Howdy,
it’s great to be home again! How are you?
We are coming up to the end of the year, and it’s time for the annual State of the Word (SOTW). Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, presents the accomplishments and challenges of the outgoing year and of what’s to come for next year to the WordPress open-source project.
The event will be live-streamed from New York, on Tuesday, December 14th, at at 5 pm ET – 22:00 UTC. On the SOTW announcement page, you can also find a list of watch parties from around the world, some in-person, some virtual.
After the two-hour event, the Post Status team will hold a live event on Twitter Spaces to discuss SOTW. I’ll be there to listen in.
Now, let’s catch up on last week’s Gutenberg news!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Gutenberg Plugin Version 12.1
The new plugin version came out Wednesday Dec 8th, 2021, with plenty of bug fixes that made it also into WordPress 5.9 Beta 2.
Riad Benguella published the release notes: What’s new in Gutenberg 12.1 ( 8 December)
Justin Tadlock took it for a spin. You can read his take in Gutenberg 12.1 Fixes Block Appender Layout Shift, Adds Template List Views, and Enhances Global Styles. And Congratulations to the WPTavern team to the new Site design, released together with the WordPress Special Projects team at Automattic.
Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I discussed the new Gutenberg version in our episode 57 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Many links in the show notes.
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Plugins and other tools for the Block Editor.
The agency, 10up published their Publisher Media Kit Page plugin that created pre-configured media pages using Block Patterns. It works with Newspack and the Twenty-Twenty-one default theme.
Justin Tadlock gave it a whirl. Here is his post: 10up Releases the Publisher Media Kit WordPress Plugin
The number of “Full-site Editing” Themes in the WordPress repository increased to 31 this week. The newest Theme is Videomaker by the designers at Automattic. It’s aimed at film directors and video creators. Justin Tadlock posted this review: Videomaker Block Theme Targets Film Directors and Video Creators
In Cwicly Gutenberg Toolkit: A New Full Site Editing Solution, David McCan reviews the kit that includes a block-based theme, a Gutenberg blocks add-on, and Advanced Custom Fields Pro. McCan includes a video walk-through of this new tool.
The team of Trewknowledge wrote The Future is Coming, Now. Watch and Learn About WordPress 5.9 Anticipated Features and summarizes the most important features coming to a WordPress instance near you in January 2022.
In his article, Custom Single Post Layouts with WordPress Gutenberg, Jamie Marsland covers the process on how to build a custom layout for your single posts using the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor and Full Site Editing. He covers the dynamic post blocks and how to use the template editor.
Building Custom Blocks and Features
This week, Ryan Welcher showed us how to create a Meme Block on his live stream. The code is available on GitHub.
Phil Sola and James Koussertari are the WPBros and started their YouTube Channel with episodes covering Gutenberg Block Development. The first four episodes are already available. Check them out.
Creating Block Themes
Rich Tabor has been a giant fan of Block Patterns. This week, he wrote a tutorial on Building WordPress Block Themes with the New Gutenberg Pattern Block.
The Pattern block renders a pattern — typically used within a template from a block theme. The main advantage is that it allows for translatable templates in themes.
David Gwyer has been working on a Block Theme Generator and the first version is already online. It offers HTML form and some tools to select all the settings you would want to configure for your theme in the theme.json file, assembles it and lets you download the file to add to your theme. It’s a first version, but already quite nifty. I, for one, had great fun playing around with the color pickers for all kind of features.
On a side note, Ryan Welcher is also working on creating a theme.json generating tool within the block editor. You can watch the progress on this GitHub repository.
Jeff Ong and Jason Crist picked 4 topics to highlight in the post Gutenberg + Themes: Week of Dec 5.
- New Color Picker is coming to Gutenberg
- There is an ongoing discussion on how best to add global padding, and still allow for full-width alignment. Check out the ideas that are tested.
- Opt into block styles via theme.json. This is to allow wp-block-styles support via theme.jscon.
- Contrary to other styling, it seems Global link styles override block-level styles. Chime in on the issue.
I am a big fan of the digest form of their weekly round-up post.
As always, the weekly round up also lists Overview issues for various feature in the works, like the Typography Tools, the Global Styles interface, the Default theme and a few more items.
And lastly you find a list of General Resources to documentation and tutorial.
Block Themes were also a topic for the Ask the Bartender column at the WPTavern: Justin Tadlock answered the question: Is There a Starter for Building Block Themes?
Upcoming WordPress Events
December 13, Monday 1pm ET / 6pm UTC
WordPress Trends to Watch in 2022
Discussion with Paul Lacey, Ronald Gijsel, Cami MacNamara, and Anne McCarthy.
They’ll share ideas about emerging trends beyond WordPress 5.9 for:
- Full Site Editing
- Block Themes
- Where Gutenberg goes from here
- Performance improvements and more
RSVP now to attend or catch the replay (GoDaddy Pro Online)
Post Status is not the only team getting the hang of Twitter Spaces. Ellen Bauer, friend of Gutenberg Times and co-founder of Elma Studio, also started informal audio-only discussion. Bauer shared her schedule for the next few weeks:
- 16 Dec, Thursday, 6pm UTC / 1pm ET
Thoughts on Matt’s ‘State of the Word’ - 22 Dec, Wednesday, 9am UTC / 4am ET,
How to prepare for FSE & the WP5.9 release - 30 Dec, Thursday, 6pm UTC / 1pm ET,
Casual End of 2021 WordPress recap/chat
Follow Ellen Bauer on Twitter to get the links to the Twitter Spaces events.
December Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at on 10:00 AM ET / 15:00 UTC
Kyle Van Deusen will host a live event and show people interested in building blocks how he rebuilt the WaveApps homepage with his favorite block packages, He will answer viewer questions. Add the event to your calendar
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events site, you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Events, around the world, including WordCamps, WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
