--- title: "Gutenberg Changelog #101 - WordPress 6.6 Beta 1, Gutenberg 18.3, 18.4, 18.5" date: "2024-06-09" author: Gutenberg Changelog url: "https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6/" tags: ["Block Development", "Gutenberg", "Site Editor", "WordPress"] --- [Download file](https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast-download/28856/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6.mp3?ref=download) | [Play in new window](https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast-download/28856/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6.mp3?ref=new_window) | Recorded on June 6, 2024 Subscribe: [Amazon](https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/91c764fa-aa1a-44a0-bd45-45caed4c8a91/gutenberg-changelog) | [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gutenberg-changelog/id1469294475) | [CastBox](https://castbox.fm/channel/Gutenberg-Changelog-id2173375) | [Google Podcasts](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ax-dojLw7yUsr3hDIRWHoaGkjyBUWyW) | [PocketCasts](https://pca.st/7O43) | [Podbean](https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/chi7j-9904a/Gutenberg-Changelog-Podcast) | [Podchaser](https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/gutenberg-changelog-878239/) | [RSS](https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/podcast/) | [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/620NwVKQJGdTupy36zYxvg) In this episode, Magdalena Paciorek and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.6 Beta 1, Gutenberg releases 18.3, 18.4, 18.5 and WordCamp Europe [Show Notes](https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6/#shownotes) / [Transcript](https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-101-wordpress-6-6//#transcript) - Music: Homer Gaines - Editor: Sandy Reed - Logo: Mark Uraine - Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack **Show Notes** ## Special Guest: Magdalena Paciorek - Connect on LinkedIn - A first look at the Interactivity API by Magdalena Paciorek - Building custom post types with blocks w/ Magdalena Paciorek - Tweet By Luis Herranz ## Upcoming Events - Seven talks about blocks, block themes and beyond at WordCamp Europe 2024 - WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 version Developer Hours: Exploring Overrides for Synced Pattern in WordPres 6.6 - Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub - Developer Hours: What’s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6 ## WordPress 6.6 - WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 version - Help test WordPress 6.6 ## Gutenberg Releases - What’s new in Gutenberg 18.3? (8 May) - What’s new in Gutenberg 18.4 (22 May) - What is new in Gutenberg 18.5 (05 Jun) Stay in Touch - Did you like this episode? Please write us a review - Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph. - 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** *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Hello and welcome to the 101st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.6 beta one. The last three Gutenberg plugin releases 18.3, 18.4, and 18.5, and WordCamp Europe, not necessarily in this order. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project, sponsored the Automattic’s five for the future program. Today, I’m also happy to have Magdalena Paciorek as co-host with me. Magda has been one of the shining tutorial writers for the WordPress developer blog, and I’m also looking forward to learning more about building custom post types with blocks at WordCamp Europe. It’s definitely a topic that many developers have questions about. Magda, welcome to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Thanks for making the time today. How are you? *Magdalena Paciorek*: Hi, Birgit. Yeah, I’m great. I’m happy to present the new features. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Awesome, awesome. So happy to have you on the show. So please tell us all more about you, where you live and what is your day job when you’re not writing for the developer blog, or presenting, or being a co-host. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Okay. I live in Poland and well, I’m basically a WordPress developer. I work in the marketing department, where I do maintenance of our websites that are built with WordPress. I’m mostly responsible for maintaining our blocks that we built for our team, so that they can build landing pages for marketing purposes. So that’s where my interest in Gutenberg came from my team, because that’s what I do in my everyday job, but I also work in marketing, so I write content around WordPress. I present at WordCamps and other WordPress events. My company also sponsors WordPress events, so I would always also attend these events. So yeah, so my work life is pretty much also WordPress, and also sometimes after work, because of the community that I’m involved with. So it’s a big part of my life. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Do you have family? *Magdalena Paciorek*: No, I don’t have kids. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. So you might not have seen the tweet by Luis Herranz, “By the way. I think this is the best tutorial on the interactivity API available so far. It’s going to be my new recommendation for anyone looking for a quick introduction to the interactivity API.” That’s great. Kudos from one of the lead developers on the Interactivity API project, so congratulations. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Well, thank you. I actually haven’t seen it, because I haven’t looked into Twitter for a long time, so wow, this is nice. Yeah, I’m really happy that I could contribute to this project, because I feel like the interactivity API is one of the most important features that are coming to work. I mean, it’s already in WordPress, but it’s just the first iteration, but I feel like when it’s going to be finished, wow, this is one of the most important things that is happening right now in WordPress. So yeah, it’s well cool. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, and you help people to get acquainted with it. So thank you for that. And I agree with you, the interactivity API is probably the most interesting pieces also for people that come over to Gutenberg and from PHP developers, that are not so much interested in JavaScript, but they can also use that and hydrate their pages with interactivity, without page loads. So it’s really cool.  So before we go into the Changelogs and talk about all the releases that are happening since we last had a podcast, well the 100th episode was a special episode as you dear listeners already know, hopefully. And so, we skipped a Gutenberg release and now we are putting it all in one show, and you will also notice that at the end of the show, that there will be a different music. And I thought, okay, for the next 200 episodes, I think it would be good to change the music, the intro music and the outro music, but to not confuse listeners right away, we didn’t do it for this one, but only for the outro music. Next time we will have it on. So at the beginning of the show, just to warn you, it’s a totally different vibe on that music. While I have you, dear listeners, at the beginning of the show, I wanted to also let you know start with a few announcements.  ### Announcements of Upcoming Development Hours, WordCamp Europe and Hallway Hangouts So WordCamp Europe is happening next week and there will be awesome presentations there, and I put together a list of the seven block-related talks that you will see in the live stream. So I will link it in the show notes, but one of them is Elena’s presentation. Then we have a presentation on the interactivity API with Michael and on block themes, and all the good things that come with 6.6, or are already in WordPress. It’s also Jessica Lessig is talking about the Twenty Twenty Four. Then Erica Gill and Luis Rosales talk about migrating from two blocks from a legacy website. Bernie Rider, developer on the Gutenberg team, talks about the block hooks, how to extend block themes, and then there’s also the Gutenberg speed build challenge that Jamie Marsland has put up on YouTube, and you will get to see it live. And we just found out that Jessica Lessig and Rich Tabor are the contestants, so that’s going to be really cool. And then, Jamie also has a talk about the three key principles for beginners on blog themes, and then of course Magdalena’s building custom post types blocks. So you see this all and you can get this all through the WordCamp Europe live stream, if you’re not there to watch it live.  Then there are three developer hours and two hallway hangouts scheduled in the next few weeks, so on June 11th, and of course all of them will have recordings and resources to share. So June 11th will be a developer hour on exploring overrides for the sync patterns that come with WordPress 6.6. That’s a very exciting feature and I’m really looking forward to using that. It was punted from 6.5, but the developers took a totally different approach now. One is they use the block bindings API to drive all the overrides, and then also you have to name the pieces so they can be displayed in the sidebar, but we are going to talk about it a little later. But that is definitely something you don’t want to miss, or want to catch on the rerun.  On June 17th, no, it’s the 19th, sorry. On June 19th at 1100 UTC there will be a hallway hangout on building a workflow for themes with the CreateBlock theme plugin using Playground and GitHub. So you could use Playground to make all the changes to your theme. Use the plugin CreateBlock theme block theme plugin to save those things, and then use also Playground to save it all back to GitHub as a PR for a theme update. So that’s going to be really cool. And then on June 25th, there’s developer hours on what’s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6. That’s more an overview and kind of sometimes deep dive. And then on June 26th, a day later, 1100 UTC, there will be a hallway hangout on the grid layouts that come to WordPress 6.6, and we will discuss all the cool things with Isabel Brison, who was one of the lead developers on the grid layouts. And then July 2nd, and that’s the end of it. July 2nd is again another developer hours and building theme with the CreateBlock theme plugin, so you can learn more about all that. So that’s it. Discussions and QA also happen asynchronously, in the Make WordPress Outreach Channel, that’s a new name for a channel that was the FSE outreach experiment, but it’s now a standard channel on the WordPress makeup for extenders, developers, site builders to come together and discuss things, or have Q&A with people. And so, join us there. All right, that brings us to what’s released.  ### What’s Released – WordPress 6.6 Beta 1 Most, but not all items in the Gutenberg plugin releases we’ll cover today will come to WordPress 6.6 version at the end of July. I think release date is, no, release date is July 26th, but you can already start testing WordPress 6.6 beta 1 version, because it was just released and I would like to point out that it’s the best way to learn about new features coming to the WordPress version, when you heed the call for testing. It has been out for together with the WordPress 6.6 beta 1 release, and you get to test 10 features coming to WordPress 6.6. And those are all the new data views that are in the site editor for pages, templates, patterns and template parts, and how they kind of work the same pattern overrides, so you can change the content of a pattern per instance, and then if you change the design, all the other patterns will change the design as well, but not change the content. So the updates to the insert are showing all blocks. A user feedback was there that it was a little bit confusing. It now shouldn’t be, but test it out. Unified and refresh publishing workflow. We have additional information about that later on. And then, mix and match the typography and color palettes from all style variations, and then section styles, and the changes to CSS, cascading style sheets, specificity. That’s a very difficult word, specificity. Okay. And then, another feature coming to WordPress 6.6 is a grid layout, and then a new pattern experience for the classic themes. I did some brief testing with a classic theme activated and it works real nicely. Also, the sync pattern works as well. Of course the sync pattern overrides are only enabled for certain blocks, so it does not work on all patterns, but that’s a different story. Another feature that a lot of people have been waiting for are the negative margins in the UI of the global styles. And then, there is a feature also coming to WordPress 6.6 that allows for the rollback of auto updates if they run against some error message, or something like that. A team of developers has been working probably for, if not longer, a year on that, and now it’ll come to WordPress 6.6 and it’s definitely great to test this. Now Magdalena, are there any features in 6.6 release that you are particularly excited about? *Magdalena Paciorek*: Well, yes, quite a few of these features are really exciting, but I’m the most excited about sync pattern overrides. I think this is a very important feature, especially for people who build websites for clients, because it solves the problem that the page builders basically have, that you build views of pages, and then you have some common elements that you add to a few pages for example. But then when you want to change something, well you had to visit every page separately and make these changes. For example, change background code. And so, that’s of course, if you have a very small brochure website with five pages, not a problem, but it doesn’t scale, the website grows, then it’s not really usable. So these synchronized patterns that you can overwrite are a really great solution for this, because you can keep styles synchronized, but then allow overwriting text for example, the content of these patterns per page. So it’s a great feature, I really like it. I think everyone should get interested in it actually. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, and I think a lot of people got already excited for 6.5, when it was pulled off the beta 1, because it wasn’t ready yet, but I think the additional two or three months maturing of the feature definitely helped to make it even more clear how to assign those allowed overrides, and how a user that uses them, an editor that hasn’t created them, but wants to use them, can identify the areas where they can override things. Now there are a few caveats there. One is that the overrides are only enabled for headings, paragraphs, buttons, and images, and in images only for the alt text and the file name. So if you put captions in, the captions are not part of the overrides. So somebody did some great testing there and you need to, if you want to test it out with captions and yeah, it’s probably not going to work as you expected. *Magdalena Paciorek*: And there’s one more limitation, because I’ve tested it with gallery block and you can override the images, but we can set them to be able to be overwritten. But the problem is when the number of photos that add to the gallery, it can’t be changed. So if you add for example, two pictures, there can only be two, they can be three or one. So it’s not a hundred percent usable, but I’ve read the discussion on GitHub, and I feel like this is going to be solved in probably the next release, but for now, this is something to be aware of. Also, the same situation with the list book, where you have a few items, and then you can’t add or remove these items from the async pattern. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, list block is not part of that. Yeah, that’s true. Gallery block is not assigned yet that it works. So yeah, those are the limitations, but for a first version to get in a major WordPress release, it’s in really great shape. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yes, yes, I confirm it. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: And every other feature, there’s a good first version and then we iterate on for the next steps on that. So yeah, I’m also quite excited about the section styles and the grid layout, because that’s also a part of what other page builders do, is that you can assign different styles to sections and not have to go to each part of it. So if it’s a cover block or a groups block of certain elements, you can change all the colors with a color palette kind of thing, and assign a style to it, and have that on a button change over to either dark view, or light view, or blue view, or red view kind of thing. But you don’t have to do it for each single block in that group. So those are really time savers, but they also give designers a little more granular control over the designs that they create. And the grid layout is definitely something that a lot of people have been waiting for, that you arrange everything on your page in a grid, and then you can wrap the handles of a block and kind of make it larger, or have a row span of a block, be it an image, or a paragraph block, or anything, and to organize the blocks differently on a page. I think that really helps with that, some people are still looking for pixel perfect, although that one went out of the window when we had mobile, and different kinds of screen sizes and we now have. I don’t know, from brownie size screen to big TV screens that are 80 inches. So yeah, we need some fluid things there. And the grid layout, if you use the automatic grid layout, it will be responsive and adhere to the various screen sizes. And negative margin is part of it as well, with the section styles and the grid layout to give more tools to the designers to have really great designs that are not following conservative flows of content and assets. Well if your listeners have a comment on that, just use the comment section on the website and let us know what you think about all the new features that are coming to WordPress 6.6. And as I said, go and test it, heed the call for testing, and you learn all about it quite by doing. ### Gutenberg 18.3 Which brings us now to the first Gutenberg plugin release that we are going to cover. That’s Gutenberg 18.3. There were 165 PRs in there. It was released on May 8th, by 44 contributors and three contributors who were first timers, Jason Crist was the release lead for that release. Well, one definitely stands out is that Gutenberg is updated to a new React version. I think it’s 18.3, was it? I’m not quite sure. Yeah, it’s just a coincidence that 18.3 Gutenberg release also uses React 18.3, so I was a little confused at the moment here. And that will be important when you use some of the newer features, or if you have to update some of the legacy React features on your blocks. I’m not quite sure how much of a disruption that is or if it is at all, but I just wanted you to be aware of it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yeah, this one I don’t actually know. I’ve checked it out, but I couldn’t make it work. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Okay, yeah, that’s a different story. It’s a different story. It doesn’t have to work. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Okay. It’s there. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Everything needs to be tested of course, and it’s supposed to work. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Onto the next thing. Also, the plugin document settings panel is now available, a slot is available in the template inspector controls, because before this release it was only available I think in post inspector contract, but now it’ll be also available in the template. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: The site editor. Yeah, and that is so plugins can have additional fields and create their own little interfaces there. The next one is classic themes get now exposure to the patterns page, and what it also removes is the template parts menu item. So classic themes now have access to the site editor design for patterns and template parts. There was a request from quite a few theme developers if that would be possible, or agency developers if that would be possible, because then they can also do all the documentation, everything for the patterns can be also used for classic themes, or users that use the classic theme. So that’s really cool. *Magdalena Paciore*k: Yeah, that’s a great feature. And also patterns, the data view is changing. The team has removed icons and right now it’ll just have this label that says that if the pattern is synchronized or not. So yeah, that’s also a really nice improvement. Small, but very useful. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah. And one other PR I wanted to point out is that now you can insert patterns on the end of the canvas, or the route section of a content piece. Until then you couldn’t get to that. It was really hard to put anything on the end of a post or pages, but now you can insert patterns to the end of it by drag and drop, or just by using it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yeah, this is a really nice usability improvement. I actually tested it and it worked really nicely. It’s a natural flow. It seems very natural to add new. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: You can now just drop and drag them to the end, because then you can stack your patterns first before you make all the changes that you need to do on the page. So you can get a really good layout very fast to just combine a few patterns, and you don’t have to rearrange them on your site. Next one is a new text alignment control component that’s for developers, when you have a few… Most text aligns are actually in the block toolbar, but some of the blocks don’t have have it in their block toolbar, but you can have it in the font section, the typography section of that block, so you can have a left center or right alignment on the text, even if the block toolbar is not there. So it’s really cool. That’s especially helpful also for custom blocks. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yes, and we also have a new improvement on the inserter tabs, because now the search bar is moved into inserter tabs. So when you type, for example, you look for the keyword, like for example, image, and you look on the block tab. Then when you switch to the patterns tab, then you still have this search phrase there and it already filters out the patterns based on this keyword. So this is a really nice improvement. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, I saw that too, and I really love that, that I don’t have to tap in my keywords multiple times just because I’m going from blocks to patterns to the other thing. Well, I mentioned it with 18.3 Gutenberg plugin. There is now the possibility to add negative values to margin controls. So you can have overlaps, so you can have a picture and then the next paragraph you can have the margin negative 200, and it goes a little bit into the picture on the bottom of it if you want to do that. That is something that many designers have done for many, many years with just plain Cascading Style Sheets, and it was available through the theme JSON where you could add negative margins already, but now it’s also coming to the user interface, and it will be in the dimension controls on the bottom of the margin, you can see add your negative values for any of the margins, be it left, right, top or bottom. *Magdalena Paciorek*: In the next feature, I think it’s only relevant for the team developers. I think so, because there is a big change to how the style variations are handled in Orpheus 6.6. Okay, so another feature is I think it should only concern the theme developers. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Are you trying to tell me that this is something that developers actually wouldn’t be able to use, or that’s not for developers that it’s actually just Gutenberg internal? *Magdalena Paciorek*: I think it’s internal for Gutenberg. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: So we don’t talk about it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yeah, yeah, of course. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: If it’s not for extenders, then it’s not really… *Magdalena Paciorek*: I don’t think they have to do anything. It’s just how it handles when you define two or three type variations, and then people mix and match it, so it’s something internal that handles it. Not to create too many styles under the hood, something like that, but I don’t think it’s… *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, and I think I saw another filter to have the color controls and the typography styles, that they are not duplicated and all that. The team is working on that. That’s the next one, is the filter out color and typography variations. That’s also an internal one, but I think it could open up the system for the next version to be able to maybe opt out of the presets, the automatic creation. So color and typography variations when they come in, they are taken from the style variations the theme has, and isolates in a separate section, all the color palettes that come with the style variations, and in a separate section also all the typography choices that could be made for the style variations. And there is a discussion for extenders. Well, if a theme is following brand standards that has four style variations for the different brands of a company, then you don’t want colors from brand two and the typography from brand three to be maxed, and that is not yet available to opt out of that. But I think how the filters were created, I think it would only be a small step to provide that opt out for theme developers. So I think we need to watch that space quite a bit in terms of what feedback is coming in from the beta version, and also see how that can be solved. It might not be part of 6.6, because we are six weeks away from release, but there might be time. So it’s certainly something to discuss with theme developers, agency developers, and the good mood developers. Which also brings us to the new preset, there are default font sizes in theme JSON version three, that for those you can opt out of course. Core has a few font sizes in the theme JSON and provides some. So those don’t have to be worried about theme developers if they don’t want to. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Especially if you create a custom for a company, then you might want to opt out from the default font sizes and declare your own ones. And onto the next one. There are some changes in the post editor sidebar. There are a few data information about the post was shuffled around in the top area of this site editor. For example, post status work count, also the thumbnail was moved to the top of site panel. So there are quite a few changes that I’ve seen throughout these three releases of Gutenberg that we’re talking about. So it’s not a big change, because the data is still there, the same data, but it got moved up or down, and I think at the moment it’s looking quite nice. It’s quite usable, so it’s definitely worth it to take a closer look at how it looks like at the moment. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, it definitely is a change that gives you much more information about the nature of the post or the page that you have. And I’m seeing that the word count might disappear from the inserter, no from the list view tab, because not a lot of people are going there, but you have all the information in the top section of the post editor. And they also moved up the featured image, and that is part of the also data views, because now they can use the same component and show off in a grid layout for pages or posts. They can show off the card with the featured image, and just the post metadata about their post status, and word count, and last edited information. So there’s also a feature that comes in actually is the duplicate post feature that you can just grab from that section, where you can say, okay, duplicate that post and then restart a new one. Up until now, you actually had to use a plugin for that, and right now it’s actually only available in the Gutenberg plugin. I’m not sure it comes to WordPress 6.6, I need to research that. So you might get too excited now, but if you use the Gutenberg plugin, you definitely have it, but it seems to be only for the plugin right now. *Magdalena Paciorek*: But it’s such a needed feature, just to be only available through plugins, but now it’s coming to WordPress, it’s really great.  ### Documentation Okay, so now we have documentation. There’s a lot of going on in the documentation field, especially the editor package of Gutenberg. The documentation for this package was updated and at the moment I think almost all components are documented, so it’s great for developers who want to use these components from the editor package. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: It definitely made some strides with the documentation on the components. Some of the components actually moved from one package to the other, because of the synchronization from the site editor and the post editor. So there is no duplication of code anymore, but they had to move the packages. And so, they also moved some of the documentation and made the discovery that some of the components were actually not documented well enough. So there were two birds with one stone so to speak. Speaking of moving the interactivity, API documentation has also moved from the package area to the reference guide area. When you go to the developer.wordpress.org/block editor documentation, you’ll find it under different heading in the reference guide and another update that you as if you do theme development or create themes for clients, you definitely want to look at the documentation for the theme JSON version three. There are quite a few changes and you need to declare it in your theme JSON, which schema you’re following to make sure that you are still compatible. All right, that was 18.3. See that was pretty harmless. Cool. Yeah, we’re getting better at it.  ### Gutenberg 18.4 We are going to the Gutenberg 18.4 release, which was released two weeks ago with 185 PRs, merged by 58 contributors, seven of them were new with their first merge PRs, and release lead was Alex Lende and he has all published release post what’s new in Gutenberg 18.4. So let’s dive in.  The first item I wanted to point out was that the grid layout, visualizer and resizer features have been stabilized, and we can always cheer about that. The listeners, I think grid layout is going to be the new gradient. I had an early times on the podcast, even with Mark Uraine. Again, I was always very happy to say gradients and new features, and now it’s grid layout with new features. I’m really happy about that. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yes, this feature is definitely going to be useful, very useful, very excited about it. And the next feature that’s coming, this Gutenberg version is the aspect ratio presets are now supported through theme JSON. So you can define your own aspect ratios for images basically. That will be available in the controls for the cropping images. So I think this is great, especially for the theme developers, that you can now have your own dimensions of the images that are custom to the theme. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, it definitely makes some nice designs when you can have images uploaded and they follow your personalized, so to speak, aspect ratio presets. Also, there was an update on color variations. I mean, the PR isn’t very descriptive what that means, but it is that it moves the color presets to the palette tab in the global styles. So there will now be a palette section in the sidebar, in the right sidebar under the global styles, where you see palettes, and then you click on it and it gives you all the palettes that are set for the themes, or the style variations, or something. So it’s a nice UI change. It also follows quite a few other design tools that have a similar feature. So I’m really glad about that. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Okay, the next change is interesting for developers, because it’s a change to the register block style function. This function now accepts an array of blocks and it used to accept only a string with the block name. So what it means, you can now register a block style for multiple blocks at once with this one function, and you don’t have to do it separately. So this is nice if you have some common style that you would like to apply to a few blocks, you can do it at once. Now with register block site function. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, that’s an excellent explanation. Thank you so much. Because I wasn’t quite sure when I read this beyond what actually changed, but now you can have the green border with the yellow background on not only the paragraph block, but also the group block as well, as the cover block, so you don’t have to write the code multiple times. And then, the next thing next is more about the block library. So some blocks have additional features, the list block has now block class name on the list, that is really, yeah, people were waiting to style the list block. It’s now the WP dash block dash list class, so you can style the overall list as well. I think the list items already had their own class names. *Magdalena Paciorek*: And also, the new variation was added to the embeds block in Bluesky. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: What’s Bluesky? *Magdalena Paciorek*: I don’t know, I have no idea. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Bluesky. And yeah, the proliferation of social networks is kind of going on and on and on. And Bluesky is a new social network that comes close to Twitter now, and it was actually founded by a former Twitter developer, and it kind of opened up now to the public. It was for two years now, just on invitation only, but now more people can go into Bluesky. They’re still not ready to open source it, but I think they at least open it up. So now you can have your social embed Bluesky posts as well with the embed block. So make block popover component public, meaning that now developers can also use it. And that is an additional block toolbar that you can use to kind of put your own stuff in there. I’m not quite, and have your own navigation pretty much in the block toolbar. I really am eager to try that out. I only saw some WooCommerce implementations, but I have not yet seen any documentation about that. So it definitely has the label needs dev note on the PR, but I’m excited about for any extension that is in the block editor. *Magdalena Paciorek*: And the next thing is a new keyboard shortcut was added. This shortcut, which is common G or Ctrl G, you can now create a group from the selected box. So we can select a few blocks and then with the shortcut, the group will be created for the… *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, that’s really nice. Yeah, it removes the searching for menu items that are kind of multiple levels deep in the block toolbar settings. The next one is enhanced block outlines and selection interactions. That means that you know where interactions happen, and there’s a blue outline on certain sections, and group blocks and all that. I think that has been a major improvement on the UI when you create content, that you actually have the outlines where you are and what you’re doing. I think with the sync patterns, those outlines also become quite important to signal where is the place where I can override some of that from sync pattern. ### Documentation *Magdalena Paciorek*: In this version of Gutenberg also, the documentation was updated. We have quite a lot of items on the list, but I think it’s worth mentioning there were some new pages added to the interactivity API documentation about and FAQ. So I think it’s really important to read about it, as the interactivity API will have become more and more important in themes, especially in theme creation. I think it’s good to learn about it and I’m happy that the team provides the documentation for it. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: And I just want to highlight that for the interactivity API, there is some change that in the block JSON, you started to put in view script and that changed to view script module. So for the developers who have already been testing out some of the interactivity API directives, that’s a slight change. It’s not a breaking change, because I think they put in the controls, but just make sure that that is something to update. Yeah, that’s pretty much all I wanted to point out, except I mentioned it before that the pattern overrides, they’re now using block bindings API. So the pattern overrides are its own source for the block bindings API, but it follows the same block markup notation. So you could use a pattern and rewrite some of the block bindings or some of the overrides in code if you’ve ever wanted to do that. But I think it opens up the feature to maybe even be available for themes to add it to the theme patterns in further releases. Not for this one, but because it uses a common API. And if that is already in the markup of a pattern that comes with a theme in the patterns folder, those overrides could even be updated through a theme update or those patterns could even be updated through a theme update. So when the theme developer has a new way of designing those patterns, they could override the certain things and then every site who has that theme gets an update to it. That is actually a dream of a block theme developer right now, but I think with the pattern overrides using that block bindings API, it might come to pass. Definitely not in 6.6, but maybe 6.7 or 6.8. All right, I’m talking maybe I haven’t rolled that out, but it’s definitely on the list or it’s on the roadmap so to speak, to make those extensible. So we’ll see how that happens.  ### Gutenberg 18.5 That concludes our Gutenberg 18.4 and we are going right into Gutenberg 18.5 was released this week. The release lead was Vincente Canales with 295 PRs, just short of 300 PRs. That’s a mammoth release. There were also more contributors, and 71 contributors and 10 of them with first time contributors. So great. It’s not surprising that there are so many PRs in there, because Gutenberg 18.5 is the last Gutenberg plugin release that goes into WordPress 6.6 from the feature set. So everything after that, and if it’s a new feature or something that will not be part of WordPress 6.6, only bug fixes get in. So if there was an enhancement that needed to be made and to be valid for 6.6, it needed to get into that plugin release. And as we all know, if it weren’t for the last minute, not a whole lot would get done in the world, so we were all kind of just in time on some of the features. And I promise you we would talk about some of the post summary updates. In 18.5, we had quite a few that were the sidebar for the documentation settings, or document settings, or post settings, or page settings. So you get some post format controls. They moved around the URL and the author on it, the trash button has been removed; it was too prominent. It’s now in the three.menu, where you also find the duplicate post feature and also the remove feature. And then, there is a post sticky setting is now a tarter. Yay. Anything else that if I get something? Oh yeah, the revisions panel is also under the three point menu, so if you want to look at revisions, you need to go three point menu and then click on the revisions. So it’s all a little bit well organized. Some of them new designs or the alignment was kind of adjusted and some of the features were not removed. They were in the three.menu. I think it’s important to know that because it looks a little bit different in the new version. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yes, it definitely does. I also checked it out and at first you might be surprised, there is no trash button, there’s no revisions panel. But yeah, it’s just hidden under the menu, so it’s good to know about it. And then the next change in Gutenberg is how the custom CSS is handled, because you can add your custom CSS to override the ones that you can choose from the controls. Before, whenever you change the variation, the style variation, you would lose the changes to custom CSS that you’ve made. But now they are saved, and so you can switch the variations and your custom CSS will override the variation, the style that is in the variation. So yeah, actually this was needed, so it’s great. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, I actually don’t think that’s an enhancement. I think that’s a bug fix, because there was pretty much the expectation of anybody who put in custom CSS, that they are not disappearing when you’re just going to switch on the variations. You can make the argument on the other side as well, but I think the user put in the custom CSS, because neither the theme nor the variations gave them what they needed. So yes, that’s definitely a good bug fix. I don’t know if you checked out the data views, just as on our aside, the data views, they’re really coming together, and I like the modern look of that, and I wish they would come earlier to WPAdmin. But if you go to the make design site, Joen Asmussen just showed off the designs for the media library, and to bring some of that new admin also to the media library. So they have great things to come. And I am going to share that design share from, I share the link to the design update, but Joen Asmussen in the show notes, so you can look up what’s in store for the next version or at least for the next time. That was just an aside. Yeah, I like the grid views, I like the layouts, I like the different actions. The only thing that I don’t like is when you look at the drop-downs in the data views on the right-hand side, they’re on top. They’re all kind of overlapping and it’s hard sometimes to see which one level deep am I looking at now. And for what I think there needs a little bit more refinement, but I think they’re really glorious. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yes, because there are quite a few options to customize it to your needs. I really like it. I really like it that you can bring the thumbnail featured image to the list. It’s great. I think it was missing in all the current WPAdmin list, but here you can just switch it on with a click. It’s great. And also, I think the metadata, I don’t know if at the moment, but at some point I think it’ll be able to also switch it on the list view. So yeah, it’s very useful. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to what other plugin developers are going to do with it for their own plugins, because of course that’s a pre-built component. Why not use it, when everybody else knows how to use it already? So use it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: But it’s not ready for extending, right? *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, no, well, not as the old admin. If you have in your plugin create a list view of something, some data, like you go out and grab some data from Spotify or something like that, and you want to display that in an admin section, you could use the list view component. That’s a public component that you could use for that particular plugin page. If you use custom post types, it’ll still be the old one, because that’s just the same interface, but because it’s not yet available for posts, it’s only for pages. So though there are some things that still need to be happening, of course. But yeah, if you have a separate page for your plugin settings or something like that, use it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: You can use the component, yeah. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: You can use the component, yeah. And it has I think some good documentation on these things. Yeah. All right. Where were we, side of the data views? *Magdalena Paciorek*: I think we’re on the background image, add support for relative theme path, URLs, and top level JSON styles. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: What that means is that you can now set a background image for the body content if you want to through the theme JSON, and add it to the assets folder of your theme. And then everybody who uses the theme can use the background image. You don’t have to upload it through the media library to get it to be recognized as a background image, which is one step further that any theme developer would want the user to have to go. That sounded weird, but yeah. Yeah, you’ll figure it out. So the next thing is, as we had the default font size spacing in 18.4, I think in 18.5 theme JSON, or it also comes with default spacing sizes. So you can create your own presets for spacing the margins and the dimension, or the dimension controls through the JSON. And it’s theme JSON version three, so you need to look at the documentation that’s also been updated. *Magdalena Paciorek*: And you can also create and edit shadows in the global styles now. So there is a new control for that, but I must say I haven’t tested it, so I don’t really know how it works. But it’s great to see it, that you can create it in no code in the editor. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: There will be in the global styles, there is now typography, and colors, and layouts, and now you also have a fourth one that’s called shadows. And then you can log all the things that you want to style on the shadow. It’s the color, it’s the angle, it’s the blur character and that. So you can really create your own styles, and it shows up on every block that supports box shadows, but it’s not all of them. And then there are presets as well that come in the natural, deep, sharp, so you can give them names as well, and add them to your global styles. So it’s the position, the blur, and the spread, and outside range set on the shadow. So they will show up with the core shadows, unless you disable the core shadows through the same JSON. So it’s not entirely, you cannot do this through the interface, but yeah, you can definitely create some nice shadows. It’s almost as good as gradients. Yeah, I like all these design tools that you can use. So the block style variations mechanism is now extended, so you can do section styling. I think we mentioned a similar PR earlier today, but you can create sections, and then you can do block style variations for that. Oh yeah, we did this, that you can apply certain styles to multiple blocks. Now you can create sections, and then attach block styles for that. I think we should have better naming conventions, but it’s what we have right now. We need to make sure, because we have the style variations, we have block style variations, then we have section styling. It’s all kind of getting a little bit convoluted, complex, but we’ll figure it all out. I’m definitely sure that once everything is in place, we can combine it and do it how we need it. *Magdalena Paciorek*: And so, the next feature is block bindings, and especially the block bindings panel that is now added to the block inspector. So when you bind certain attributes from the block to the post meta, and then they will show up in the block inspector in the site panel, so that you’ll know which attributes are connected to the meta. So I think this is really nice, because you get to see what is connected. And before, I think it was only, you can only tell it is binded by the violet like icon, or something like that, by the color, but there was no way of telling what is connected to what. So yeah, that’s definitely an improvement. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah, definitely an improvement. Yeah. Yeah, the icon was that kind of connector icon in purple on the block toolbar, but you only could see that per block. But the bindings panel, you see all the pieces, all the data that is connected to that block. And where it also tells you, because you can, for the block bindings, you can assign custom data sources. So it also adds the data source to the inspector controls. So you know okay, this comes from post meta, this comes from another data source, so that’s nice too. I really like it. And they also, that comes together with that, allow editing of the post meta source. So if you have a URL somewhere or an additional data point in the block, you can actually change it there. And it’s also then updated in the post meta table that comes with it. They didn’t put in a nice video or so they used to do it with the PRs. Oh, here it is. So now you can edit in the block canvas, change the data, and then it will be updated also throughout every block that uses that metadata for that particular post item. So if you have that binding also for the archive templates, it’ll also be updated in the archive templates, wherever that particular post meta is showing up. So that’s a pretty cool feature. I think that is something that was never possible with WordPress until this time, that you can actually have additional custom fields be edited through core. You always needed a plugin for that. Most developers went with advanced custom fields, but there are also others that allow you that. It’s certainly not as rich as advanced custom fields. So you can’t do field groups and all that, but it definitely gets there sooner or later. And I really like it. Yeah, it’s really cool. That can be, it also an answer to what happens to all the meta boxes that were on the bottom of the screen. So if you bind them to a block, then you don’t have to create a custom block for that. You just need to create the binding for it. So I think it gets there where a lot of people wanted the block editor to be in year two. Well we are in year, year seven, but they needed a lot of other things to come in place before this happens. *Magdalena Paciorek*: But this is such a powerful API, the block bindings API. It’s also one of the most important APIs that are coming to WordPress right now. And it’s worth mentioning and it’s worth getting interested in that and learning how to use it. Especially if we build with blocks, we don’t really want to have these meta boxes on the bottom of the editor. So this is a great way to get rid of them. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: And also, for plugin developers, that they don’t need to go through all the hoops to create blocks for some of the things that they could do just in block bindings. There are two articles on the developer blog, one part one and part two, where the block binding has been a tutorial on using the block binding API. And I will share the links to those in the show notes. So Justin Tadlock had one that says, building a review site with block bindings. And the part one covers the custom fields and block variations. Part two will be released later in a couple of days. And that is about how to actually create input things in the inspector controls. So it’s kind of a predecessor. So if you don’t want to wait for WordPress six to come out, you can use that variation, but sometimes it might be just more user-friendly to use those inspector controls and control them yourselves, rather than use what comes from the editor. Of course, we need to find a way if we could actually switch them off at some point. So I’ll share those articles in the show notes of this podcast. All right, again, a lot of documentation went in this release documentation, updates in this release, it’s all about components and blocks, and I think they updated the JSON docs for a lot of components. So they actually are automatically graded from for the documentation. So I think these are the changes for that. Check them out. All right. Wow, this was a long show.  Well, it’s probably about an hour. So I think we come to an end of this show. Magdalena, thank you so much for being here and going through this with me. Explained quite a few things that I didn’t understand. So I’m really happy that you joined me today. When people wanted to reach you or connect with you, what would be a good place to catch up with you? *Magdalena Paciorek*: I think the best place would be on LinkedIn, because that’s what I use as social media. I’m not that active on social media, not like I’m everywhere. But yeah, if you reach me out on LinkedIn, then I’ll get the message. Yes. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Yeah. So I’m going to share that information as well in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want our listeners to know about your company, or your presentations, or there’s an article coming out, I know. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Yeah. Well, I need to start writing, but I would like to invite everyone to my talk at WordCamp Europe, happening next week. I’ll be covering some of the things that we’ve talked about today, like pattern overrides or block bindings. And also, I’ll be sharing some of my, I don’t know, experiments also that I’ve done with Gutenberg with custom blocks. So I hope this will serve as inspiration of how we might create post types in the future. Maybe we could actually create them now in this new way, a new block way, block editor way, not in the custom fields way we used to do, or how it’s still popular to create them. And this talk, I think it’s mainly, I’ve made it for people who build websites for clients, so like agencies and freelancers that maybe want to take a look at how you could build this typical for agency websites, in the new approach, like you build it with blocks, with some custom code as well, but in a different way that you would do it with, for example, ACF. So yeah, so I invite everyone. I’ll be talking I think in the morning on Saturday, on the second day of WordCamp. So I see you in Torino. I’m super excited. *Birgit Pauli-Haack*: Right. Yeah. And I’m definitely going to be there, unless it’s Saturday, I need to see, I’m seeing on track one, so I’m not quite sure if I’m going to be there. But I will definitely catch it on the rerun through the live stream video. And I will share that also on that particular single post on the Gutenberg times about the WordCamp Europe. So yeah, and I’ll see everybody who is going to be in Europe and in Turin next week, and I hear the others on the next Gutenberg Changelog podcast.  So as always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is podcast number 101. And if you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to [Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com](mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com). That’s [Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com](mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com). And if you like our podcast, please write us a review on any of the podcast directories and it would help for other people to find us. All right, so thank you all so much, and I’ll see you around next time. Bye-bye. *Magdalena Paciorek*: Bye.