in.
Collaborative Editing: Inline comments
Pooja Bhimani, developer and project manager at Mulidots, together with other core contributors released the first and experimental version for inline commenting to the block editor. Before you can explore it, you need to enable the experiment “Block comments” on the Gutenberg plugin. It will be released with Gutenberg 19.6 next week. You can already take a peak via the Gutenberg Nightly on Playground.
Once enabled, you see an new menu item on the 3-dot-menu from the block toolbar, that opens a box in the sidebar to add your comment. A new icon appears in the toolbar once a comment is associated with a block. Then you can open, edit, delete or reply to the comment or ‘resolve’ the issue. When you click on the canvas, you can view all the comments for this particular post. Using the star on top of the comment sidebar, you can pin the icon to the top of the screen for easy access. You can use comments on pages or posts or any other custom post types. Once the post is published, inline comments are disabled.
As an MVP (minimally viable product) it works very well, apart from a few tiny quirks. Make sure to share your findings on GitHub or in the #outreach channel. The team also provides a list of what’s next for the inline commenting in this GitHub tracking issue
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
On YouTube, Jamie Marsland, teaches you in WordPress Layouts! A Beginner’s Guide, how to master content widths and page widths for stunning layouts. Discover the 4 essential widths: Normal width, Wide content width, Full width and Custom width via Global Styles and learn how your various container blocks adapt to the settings.
At our friends over at WordPress.com, Tanya Thibodeau shared Five Powerful Gutenberg Blocks for Developers to Create Custom Layouts and explained how best to use the Group, Columns, Cover, Spacer and – my new favorite – the Query Loop block. Thibodeau has instructions and demos for each of them.
Justin Tadlock has updated the free X3P0: Breadcrumbs plugin with the option to remove the first breadcrumb. He also added a Markup Style option for selecting between plain HTML, Microdata, and RDFa (default) markup. Developer can also find new hooks that act as extension points.
Rob O’Rourke, principal engineer at HumanMade, introduced Lottie Lite for WordPress animations It’s a lightweight alternative to the Lottie Files plugin and is designed to offer a simpler, more efficient solution for WordPress users. O’Rourke shared in his post the genesis of the project as its key features and how they work. Check out Lottie Lite over on Human Made’s GitHub.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Carolina Nymark, core contributor sponsored by Yoast, and Juanfra Aldasoro are the lead developers for this year’s WordPress default theme, Twenty-Twenty-Five. During this week’s Developer Hours they gave a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the theme. The recording is available on WordPress TV: Developer Hours: Exploring the Twenty Twenty-Five Theme.
They also shared links to dive in:
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In his tutorial, Building Custom Block Theme Templates: A Plugin Developer’s Guide, Ajay D’Souza, walks plugin developer through the process to providing templates to block themes. WordPress 6.7 will come with a new API for this use case, though. However what are plugin developers to do when they want to support older WordPress version, too? D’Souza has you covered. You learn about the nature of block theme templates and how to build a template handler, define your loading methods, and put it all together in an real-life examples.
ICYMI: The Recap: Hallway Hangout DataViews and DataForm Components is now available with the recording, a summary, details, shared resources and a transcript. Riad Benguella, André Maneiro, and I discussed with Nick Diego the evolution and future of DataViews and DataForms in WordPress. The overall focus of the demonstration was to showcase the current capabilities of DataViews and DataForm, as well as the plans for future extensibility and integration with the broader WordPress admin experience. The recording is available on YouTube
In Justin Tadlock‘s latest tutorial on the WordPress Developer blog, Getting and setting Block Binding values in the Editor, he walks you through making the data from your custom binding sources appear in the Editor and also letting users edit that data from the connected blocks.
This week in WordPress Playground
WordPress Playground is an exciting new platform that is the basis of a few features and tools around WordPress. Recently, it received a new, much more intuitive interface, that looks familiar to site editor users. You can learn more about this change from the new Make Blog of the Playground team. Running Multiple Playgrounds with WordPress Playground by Brandon Payton.
New Blueprints in the Gallery
Jonathan Bossenger, developer educator on the WordPress training team, added a blueprint to load the Create Block Theme plugin automatically to the next Playground instance. That way you can instantly start working on a new theme. Try it out.
Alex Kirk, web developer from Vienna, added a blueprint to turn Playground into a feed reader with the Friends Plugin. Using it allows you to read feeds from the web in Playground, and even via ActivityPub. Start reading (Add the Gutenberg Times via it’s feed URL https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed)
Jason Bahl, developer of WPGraphQL, didn’t wait long to add a blueprint that loads WordPress with WPGraphQL active and defaults to the WPGraphQL IDE page to allow users to test GraphQL queries and explore the GraphQL Schema.
There are a few other blueprints for Playground are waiting to be discovered in the Blueprint Gallery. You can browse the list on GitHub or on any new Playground instance.
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