Hi there,
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and spend some time offline with friends and family. And if you don’t live in the US or don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, you might still have had a quiet time, with US business owners and leaders offline.
This time of the year there is a lot of planning going on. The first in-person event of 2025 will be WordCamp Asia. The Gutenberg Times is a media partner and I will hold a workshop on how to create a demo with Playground. If you’d like to connect for a meeting in Manila, use the self-schedule app.
For now, I wish you a incredible rest of the weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
The Gutenberg 19.8 RC1 is available for testing. With the final release, a few experimental settings and functions will be stabilized. You’ll find many quality-of-life improvements for blocks and editors. You will learn from the release post of the final release on December 4th, 2024. Sarah Norris, JavaScript developer and core contributor will join me as my special guest on the Gutenberg changelog episode 112, and we will cover all important changes, then, too. You can use the Gutenberg Nightly via Playground to start testing.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #131 – Gutenberg Plugin Releases 23.1 – 23.3, Calls for Testing for 7.1 and more
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In his latest video, INCREDIBLE WordPress layout in 250 seconds, Jamie Marsland, teaches you how to create a stunning card layout in WordPress using core blocks and the new negative margin feature.
Rob O’Rourke, principal engineer at the enterprise agency Human Made, was Introducing the WordPress Query Loop Filters plugin. This plugin provides filter controls for the query loop block, using the interactivity API and a powerful way to bring dynamic filtering to your WordPress site. In this article and accompanying video, O’Rourke leads you on a walk-through on how to add a taxonomy filter, create a dynamic Search or add a Post Type filter.
For your more complex table needs in the Block editor, Table Block by Tableberg might be the right plugin for you. The description reads: “From pricing tables to product tables, you can build any types of tables using Tableberg. The plugin is designed for both novices and experienced users. It offers advanced functionalities like responsive controls, alignment adjustments, and cell merging, ensuring that tables look great on all devices without the need for coding skills.”
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Justin Tadlock published a Snippet on the Developer Blog on How to disable the Font Library. With a few lines of code you and remove Font library tools for the users of your theme.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor
Mark Howells-Mead shared in his post how to get preset aspect ratios in the WordPress Block Editor. He sets them via theme.json and then with the help of the useSettings function, he retrieves the value for a SelectControl component.
Join Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego in the upcoming Developer Hours: Improve your workflows with WordPress development tools. They will take a deep dive into the advanced usage of tools like create-block and wp-scripts, along with a few others. Their focus will be on solving common challenges and showcasing techniques that go beyond the basics, even for developers already familiar with these tools.
This session will feature practical examples and insights to help you work more efficiently, especially when building blocks, block themes, and Editor extensions. While the discussion will cover more advanced implementations, it will remain accessible to developers of all experience levels, with plenty of resources provided. There will also be time for questions and a preview of enhancements coming in future WordPress releases.
Steve Bonisteel, technical editor at Kinsta, discusses in his recent post Advanced WordPress development: how to build your next project with wp-scripts a set of tools for WordPress development. He highlights how wp-scripts makes the build process easier with a zero-configuration setup, support for modern JavaScript, CSS processing, code quality tools, and testing utilities. This package helps agencies manage multiple WordPress projects by standardizing the environment and centralizing tool dependencies.
The article includes guidance on setting up a development environment with wp-scripts, using webpack, and utilizing features like advanced compilation, intelligent bundling, and integrated testing, along with examples for handling JSX, modern JavaScript, and linting for code quality checks.
Gutenberg Fun & Games
Aki Hamano demo’d on X that “Code is Music” and share a video on how his Piano Block can be used to interrupt your content creation flow with some music. You can also study the source code on GitHub
Tom Rodes is Using a Gutenberg Block to run Snake. He built it in React and runs it in the Gutenberg editor. It’s a fabulous way to procrastinate on your content creation tasks. You can inspect the code on GitHub or play the game inside Playground.
Jonathan Bossenger built a variation of Dodge game you can play on his site. It’s outside the block editor but used the Interactivity API directives, actions, and stores. The code is available on GitHub.
Do you know other fun way to use WordPress and the block editor for a fun projects? I want to know about it. Email me pauli@gutenbergtimes.com
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
This week in Playground
Save the date! Next week, Dec 6th, 2024 at 14:00 UTC, Adam Zielinski will meet with Tammie Lister and others for a Hallway Hangout to discuss Playground for agencies; how agencies and product builders could use WordPress Playground for client work and showcase their products.
You can create Playground configuration files called blueprints written in JSON (see docs). With the help of Blueprints you can build demos or test environments and share with clients, users or co-workers. You can also view a list of example blueprints in the Blueprint Gallery. You can access directly from the https://playground.wordpress.net/ > Blueprint Gallery.
Not everyone is comfortable writing JSON, so Ajit Bohra and his team created a Blueprint builder in the block editor. On Friday. Adam Zielinski and Dawid Urbanski met with Ajit Bohra for an informal discussion about this tool and how it can be integrated into the Playground platform. The recording is now available on YouTube.
Two new blueprints in the Gallery: ImportStarter Content
Since WordPress 4.7, Theme builders could add Starter Content to their themes, to showcase how the theme could shine or to give users a head start on building their new site. Playground offers two methods to import Starter Content: via an option on the installTheme step or as a separate importStarterContent step. The two new examples in the Blueprint Gallery show how to use both of them.
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