New Blocks, Interactivity Router API, WordCamp US Schedule, and more—Weekend Edition 337

Hi there!

With the updates of the last few weeks, there appears to be some increased excitement ahead of the next major WordPress release on December 2, 2025. The planning has been done. The announcement of the release squad is imminent.

Did you get a chance to read through the Roadmap to 6.9 post? It’s challenging to pick the most exciting features and updates, be it the DataViews or the Site Editor improvements or better template handling… What is it that you are most excited about?

ICYMI: WordCamp US has published the schedule for the four-day event. Check it out!. Ray Morey has more details.

Have a splendid weekend ahead, until the next time. 👋

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Table of Contents

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Gutenberg 21.4 RC1 is available for testing. It seems the team is almost back to last year’s numbers of PRs merged per release.

A brief look at the changelog, and it’s brimming with DataViews updates. 🎉

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John Blackbourn announced the Maintenance Releases for WordPress branches 4.7 to 6.7 and wrote: “Following on from the WordPress 6.8.2 maintenance release last month, the included update to the root security certificate bundle has been backported to all branches back to 4.7. This ensures that when your site performs server-side HTTP requests, the most up-to-date information about trusted security certificates is used.”

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An interesting discussion is happening among contributors regarding which new blocks should be added to the editors if any. For a long time there was strong hesitation to add more blocks beyond the basic ones already available, and users were pointed to the many plugin options. There appears to be a some movement now.

You can read more in this Gutenberg issue, published by Matias Ventura, lead architect of the Gutenberg projects. New block additions for the Block Library. After being discussed also in this week’s Core Dev Chat on Slack, you’ll find a plethora of opinions in the comments. There are quite a few aspects to consider before contributors move ahead. Well, we all need sliders, tabs , accordions, icons, breadcrumbs, and mega menus to create awesome themes and sites. We might be ok pushing the MathML, marquee, time to read, pop-up dialog and stretchy text into the plugin space. What do you think? Let your ideas be known and comment.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In his post Migrating Legacy WordPress Content to the Block Editor: A Real-World Case Study, Elliot Richmond shares his experience, from planning to pitfalls. The post is a practical look at what it takes to bring old content into the modern editor. Richmond demonstrates the technical implementation for transforming 15+ widget types, managing edge cases, and processing 200+ property listings with galleries while maintaining functionality and performance. He describes his content analysis and mapping, the pattern-based architecture with placeholder replacement, batch processing techniques, and handling complex metadata transformations.

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Nagir Seghir published a Developer Advisory: Changes to session management and cron jobs in WooCommerce 10.1. Review your plugins if

• it changes how long user sessions last,
• uses woocommerce_persistent_cart from user data, or
• works with WooCommerce background jobs.

Test with WooCommerce 10.1 before the August 11 launch. Check status logs for session warnings. Update code since logged-in user session storage is changing from usermeta to session table only.

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EventKoi, the new event management plugin on the block mentioned in the previous newsletter editions, just announced the release of a free version. You can download it from the pricing section.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

In his latest tutorial, Carlo Daniele, at Kinsta, explains how to hack Gutenberg blocks with style variations and block variations. He demonstrates creating an animated Polaroid effect for the Image block, covering the differences between these features : Style Variations change appearance with CSS, while Block Variations create preconfigured block versions. The tutorial includes setting up a development environment, building a complete “Image Hacker” plugin, and addressing compatibility issues with WordPress’s lightbox feature. It’s a great tutorial to level up your block customization skills.

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If you need a shorter version of how to create block styles, Ryan Welcher shows you How to make a custom block style in minutes! on YouTube.

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If you are eager to learn more ways to add block style variations to your theme or plugin you can read through the complete developer guide. “Mastering Custom Block Styles in WordPress: 6 Methods for Theme and Plugin Developers” by yours truly.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Ronald Huereca has written a detailed guide on How to Generate a Block Manifest to Improve Block Performance. You’ll learn what they are and how to effectively use them in your block plugin. In this comprehensive resource, Huereca not only explains the technical aspects of block manifests but also shares best practices for implementation, ensuring that you can optimize your plugins for better performance.

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Juliette Reinders Folmer released v3.2 of the WordPress Coding Standards, PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) to enforce WordPress coding conventions. This release adds stricter meta usage checks, new sniffs for heredoc, better PHP 8.1+ callable support, expanded deprecated feature detection to WP 6.8.1, improved documentation, higher PHPCS requirements, and various optimizations. These help developers ensure cleaner, more up-to-date, and future-proof code.

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In his latest live stream, Ryan Welcher took a Deep Dive in explaining WordPress Interactivity API Router. He looked at the WordPress Interactivity API and how its routing system works. He walked through the @wordpress/interactivity-router package and showed how to use its front-end routing features. This is useful if you’re working on custom blocks or interactive themes. He covered how the Interactivity API functions, what the routing package does, and how you can apply it in your own WordPress projects.

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In his latest livestream, JuanMa Garrido explored how to test WordPress PHP code with PHPUnit. You can follow along as he spun up the Docker-powered wp-env test stack, created WordPress-standards-compliant unit tests, used TDD for clean architecture, and wired everything into CI pipelines—so your plugins and themes stay stable, refactor-ready, and bug-free.

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.

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For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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Featured Image: Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash

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