Howdy,
Greetings from WordCamp Leipzig! I didn’t get much time to work on this week’s edition, but I didn’t take a break either as I found some great articles, videos and tutorial, I wanted you to know about right away.
WordCamp Leipzig was a great no-frills WordCamp. I arrived after a workday on Friday night, spend Saturday with my German WordPress community, talked to almost every attendee during the day, and I am on my home on Saturday night. I had a good time and will be back next year. As a side note: It’s been a while since I saw a Social Wall at a WordCamp.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
WordCamp Asia Videos are available now on YouTube. Here is a list of Block related talks you might be interested in.
- The elements of WordPress with Tammie Lister
- How to achieve an efficient workflow with the Site Editor with Benjamin Intal, Stackable
The team organizing WordCamp Europe just published the presentation schedule for Torino. There are considerably more talks on the technical side and quite a few talks and workshops on block and block theme development.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Gutenberg 18.2 RC is available now for testing, outstanding new features: Side-wide Background image tools, and Starter Pattern for Page in the Site Editor and many updates on Data Views. The final release will be on April 24.
📣 Reminder: Next Hallway Hangout on what’s next in Gutenberg to learn about some ongoing projects on April 24 at 23:00 UTC / 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT.
Aaron Jorbin announced the schedule for WordPress 6.5.3: An upcoming maintenance release to come out on May 7, 2024, with RC 1 a few days earlier.
Felix Arntz published an article on How WordPress Is Creating a Faster Web in which he lists a few of performance enhancing features that made it into WordPress in the last few releases: faster loading of images, a faster translations engines, and improvements to the block editor resulted in 5x faster typing processing. What’s next from the performance team, you ask? Well, you need to read the article. haha.
Nick Diego announced that the Pattern Directory gets a refresh and is now powered by blocks. “Over the past few weeks, the Meta team has been working on a new theme for the Pattern Directory as part of a broader effort to establish a consistent design language across WordPress.org. The updated site launched today. Congratulations to everyone involved in this effort.” Diego wrote.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Md. Nahidul Islam from Bangladesh release the newest single block plugin in the WordPress repository: Responsive Pro & Con Block. It sports four different designs and lets you as many items on your pro and con list.
Sunita Rai explains in her video on YouTube How to Add Custom Fonts to WordPress? (Without a Plugin). “If you’ve been looking to enhance the look and feel of your website, using custom fonts is a great way to do it.” Rai wrote. She covers, upgraded to WordPress 6.5 , where to find the Font Manager, how to install Google fonts or Custom fonts, and how to select the new fonts for the site design.
Anders Noren has a new free WordPress theme out on the repository! It’s called Vermeer, and it’s a profile theme with an eye-catching marquee across the top of the screen. The marquee is automatically disabled for visitors with their system settings set to reduce motion. Vermeer includes 13 different color schemes. Change fonts and colors in seconds with WordPress built-in design tools. WordPress 6.5 allows you to choose from all fonts on Google Fonts out of the box.
Rich Tabor, product designer at Automattic, published the first issue of Shaping WordPress, a newsletter where he shares “every two weeks on what’s top of my mind and what’s shaping up for WordPress.” he wrote.
On WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Lifter LMS founder Chris Badgett on Driving WordPress education via Full Site Editing. They talk about Chris’s journey from humble blogging beginnings to crafting a comprehensive, integrated LMS platform that democratizes online education for experts and novices alike.
Badgett, “a non-developer by trade, has leveraged the capabilities of full site editing to empower his customers to design online education experiences without the need to write any code.” Wrigley wrote in the introduction.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
If you want to streamline your block building experience, create-block is a fantastic scaffolding tool. Ryan Welcher published a tutorial on how to create an external project template for create-block. With that knowledge, you can make use of the create-block tool even more and tailor it to your developers needs. “A default template provides a standard configuration for creating simple blocks. The real power of create-block becomes evident when you start creating external project templates.” Welcher wrote.
In the episode of the ViewSource podcast, Exploring the Interactivity API in WordPress Part 1, Aurooba Ahmed and Brian Coords discuss the Interactivity API in WordPress. They explore how to use the API, the challenges they faced, and the benefits it provides. They also touch on JavaScript modules and how they are used in the context of the Interactivity API. The conversation ends with a discussion about future topics to cover in the series as they build out the plugin using the API.
Jason Adams, also has an opinion about the Interactivity API and calls it a noble attempt: “It’s entirely new and independent. It doesn’t build on what devs learned, nor does it use any existing directives API out there. This means that not only do developers have to learn a completely new API, but when they do, it doesn’t directly translate to anything else. Not only that, but you’re limited to whatever the API supports — it’s nowhere near as powerful or flexible as a raw React component. If you want to do more with it then the API itself will have to mature.” he wrote.
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
