Changelog #38 - 100th Release of Gutenberg, WordPress Core 5.7, 5.6.1, and Testing Call for Full-site Editing

Gutenberg Changelog

00:00 /

In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Mark Uraine celebrate the 100th release of Gutenberg, WordPress Core 5.7, 5.6.1, and Testing Call for Full-site Editing.

Music: Homer Gaines
Editor: Sandy Reed
Logo: Mark Uraine
Production: Pauli Systems

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

WordPress 5.7: A new dynamic hook to filter the content of a single block.

FSE Program Testing Call #2: Build a Homepage with Site Editing Blocks

The Material Team of Google released a plugin/Theme and blocks suite /

Theme
Plugin (WordPress repository)

WordPress and Gutenberg Releases

Gutenberg plugin release

What’s new in Gutenberg 10.0? (17 February) – by Riad Benguella
WPTavern: Gutenberg Plugin Marks 100th Release with 10.0 – by Sarah Gooding
Reflecting on Gutenberg’s 100th Release by Riad Benguella

What’s in the works and discussed

New Gallery block.

[Discussion] Hybrid themes: Templating hierarchies

FSE: 47 Questions and Answers

Did you like this episode? Please write us a reviewhttps://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog

If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how)

Transcript

Announcements

All right. So we have an announcement. The first dev notes for 5.7 are coming out. JB Audras does a remarkable job wrangling all the developers that have duty to produce some dev nodes. And for the plugin developers, there is a new dynamic hook coming to filter the content of a single block. It was always a little bit more difficult to get the content out and then add additional things to that. So now this has gotten a little bit easier. Check it out, of course, we will share the link in the show notes.

Mark Uraine: I would imagine that hook will really open it up for some plugin developers. That’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it can handle anything between let’s just say, okay, I want to wrap something around it to style it better. Or you can add another feature to it, like for an image block to have an additional way to pin that image to Pinterest or something like that. So the PHP code that you use to do that would be probably in your functions, PHP of the team, or you can of course add it to your plugin, but yeah, it depends on how you want to implement that. So I’m really glad that’s in there. It’s also relatively easy. So if I understood how to do this, it’s fairly easy to do because I’m normally not a PHP person.

So, and the other announcement coming from Anne McCarthy, she has just published today or on Friday, the testing call number two for the full-site editing program. And it will ask you and guide you through that, how to build a homepage with a site editing blocks, and you get to use all the new blocks that come with a full-site editing. You can play around with the post list block, which is a query block, the navigation block and the template part block. Yes. Everything is blocks. I learn how to … yeah. It’s not to stumble over it.

Mark Uraine: That post is really thorough too. There’s really good explanations in there. I can’t wait to give it a try because I remember last time I tried fiddling with creating a header and putting a navigation block, I had to give up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, and there was … some of the things were really hard in the first one, but I think they’ve gotten really good now. And there are, I think, 22 different steps on what you could actually test there. So, and every step of the way, if you run into trouble, make a note of it, and then either come to the Slack channel FS-outreach-experiment and discuss with your other testers, or go right to the GitHub repository of Gutenberg and file an issue.

Mark Uraine: Or leave a comment on the post as well. I know she’s accepting feedback from March 5th.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Any feedback is good and welcomed and so get on it people.

Mark Uraine: Test.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Test it, test, test, test. Yes.

Community Contribution

Mark Uraine: So we’ve got a community contribution today from Google of all places. The material team of Google released a plugin and a theme that includes blocks suite and some styling and stuff for WordPress, there’s actually a link in the show notes to the theme and to the plugin itself. So looks good as Bob released about a week ago, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s really neat, and it gives you several, a good starting off piece. Yeah. So you have a little guide at the front, first do your site and then do your styling and then select a template. And then it uses the customizer quite extensively. So that’s certainly a signature usage there, and it turns out really beautiful.

Yeah. The blocks are card blocks. You can style them differently in the sidebar and you can use a card block for images or for latest posts or even for portfolio or a media and text designs. The styling is really nice, and I got started right away and within a few minutes I was up and running with a new site.

Mark Uraine: How’d feel?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It felt very comfortable and very intuitive. And for me also seamless. Yeah, there was no pickup that I have to think about things. So what do they mean? So it was very clearly organized. So yeah. Check it out.

Mark Uraine: I saw a few comments there on the post recently about it being a bit too basic or something, but I really think that’s materials approach to things, is really to give you something very simplified and very organized from which to build or add onto, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe some other… I’m not that person that needs to have a design. I’m not opinionated about design. So I have a lot of good enough kind of thing.

Mark Uraine: That’s why we get along so well. You’re not a very opinionated and I’m very opinionated, so we just get along so well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m opinionated about a whole lot of other things. Yeah. But then, so I thought about that the other day when I was going around my house and say, “Well, a lot of people have a very … they are hunting down a lot of things, accessories for their house, yeah, quite extensively.” And I say, “Oh, well, it fits. Let’s use that.” So I might not be the best person to talk about design. That’s why also in our company I work with a designer, she is very opinionated, of course, and very good in the details. Yeah, so that’s the material team with Google having a new plugin, a theme and blocks in there. I really like it, and it should get you started right away if you want to create a new site now.

Mark Uraine: Yeah. Yeah. Those are available on the repo.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. They’re published and all available.

What’s Released – WordPress 5.7 Beta 3

So that brings us to what’s released. The core team released the WordPress 5.7 beta 3, and there were a few bug fixes that are from the block editor. The contributors in total fixed about 171 tickets, including 64 new features and enhancements. And as I mentioned, the dev notes are becoming published now and so it’s about the lazy eye frames. It’s about the new dynamic hook filter, and all the additional functions to check if a post is publicly viewable. So there’s a lot of new things coming in that have been around on the ticket for quite a long time. There’s a robots API updates as well. So check it out because I have the feeling that the dev notes, when you read them all at the same time, it could be quite overwhelming and with beta 3, the release candidate is soon to come.

WordPress 5.6.2 RC 2

Speaking of release candidate, the courtroom also released the 5.6.2 release candidate 2. So I think the version is coming out next week and has a few editor fixes that are back ported to 5.6.1 or 2, then like the image options, right now are not visible in the pop-up when clicking the replace button, which odd to fix, odd bug. And then now you can change the font size again. And the paragraph log that was a little hiccup there, and the preview for the block inserter now restored again, that was kind of good things.

Mark Uraine: Some essential bugs to get fixed, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and they can’t wait till 5.7 because people might not upgrade to 5.7, but they could really benefit from all those bug fixes there.

Gutenberg’s 100th Release

Mark Uraine: Very true. Then we had, which I heard you mentioned in the intro, Gutenberg’s 100th release. That’s incredible. I know, there have been 722 contributors listed on GitHub, many more contributors working in core themes, CSS, meta docs, training, marketing, and community, all these teams, just so many people contributing to the welfare of WordPress and really trying to bring that software up to something that everyone can be proud of, and that can benefit so many people in this world. So it’s…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s really amazing, yeah.

Mark Uraine: Yeah. It’s a big milestone, big milestone and this release. So you think maybe, Oh, with the 100th release, what are we going to get? It’s just like any other normal release, a set of features and has been some bug fixes, which is the way that this goes. But the great thing is that we’ve made it through a hundred of these and it just keeps getting better. I’m really impressed.

Riad Benguella, at first he posted the release notes and shared all the changes for Gutenberg 10, and then also posted about a reflecting piece about the last 100 releases and how it’s come along and progress has been shared. We’ll share those links in the show notes and of course, WPTavern, Sarah Gooding published a post about the 100th release as well and read through those very insightful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, Riad kind of closes, “It’s a delight to see some people who strongly disagreed with the initial vision or approach to Gutenberg gradually come to enjoy, using the editor and joined the project to carry on its vision.”

Yeah, that has been a remarkable transformation for a few people. And I think he also said in the last four years we made a lot of mistakes and we fixed them all. And, but we will also continue making mistakes and we’ll learn from it and fix them fast. But that’s how you develop things when you’re on the cutting edge. Yeah.

Mark Uraine: Yeah, and it’s so true. We have seen so many people that initially were very anti-Gutenberg, and that have just like really throughout the progress of the project and the improvements that have happened, they’ve really come on board and recognize how good a quality the software’s becoming.

Features

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, speaking of which, we have two new features in the Gutenberg 10.0 release. One is a basic pages block, which is … you can use it as standalone or in the navigation block. And it gives you a list of all the pages or a page, you can narrow it down to children’s pages or something like that. So it’s a dynamic block and it’s something that people really were looking for, but it also is a feature that needs to be in the site editor to be on par with the features from the traditional menu building thing. And the second feature is that the parent block selector is now visible on the block toolbar. Up until now, it was kind of … so the parent block selector is always … nobody really had a good place for it. And the team tried out different variations of it.

And I think they landed now on that, to have it visible all the time in the block toolbar, that’s probably the only way that people will know, “Okay, there is a parent block and that’s how I get to it.” So really glad that they found a place to make this work.

Enhancements

Other enhancements on that the social icons needed a better empty state for dark themes because they disappeared into the background, that is fixed. The group block now has an advanced panel to add a tag name to it.

Then the categories block is now … displays a message instead of empty content that there are no categories or need to be categories in there to show the block patterns in the inserter for non-root level insertion points. So if a block pattern is added to an inner block, it still needs to be shown or available and it wasn’t, I think that was the problem there. The improve the keyword navigation for the block pattern in Serta, towards accessibility.

Mark Uraine: Oh, that’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s really cool. Now you can transform actually the paragraph block into a buttons block.

Mark Uraine: Whoa. Really?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I had thought that….

Mark Uraine: So what happens? I didn’t even catch that one. I have a 10-word sentence. Does my 10-word sentence become a button?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It could be, but it’s probably not for that. It’s probably when you have a list of things and then say, “Oh, maybe I want to do that in a separate page.” And then you say, “Okay, well then I need that sentence to be a button and then make it a call to action or something like that to go to that page.”

Mark Uraine: All right. That makes sense.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But I also noticed that they are actually increasing the … what’s all transformable. So that’s certainly also part of it for that. Yeah, remember we talked about the transformation of a paragraph with a heading into a columns block for instance, or yeah, the last … I think today actually I highlighted a heading in a paragraph and a list and say it transformed two columns and it gave me two columns for them. One was the paragraph, the other one was the list, it was really cool.

Yeah. So these transformations are pushing it a little bit further in how comfortable you are going to go from one block to the next and not have to read into content.

Mark Uraine: That’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Another one is the top toolbar arrow gap. Well, that’s not really an enhancement, but the top toolbar got some little attention there, design wise. And also use a new design language for the layout icon, and also update the buttons icons. Their design-wise definitely important, but I don’t think they’re really enhancements, but who knows? As I said, I’m not so opinionated about things.

Mark Uraine: That works. It works.

APIs

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So there are new APIs, six of them. One is that the resolve select function for the WordPress data scripts graduates from the out of the experimental stage into a state of status. And then there’s also a WordPress internationalization script and they are using new APIs for the React bindings. So that suddenly, that needs to be looked up for those who need to work on that internationalization for the block editor, yeah.

Bug Fixes

Mark Uraine: Oh, cool. Okay. And then that brings us to bug fixes. There were 13 bug fixes with this release. A couple of them let’s see, range control fix the input slider widths. So that was something that needed to be adjusted. There was a fix for the latest posts block. The focus was not selectable. There’s a fix for the issue where the gallery block requests all attachments when empty. So that’s better. There’s a fix for wrong space between style in the buttons block. So all the spacing should be correct. Fix the default buttons block radius and size, which Birgit mentioned was also an enhancement, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I think that the default is 15, but the controls and the Cypress shows five, I think that was a disconnect there, yeah.

Mark Uraine: That was a long-lasting one issue too. I’m glad to see that one got it. And then fixing the cover block height as well as another one. So a lot of little fixes on the blocks throughout the editor that’ll make a difference overall.

Experiments

There were 37 experiments that made it into the release, many of which are actually bug fixes on certain experimental features. So the site editor saw a lot of bug fixes going on there. One of which was allowing searching pages and posts and categories in the navigation sidebar. The full-site editing architecture saw a lot of theme.Json improvements. So the … to iterate on the public API of the WP theme.Json resolver was one. The renaming page templates configuration to custom templates in the theme Json file. There were a few others like improving the performance on file access of experimental theme.Json and load page templates via the theme.Json abstractions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It also … It’s really important because then you can list them all through the theme.Json list. There is no assumption what’s in the folder needs to be templates or something like that. It’s very explicit. So like that, yeah.

Mark Uraine: Yeah, there were several, of course with full-site editing blocks such as the query pagination block is getting some code refactoring or cleanup, I guess I should say. The navigation blocks saw a lot of changes. Polish around the social links went inside the navigation. There’s adding a new post navigation link block as an inner block for the navigation block. And in addition to the navigation block itself, the navigation screen side, big design iteration.

So if you have that experiment turned on, you can go check out some of the fresh designs that are implemented right now. And I believe in … at the end of that PR that got merged, Shaun Andrews, who’s been working on it, he says it’s in a good place to merge now. And of course there was more work that needs to be done. So as you venture over there, just keep that in mind, they’re still iterating on it.

The block-based widget screen and the customizer saw some changes. So there’s now an experimental flag that enables widgets or widget screen in the customizer, which … what that means is, I think breaking in the blocks into the customizer. I am right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. But the customizer was never touched really with the widget screen set. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that’s going to work out.

Mark Uraine: Yeah. How they merge those things together, dial out in. Global styles, saw some context. They use context when translating entries and theme.Json. The rest API, there’s a couple here about a pattern directory API, Birgit, so….

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yes. It’s getting serious now.

Mark Uraine: We’re starting to see these things starting to come together right now, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So the pattern directory is actually developed in its own repository. So showing up the pattern directory API here in the Gutenberg means actually that the block editor and the pattern directory, they need to work together to get new patterns listed in the inserter. And somehow those two code bases need to work together. So it’s all through the rest API of course, but the block editor needs to see the things that come from the block pattern directory.

Mark Uraine: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And finally, the last subsection of the experiments is called UI components. So as you all know, there’s a lot of G2 components getting built by Q and making their way into the software. Right now there’s a couple that got added like the V-stack component, which is a vertical layout component to lay things out vertically and you have an H-stack component that compliments that laying things out horizontally. And then finally, because we need it, is a flex component. So if you need a flex, any flex attributes there for your designs for blocks, however that this component that you’re planning on using, we’ve got that in there now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Yes. I think the … is that the third iteration of the components or is it even the fourth?

Mark Uraine: I know it’s gone through several, so yeah, it just keeps coming together more and more and dialing in and seeing this stuff merge in is so good.

Documentation

Documentation saw about nine PRs that were merged, most of which were typos and tweaks to the documentation. So anybody out there thinks that contributing your first little bit to WordPress or Gutenberg is a bit daunting? We’re always running into typos in the documentation, just hop in and correct some grammar for us, help us out. And you’ve got something that you contributed to an open source project, which is really cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s how I got my first contribution.

Mark Uraine: Right. It’s so good and it’s a great gateway into that whole ability to really get it. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, I just contributed to the WPCI because they had a wrong link and I was able to find the right one and yeah. Ended the PR that was the easiest part, it just got merged, yeah.

Mark Uraine: One of the other documentation things to know is that the theme.Json documentation saw a lot of updates or saw some updates. So in regards to all that theme.Json updates in the code, the documentation is here to reflect it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Code Quality

That brings us to the last two items on the release oh, three. Okay, of course. Yeah. We have some code quality items. The packages get some updates with the store names, which is how they store data and there’s a refactoring going on. So we see that a special line item in quite a few of them and then some default for components refactored some … the justified tool controls for the buttons.

Tools

Yeah, and then for the tools, the WP environment.Json got an update with pinning the TT blocks dependency, on a TT blocks is the default theme Twenty Twenty-One, as a full-site editing theme and environment will have that as a default dependency in there.

They also added a welcome, talking about first-time contributor PRs. A welcome comment for first-time contributor PRs on the GitHub repository, and they’re also updated the composer packages for PHP8 compatibility. There’s also the dependencies checking against the MPM seven license. I had some trouble with running some of the builds with MPM seven. So I have my own local environments still on MPM six. I don’t know how long that lasts, but that’s how I get by.

Various

And then the various section had two items, which all components system phase variables has adjusted faults for the component system phase variable, and for the build worker there’s a callback with error, called the callback with an error and no task is an extension.

Mark Uraine: Completely understand why those are under the various category.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it’s really remarkable that it doesn’t have 25 other pieces. Normally that’s a really long one.

Mark Uraine: They got better at organizing this, a little bit more finding the right category for them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I got a surprise. I just was reminded of it, but earlier this week. So Andy Fagan who is working on a feature plugin for the updater for plugins, and also has become a component, and is my mentor on the … or supervising adult, on my zip for master, yeah. I do a daily build if there were changes. So you can have the plugin as a zip for master and he found out a way to display the download numbers on his plugin. And I was totally surprised and so I said, Oh, I tried this on that, a GitHub repo as well and I was totally floored by the fact that a build has been downloaded 36,000 times. It really … is totally surprised. So I thought, well, maybe…. I didn’t have opinion about things. I said, I have to do it because I want to do it anyway.

So I might as well, but people using it was a total surprise for me. I thought maybe it’s 2000 downloads from the hundred people that do it, but that’s what’s really huge. Yeah, so-

Mark Uraine: Wow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was 36,000. Yeah. But it was floored, I think it’s nothing like the GitHub update, a plugin that Andy does. It had been downloaded 16 million times. So he’s 15,000 times more impressed or surprised, but that’s a really a totally interesting, yeah. How that mushrooms around the ecosystem here, yeah.

So if you using it, dear listeners, yeah, and you had a hiccup. This week I published some instructions on that because the Gutenberg team changed the default branch from master to trunk, and that propagates throughout the fork and we have changed too. So, but then the update … a little hiccup and you couldn’t get … so I had some instruction on how to get past that. When you stated that and I put it in the discussions on the BPH/Gutenberg discussions and I also put it on the Gutenberg times. So you can read up about it if you have any trouble there, but it’s very easy. Yeah. So it’s just … you need to know where to click things. Okay.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

That brings us to, what’s an active….

Mark Uraine: Yeah. Closed out the release, that’s it for the release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s it for the release, okay. Yes. Yeah. And what’s an active development and discussed. I discovered or read up about … we talked about it before, I think we mentioned it before, that the gallery block has experienced some refactoring and it has gone on since summer, but then there was a break, and Glen Davies is spearheading that effort. And it’s the refactor is actually making the gallery instead of its own block, a wrapper block around the image blocks. So the images are included as a single image block, which brings the advantage that you also can apply all the features that the image block has, like the styles, you can do rounded corners, or you can add a link to each single image instead of just to the whole gallery. So there are so many advantages to doing that, that I’m really glad that’s happening, and if you are interested in it, we share all the different PRs that come with it. So you can chime in and test it out while they’re still working it, yeah.

Mark Uraine: Yeah. That’s going to be so cool to work with having each one of those images be its own individual block within the gallery. That’s so neat. I’ve been waiting for that one, too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. There is one caveat with it. Is of course a breaking change. They’re not going to support the old gallery for long. So Glen is also working on a fallback handling when an old gallery block comes down the pipeline, so to speak. They will roll that out as an experiment first. So you get to test it, and you get to test it with your plugins and your own content before it actually is released into the plugin. So that is certainly something to look out for and watch that development. I really looking forward to that, yes.

Another discussion happens around hybrid themes in terms of the upcoming changes to the full-site editing. So is a potential upgrade path from the traditional theme to a full-site editing theme. And there are multiple avenues that I explored. One is to have … maybe just create one template through the site editor, that is an addition to the PHP themes templates or have the old way, do the header and the footer but in between that’s all going into the full set and everything. So there are multiple ways to do this. And yeah, if you have any idea how to do that, that will be good.

Mark Uraine: Birgit, have you noticed the discussions leaning one way or the other?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, there is definitely a granular upgrade path. There is no one way to discuss, and we are coming towards that when we look at the answers from the call for questions that Anne McCarthy provided the answers for. There is an idea to have a very granular upgrade paths. Yeah, so you can use that. So that there are multiple variations.

So one is the traditional theme and then the traditional theme was global styles, and then a traditional theme with the templates or a traditional theme with the site editing blocks, is a block scene with no support for global styles because all their styles are in the CSS style sheet is to cut it down for instance, for the user they don’t mess with a design, right?

That’s a big thought about that or a big worry for some of the designers and block theme development. That’s also the block theme with full global style support. And then the traditional theme, plus the widgets, the block-based widgets and the traditional theme with the widgets, the new widgets screen and the new navigation screen. So yeah, is a whole… and that’s also the complexity with which the team is approaching it to make sure that nothing breaks pretty much, yeah. And everybody can have that pace that they want to come along that fits the best to them.

Mark Uraine: Really, interesting. Yeah, speaking of those posts and McCarthy just recently for our listeners put out about one, two, three, four, five posts just today, I think, answering all sorts of questions that she had reached out to developers and designers, and really aggregated all the questions that people had in the recent call for questions and then brought forth some good answers to those. So check out all those posts they’re on the make test blog on wordpress.org. So, and they’re all regarding the full-site editing program. So they go over the overall project. There’s a post about templates, one about themes, which is where Birgit was just reading from. There’s one about restricting access and functionality, that was the other one about like, well, sometimes people don’t want global styles to be turned on. Because they don’t want people messing up the theme, and there’s another one around the general functionality. So that is a plethora of good information there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I really have to admire Anne McCarthy, she went really deep on many of those questions except for … oh, that’s a plug-in, going to do that for … but then if it was that, but she also links into the answer, the issues that on the GitHub repository, where that particular problem has been discussed or is discussed right now. So if you all are really interested in how that’s going, you can actually chime in and get your opinions heard and make that also your own, and see how with different ways it goes.

Yeah, these are all 47 questions we are sending — 47 different questions, I have to say and it took quite a bit to get through this. So, yeah, and I think that’s it. Yeah, we are at the end of our show. Do you have anything that we might have wanted to pick up?

Mark Uraine: I think we covered it all. Thank you, listeners, for sticking around for the end of the show, Birgit, it’s wonderful, once again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Same here, same here.

And just a last reminder before you head on to the next podcast or to your next task, check out the call for testing. The second testing call for the full-site editing, and build a homepage from the new tools.

As always the show notes will be published on the Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast page. This is episode 38 and if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

That’s it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Mark, it was so wonderful to see you again and talk to you about that, and I’ll see you all the next time.

Mark Uraine: All right, bye-bye, everyone. Thank you.