Howdy,
Work on the next major WordPress release, 6.5 is in full swing. Two more Gutenberg plugin releases and Beta 1 will be upon us. You’ll find more information below, including additional resources. It’s the first release since 6.0 that I won’t be on the release squad, by choice. I will, of course, support it anyway I can.
More about block editor, themes, plugins and tutorials, as always, below.
Wishing everyone in the Northern Hemisphere to stay warm and a wonderful weekend for all of us.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
PS for WordCamp Attendees:
If you’d like to meet with me, feel free to use my Calendly link to my public calendar to schedule a get-together. I’ll be in Taipei, Taiwan a couple of days early in will scout out some meeting locations.
My friend and college Ryan Welcher will also be in Taipei, Taiwan. If you want to meet with him as well, you can use his Calendly link to schedule a meeting
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.5
Hector Prieto, co-release coordinator, posted the full release squad for WordPress 6.5: WordPress 6.5 release squad formation – a new role is Default Themes lead, suggested by Carolina Nymark, who will also lead the first time around. In her suggestion, she mentioned that it would be great to make sure default themes bundled with WordPress are all compatible with the improvements and features of the Block editor. The abbreviated release schedule:
- Feb 13, 2024, Beta 1 – Gutenberg 17.7 will be the last version for features in WordPress 6.5
- March 5, 2024, Release Candidate 1 with Fieldguide and Dev Notes deadline
- March 26, 2024, Final Release
From the Dev Chat Summary by Abha Thakor
“Note update on the Font Library API design proposal, with a particular note for REST API folks to view as per this comment. The navigation overlay has been punted from the 6.5 roadmap by the contributors working on this feature.”
More resources:
- WordPress 6.5 Development Cycle Full schedule and release squad
- Early Opportunities to Test WordPress 6.5
- Roadmap to 6.5
- WordPress 6.5 Editor Tasks board
Anne McCarthy invited contributors to a Hallway Hangout to explore WordPress 6.5 at its current stage and posted a Recap with links and video recording. You learn more about the upcoming Data views, the new Drag and Drop features in the editor, as well as the work behind the Pattern Overrides (former partially synched patterns) and the improved Style revision screens. Demos by Anne McCarthy, Isabel Brison and Saxon Fletcher.
If you want to dive in a little deeper into the various features, here is your reminder: Anne McCarthy also posted Early Opportunities to Test WordPress 6.5 with clear instructions on what exactly to test, and how to set up a test site for this exercise. All. feedback is welcome, post it either on GitHub or as a comment on the post.
WordPress 6.4.3
Aaron Jorbin, release lead for 6.4.3 just announced the schedule and content for the next minor WordPress release. 6.4.3: An upcoming maintenance release. Final release is scheduled for next week, January 30, 2024.
Gutenberg 17.5
Ben Dwyer managed this week’s Gutenberg plugin release and published What’s new in Gutenberg 17.5? (17 January 2024) . 178 PRs were merged for this release by 45 contributors, two of them first timers. This release is dominated by a lot of foundational work on site editor to allow for feature parity with the post editor and for the Data views, that are still experimental. Dwyer highlighted:
- Editor Unification
- Gallery Block: Random Order Setting
- Post Featured Image: Add a
useFirstImageFromPostattribute. (56573) - Add drag cursor to draggable list items. (57493)
- Font Library: Add a progress bar while uploading font assets. (57463)
Gutenberg 17.5 was also part of the Gutenberg Changelog chat with Carolina Nymark. We discussed block themes, migration to block themes, the new role on the release squad and lots more. It was wonderful to finally catch up again and talk about her fantastic work on fullsiteediting.com and on the themes team for all those years. The episode will drop into 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
Upcoming events
January 23, 2024, at 12:00 UTC. Extensibility Issues Triage meeting We will go over the project board’s columns: Triage, Needs discussion and PR in reviews. It will be a Slack meeting in the #core-editor channel.
January 25, 2024, at 15:30 UTC – Developer Live stream: Reviewing Gutenberg 17.5 Ryan Welcher is also doing a review of Gutenberg 17.5 on Twitch. It’s a live stream, so not prepared slide etc.
Phase 3 Media Meeting: February 7, 2024, at 12:00 UTC, Anthony Burchell wrote: “kick off a round table discussion about some opportunities and challenges ahead in the development of Phase 3. The Media Component Maintainers hope to find areas of focus where contributors can lean in to align efforts with folks working on Phase 3.”
February 8th, 2024 15:00 UTC: There will be a Hallway Hangout to discuss Intrinsic Design and how to use it on real life projects
February 13, 2024, at 16:00 UTC Developer Hours: JavaScript for modern WordPress development
- More events are planned to Learn.WordPress . Here is their schedule of Online Workshops
- If you are looking for a WordCamp or Meetup near you, take a look at the new WordPress events page.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In Doo the Woo Product podcast episode: Gutenberg, the Beginning to the Present, Tammie Lister and Jonathan Wold discuss block editor and WordPress. They cover State of the Word, upcoming changes and what it means to Woo and WordPress as a whole. Learn more about the progress on the WordPress way.
Robert DeVore posted Introducing BoostBox: The 1st WordPress popup builder for the core editor about his journey to push his newest plugin BoostBox over the finish line. It’s available via the WordPress repo.
A user posted in the forum, that it wasn’t clear if he needed to recreate all the menus he used in the classic theme, again to display them on the block theme. The answer is no; however, it’s not as obvious where to find the menu item to make a classic menu available to the block theme navigation block. Here are the instructions and a video. Quick Tip: How to use a classic menu in the navigation block of a block theme
Ana Segota, of Anariel Design, published a new Woo Theme, Fuel, meant for food related businesses. It entails plenty of patterns and color options to style the site of a food store.
John Hughes found four methods on How to Create a Sticky Header in WordPress and in his post he walks you through all of them. Hughes also explains some consideration and best practices for using Sticky headers in the first place.
Pascal Birchler, core contributor sponsored by Google, and Core Co-release lead for WordPress 6.5 experimented with media handling in Gutenberg and WordPress. He centralized all his experiments in the plugin Media Experiments that available on GitHub.
Nathan Wrigley had Birchler on as a guest on the WPTavern Jukebox podcast. #105 – Pascal Birchler on Revolutionizing Image and Video Processing Within WordPress, where they discussed the power of WebAssembly, the future potential for moving desktop activities to the web, and Birchler’s innovative work in image and video processing.
The list of features of the plugin is spectacular, yet all experimental, more proof-of-concept rather than production ready. For some of them, you’ll find short videos on how they work:
- Automatic Poster Generation
- Preview image generation for PDFs
- Converting GIFs to Videos
- Video Muting
- Self Recording
- Optimize Existing Media
- Upload from another device
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
After the revamp of the Theme Handbook to include making block themes, Justin Tadlock posted about the project and what will be next: New Block-Focused Theme Handbook Docs and What’s Coming in 2024.
If you haven’t explored the Theme Handbook lately, the team create five new chapters in 2023:
For 2024, the team is also onboarding new contributors, to do the heavy lifting of creating the Advanced Topics for Themes.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Nathan Schneider posted a tutorial on Extending the New Product Editor with React on the Woo Developer Blog and covered how to create two blocks that enforce minimum and maximum quantity on text inputs.
Brian Coords shared his Thoughts on Version Control for Block Themes and what he thinks could work and make his life as a developer easier.
The recording of the latest Developer Hours is now available. Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher walked attendees through the official Getting Started tutorial of the Block Editor Handbook and explained every step of the journey.
Matt Cohen, engineer lead at Woo Marketplace, published how he built a terms list block for WordPress. He shared his research and approach, as well as his code on GitHub. you learn how to add a custom control to select taxonomies, and his lesson’s learned.
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
