Hello,
We are a few days away from WordPress 6.6 version hitting a WordPress instance near you. The latest WordPress 6.6 RC3 was released earlier this week. By now most of your testing should be done. Or you wait a few weeks before upgrading. On the Developer Blog What’s new for Developers (July 2024), help you sort through all new features and updates coming to WordPress.
Contributors are working on what next for Gutenberg, and there will be another Hallway Hangout on August 15, 2024, at 15:00 UTC / 9 am EDT to discuss what could be on the Roadmap for 6.7 and beyond.
Exploring my hometown anew is a special treat for us; finding new Restaurants, hanging out in beer gardens and café’s with friends, shopping at farmers market, walking guided tours, and visiting art exhibitions in one of the seven art museums. It is wonderful to play tourist for a while. The next couple of weeks, I will write from my parent’s hometown, outside of Munich.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #128 – Gutenberg 22.7 Version and Dev Notes for 7.0 with special guest Maggie Cabrera
Learn.WordPress updates
The training team started publishing their Learning Pathways courses.
Beginner WordPress User is a course for WordPress users to learn more about the content management system that houses their content. It holds 25 lessons that users can tackle one at a time, or in single sessions, if they are eager to learn something very specific, for instance, how to use, the Media Library or about the difference between post and pages.
If you design sites for clients, you can guide your clients to a single lesson on the official WordPress site with videos on the official WordPress YouTube channel, that doesn’t have any advertising nor any other uncontrolled suggested videos.
The next set of Lessons are for an Intermediate WordPress User. This one lets learners “delve into advanced features, fine-tune site customization and implement effective content strategies.” It comprises 37 lessons, also all with individual links, for instance: Using the style book or Uncovering the Cover block
Developer Courses
For aspiring WordPress Developers the training team also released the first course. In 59 Lessons, the Beginner WordPress Developer “course provides an extensive overview of the basics of almost every development topic relevant to WordPress. While it is geared toward first-time developers, there’s enough information available that it’s worthwhile for veterans in the community to learn something new”, wrote Justin Tadlock in What’s new for Developers (July 2024)
On Learn. WordPress site, there are other developer related courses available which might be an overlap with the current work. They are more deep dives into certain topics.
- Introduction to Block Development: Build your first custom block
- Using the WordPress Data Layer
- A Developer’s Guide to Block Themes – Part 1
- A Developers Guide to Block Themes – Part 2
- Develop Your First Low-Code Block Theme
- Converting a Shortcode to a Block
- Introduction to developing with the WordPress REST API
Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Wes Theron chatted about the Learning Pathways releases on the latest episode of the WP Briefing podcast: Episode 83: Learning Pathways
Upcoming events
July 23, 2024 15:00 UTC / 9 am EDT Developer Hours: Do you really need a custom block? Let’s explore alternatives. JuanMa Garrido and Nick Diego will explore several scenarios often addressed with custom blocks and discuss alternative approaches, especially those that leverage block patterns and Editor extensions. Key highlights include:
- How to create overrides in synced patterns
- How to add new functionality to core blocks
- How to use content-only editing and the allowedBlocks attribute in patterns
- How to integrate block bindings and block variations
- How to effectively use block locking and naming
July 24, 2024 18:00 UTC / 2 pm EDT What’s new in WordPress 6.6? with Bud Kraus and Laura Adamonis. You will see demonstration of the main features of this new version: Here are the main features that will be demonstrated during this prevention: Synced Pattern overrides, the Grid Block, an improved way to layout pages and negative margins. All part of the new and improved user experiences in the site editor and more.
July 19, 2024, Stellar Spark Conference, a free online WordPress event! The lineup of speaker promises interesting, inclusive and innovative talks. It starts at 9 am EDT with a keynote with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Among others, you can listen to Tammie Lister, Bet Hannon, Bud Kraus, David Wolfpas and Lindsey Miller.
July 30, 2024 WordSesh produced by Brian Richards is back. It’s a free online event with eight sessions across three live broadcasts in three time zones. Speakers announced so far include Alex Thomas (Defiant), Daniel Bachhuber (Automattic), Kimberly Lipari (Valet), and Piccia Neri (UX and accessible design lead)
Save the date:
August 27, 2024 15:00 UTC /9 am EDT: Developer Hours: Building themes with the Create Block Theme plugin with Tammie Lister. In this session, you will explore how this plugin enhances WordPress theme development. You also learn to create custom themes, utilize the speed boost, define different types of themes, and streamline your theme creation process all the way to exporting the theme.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Jamie Marsland published the recording of his talk at WordCamp Europe on YouTube: Master WordPress Block Themes: 3 Essential Principles for Beginners. He shows you how Blocks, Templates, and Styles can transform your website design with their simplicity and flexibility.
Nithin Sreeraj at WP Content, takes you along WordPress 6.6 and its expected new features and changes and explains in short paragraphs why those features and changes are important for you and your customers.
Mike McAlister announced the update of the Ollie Pro pattern browser just got a huge boost. To help you quickly browse the massive pattern collection, served from a cloud app, the updated increases load performance for these patterns seamless into the WordPress block editor. McAlister shared some technical details of the refactoring.
- This announcement comes days after the public roll-out of Ollie Pro,
- Rae Morey at The Repository covered it comprehensively.
- Jamie Marsland will interview Mike McAlister on Monday on his live stream
One of the newest Block theme in the WordPress Repository is My Menu by Automattic. It “is a simple theme designed to facilitate restaurant owners’ site-building experiences. It is clean, direct, and customizable. Test the cool style variations that have been added to the theme.”
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Jessica Lyschik asked contributors and users on What would you like to see in the next default WordPress theme? The next theme will be Twenty-Twenty-Five and is part of the next major WordPress version, to come out in mid-November. To be more specific, she asked:
- What types of sites do you want to create with the theme?
- What problems do you need the theme to solve to be able to create these sites?
- Is there an existing feature that you want the theme to support?
In his latest post, Brian Coords asked Will WordPress 6.6 have components? After outlining his expectations on flexibility, Coords reflects on how Section Styles and Sync Pattern overrides fit into the ideas of a design system.
The summary of this week’s Hallway Hangout is now available on the Make Core Blog: Recap Hallway Hangout: Section styles and other block style variation updates “Attendees chatted about cool new features and handy tips for styling sections in WordPress 6.6. They also swapped stories and ideas on how to handle theme styles with section styles. The group shared their experiences and brainstormed ways to make pattern management and theme building in Gutenberg better.”
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In this week’s Developer Hours: Editor unification and extensibility in WordPress 6.6, Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego discussed how the more unified slots and extensibility APIs are unified in the @wordpress/editor package global variable, simplifying the integration of extensions across editors for developers. The user interface is also becoming more standardized.
WordPress Playground
Alex Kirk has created a WordPress Playground Step Library. To learn more about the thoughts behind it and how to use it, he also wrote a blog post about how to Build a Playground Blueprint with a Drag and Drop UI.
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