Gutenberg Changelog #102 – WordCamp Europe, WordPress 6.6 and Gutenberg 18.6

Gutenberg Changelog 102 with Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack

In this episode, Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordCamp Europe, WordPress 6.6 and Gutenberg 18.6.

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Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special guest: Jessica Lyschik

WordCamp Europe

Upcoming events

WordPress 6.6

Gutenberg 18.6

What’s new in Gutenberg 18.6

What’s in the works

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 102nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordCamp Europe, WordPress 6.6, Gutenberg 18.6. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at Gutenberg Times, and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future program. As co-host, I’m thrilled to have again Jessica Lyschick with me. She is a Front end and WordPress Developer at GREYD, co-lead of development of Twenty Twenty Four theme, and was the co-lead organizer of WordCamp Germany last year. We both just returned from WordCamp Europe in Torino. Welcome to the show again, Jessica, how are you today?

Jessica Lyschik: Well, I’m good. I finally got some much needed rest the past couple of days. Some extra sleep because you do not get that during Wordcamp Europe as always, or any WordCamp. Yeah, but I’m doing good. Glad that you have me on the show again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I had the same thing. It took me about a day and a half to really recover.

Jessica Lyschik: Monday was hard. Monday was hard. It was like, “Ugh, I don’t want to get up at all.” But I had to go grocery shopping because the fridge was empty.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So in that case Lieferando is also a good place to get food delivered.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I did have sushi in the evening, so I did not cook on Monday at all. It’s like, “No, not today.”

WordCamp Europe

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. So one of my takeaways from WordCamp Europe is that Jessica is one of the most courageous people I know. Not only did you prepare a presentation on the Twenty Twenty Four theme pushing default themes forward, you also participated in a live onstage speed building challenge against Rich Tabor. And then during Q&A, you challenged Matt Mullenweg to also participate in one. So let’s talk about that.

On this show, we talk quite a bit about the Twenty Twenty Four theme and appeared with you as also with Maggie Cabrera. So we covered how versatile it is and also about the kudos it received around the community, so contract relations. And in the post on the Gutenberg Times, seven talks about block themes and beyond at WordCamp Europe. The talk is listed, your talk is listed. Including a link for the recording. So if you don’t know dear listeners, much about Twenty Twenty Four or the nature of open nature of default themes, that’s a great talk to watch on the rerun. So let’s talk about the speed building challenge, Jessica.

Jessica Lyschik: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For those listeners who don’t know, Jamie Marsland, a longtime WordPress educator and YouTuber invented a format and invited WebPress community members to recreate sites on his YouTube channel. I’ll share a playlist of the five that were already done in the show notes, but you can see Rich Tabor, Justin Tadlock, Nick Diego, and others competing with fellows from the page builder community. I’m sure Jessica, you also noticed that they’re all dudes.

Jessica Lyschik: Except for one. There was, I think it was Kim Coleman.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, right. Yes.

Jessica Lyschik: Was in the second one, but that’s what I complained to Jamie. It’s like, “There’s not so much diversity in your lineup there.” And then Jamie was like, “Oh, can you come to work in Europe and do it there?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. So you went against Rich Tabor and how did that work out? What did you have to build and how did you go about it?

Jessica Lyschik: So that was a really fun thing to do. So before we started, Jamie teased us with the Lingscars website. If you don’t know this one or maybe you have seen it before, lingscars.com, I think is the link. It’s a very crazy website. It’s like something from the early ’00s with overstuffed images everywhere and patterns and crazy going on website. Which is like a cognitive nightmare, you could call it maybe. And I saw it already and I was like, “Oh no, please not this one. Anything but not this one.” But Jamie was just kidding. So he was trying to tease us there. And then he actually picked a website from the WordPress Rock Showcase, which is for the Noguchi Museum. And at first when you look at it looks like very simple, but it has some interesting details to it. So yeah, that was a great challenge and something definitely doable in 30 minutes as a rough sketch or more detailed sketch depending on how skilled you are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right, so then how did you start?

Jessica Lyschik: So we got first a couple of minutes where we could look at the site ourselves to get the first idea in your head, what blocks do I use for this part or how do I make this part? And I’m usually someone who starts with the header, so I have to get the header done because otherwise it feels like the site is not really done. And then I moved on to the content and I didn’t pay so much attention to what Rich was doing because I was so much in my own tunnel and I need to get stuff done. I cannot look over what is he doing. But Jamie interrupted every now and then, so of course you cannot go like, “Ah, shut up.” But yeah, that was a really, really fun thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can imagine that it was a little bit of a disconcerting because we are all people who are in our bubbles when we work hard, concentrated, and then interruptions are actually setting us back. But Jamie had a different job. He needed to entertain the audience there, yeah. So yeah, it was really interesting to see. But you did very well. So the header that you’re talking about, there was a sticky header, right? No, there was a sticky column.

Jessica Lyschik: There was a sticky column in there. And I must say we looked at, it was like, “Oh my God, how I’m going to do it?” And then Rich explained it before going into it. I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I’m going to do that too.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s what I really found that watching you and Rich, it taught me a lot how to approach building websites, building themes or websites in the site editor. And that happens with every speed building challenge session that I watched. It’s a special way of building in public and problem solving in public. The time constraint is added. It’s an added thrill of course, but to show what’s possible once one gets over the learning curve because starting out with block themes and site editor, there’s certainly a learning curve there, yeah. And the difficulty that you encounter needs to be separated vs is that part of my learning process or is it going to be that way when I know how to do it? Is it still difficult? And I think a few people think that the learning process is part of how it’s always going to be and it never will be.

You’re going to get faster and faster, and you both did a great job recreating the website in 30 minutes. But it’s how fast you can get with a prototype. That was really astonishing for me and the visual idea out of your head. But of course you were all following a site that was already built. So all the discussions with the client beforehand were already done. What’s the color? What’s the content, what’s the image going to look like? But with the site, you can go very fast with your first prototypes and have a conversation started with the client. So this is definitely a good thing to watch.

Jessica Lyschik: And I think it’s also a good exercise for anyone who wants to try this themselves, especially if you’re a developer. Because I had this discussion with Collina I think before WordCamp Europe that if you code and are just in the code every day, all day, like I am usually. Using the site editor is so different because it brings you to another level of how do I implement this? How do I recreate visually what I have in my head? So I need to know, okay, I can use this block or that block, this block has this setting or feature I can use there. And I think it’s also very useful if you go on the other side, on the user side if you will, so you understand, okay, what are people struggling with and how can you make the code or the user experience better so that the users at the end of the day will also have it easier to create something.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a very good point. And with WordPress having a set of UI components, I think it’s really important for a developer to see how they work from a user perspective because that’s the learned experience that users come to WordPress with. And as a developer you don’t have to make those decisions anymore on the UI. But sometimes you need to make them, but then you have to decide, okay, where do I part from the WordPress components and build my own components. But I think knowing how far you can push the WordPress components in a user interface is really interesting to see, yeah. So that was the speed building challenge on live stage. So what on earth drove you to challenge Matt during the Q&A to participate in one?

Jessica Lyschik: Well, sometimes you have these stupid ideas that are just randomly popping up in your head and you’re like, “Not bad.” I do have to say though that I did text my colleagues, “What do you think if I asked Matt this question?” And immediately I got three replies, “Do it, do it.” It was like, “Okay, I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a good question.” So I went up to the mic and I intentionally asked the question, not that I am challenging him to do one, but I intentionally said it, “When are you going to do one without adding me to the part of it?” So yeah that, maybe you can say escalated quickly into a challenge against Matt positively.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Positively. Yeah, it came to an actionable thing.

Jessica Lyschik: Yes. And yeah, I’m going to do it. So I’m not backing out of this. I mean, I’ve done one already on a stage in front of a couple hundred people. The room was so full but I didn’t really notice it. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You got into your flow, yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: … got into my flow. And then you ignore the audience. I heard the questions. Sometimes people ask questions specifically, but that’s like my world ended at my screen during that 30 minutes. I’ve done it already so I can do it again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: To catch up with our listeners. So what happened on stage was Matt said, “Are you going to be the one I’m going to do it against? Are you in?” And Jessica said, “Yes.” And then there was a side note from Matt to Matías Ventura who was sitting in the front row said, “You’ve got to train me.”

Jessica Lyschik: No, I don’t think so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And, yeah. After the conversation, was there any back and forth from stage? Was there any conversation afterwards yet about that?

Jessica Lyschik: No, nothing in particular. I did meet Matt at the after party for a quick, “Hi, what was that?” No, it was very funny. We took a few pictures, his sister took a few pictures of us and I will do a video on my YouTube channel about this fairly soon. Maybe it’s already out once this podcast is published. If not, you will find that on my YouTube channel.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent, yes. And we definitely share the link to the YouTube channel in the show notes. And well, this comes out Saturday or Sunday. We are recording this on June. What’s the date? 21st?

Jessica Lyschik: 21st, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: 2024. So it’ll come out either 23rd or the 24th, so yes. You can also follow along on the summer update by Matt Mullenweg in the show notes with the video to the keynote presentation. But there’s also a link to the Q&A part of the keynote presentation that’s always separated out where you can recreate or revisit the exchange between Jessica and Matt. So I haven’t finished reflecting of WordCamp. Have you any first takeaways that you’d like to share?

Jessica Lyschik: No, I try to relax this week mostly, to be honest. I did think about a couple things. So first of all, it was an intense week for me as well. We were there with a great team. So that has been a really fun week, hanging out with everyone and WordCamp Europe was, again, so fast, passed by so fast and was so exhausting. But even if it’s physically and mentally exhausting, it’s also you always have these positive emotions afterwards because you talk to so many people. You see them, some even just once a year at WordCamp Europe because that’s the place where you all meet at that time and it’s just so positive to see everyone.

Again, having conversations in person, which is so different from even if you do it in Slack or on Twitter or wherever else. So I was also very happy to see that booth of grade was fairly well visited and many people come around and ask what are we doing? What’s going on? What our next plans are? And also having conversations with other companies’ developers. It’s like on everyday things. It’s not just about what are you doing and how can I copy you? Or whatever bad things you might think of. But it’s a very often very interesting conversations to hear other people’s point of views and see what are they struggling with, what have they success with? Yeah, overall it was just so much fun again and yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, meeting all the people that you are friends with in the word community, but always mostly see on Slack or in GitHub on issues and PRs and all of a sudden you sit next to them and have coffee and eat with them. And it’s just almost like a big family reunion. But there were, I think about 70 sponsors there. So I think the WordPress communities is really coming back from what happened in the pandemic, really interesting to support those in-person meetings. And I’m not done yet, but I think playground is something that I’m going to play with quite a bit. And it was part of the keynote as well. There was also a talk by Adam Chylinski and he also had a question for Matt about documentation with playground. Yeah, so that’s certainly one takeaway for me, but I have so many conversations about things.

I don’t know if I get them all together into just a list to follow up on things. Yeah, so that’s about WordCamp Europe. I think there’s a lot of recap posts coming out of the community. I saw a few from sponsors already, also from community members that were new at WordCamp, I like that. I met quite a few people that were new to WordCamps at all, and they were really amazed on how the community reacted, how they get in contact very quickly with people and have the conversations be around what they care most about. Then that’s a business and WordPress. 

Announcements

So now we get to the announcements that I have for our listeners. If you listen to this over the weekend, there are two events that are happening next week. One is the developer hours, what’s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6, that’s on June 25th.

And it’s Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego talking about anything and everything about WordPress 6.64. Block themes, website builders, and maybe also a little bit about plugin developers. If you listen to this episode after June 25th, you can always catch the recording on the YouTube channel of WordPress. There’s a developer hours playlist where you can also find the one for next week, but also the 24 previous developer hours, just in case you were looking for those. Also, next week, and you can join me, Isabel Bryson and others at the Hallway Hangout. When we explore the grid layouts, that’s on June 26th, a day later at 11 UTC. The developer hours are on 1500 UTC. But hallway hangouts are 11 UTC, and there will be a short demo of what’s coming to WordPress 6.6 and what cool layouts you can create with this new grid layout feature. And we also chat about what’s in the works for the following WordPress releases because the WordPress way is to release fast small version, a minimal viable product kind of thing, and then iterate involving the feedback from users and other developers.

So in contrast to the developer hours that are entail formal presentations, Hallway Hangouts are more like an informal discussions to get feedback from the designers and from the developers and from site builders on what’s worked on and to see what people think about things. So these are two events for next week. Also, Hallway Hangouts are always recorded and will be shared in a recap post on the make core blog and also in the outreach channel. That’s fairly, it’s not new, but there was a FSE outreach experiment, but that was transformed into an official outreach channel where people who are not contributors can come in and ask questions. Ask if something that their experience is wanted or is the right way or if that’s a bug. That’s before you actually get your information together to file a bug report, you first need to know is it really a bug? What do other people think? And also if it’s not clear, if there’s some confusion. That really helps, those discussions really help inform the developers on what’s not working right yet.

And most of the time we put the bug report together and put it together in the GitHub repo. Yeah, that’s about outreach channel in the WordPress make slack. Come and join us or just come in and if you have a question. That’s also where we announce the Hallway Hangouts the developer hours, and also share some links from GitHub repo about things that need to be discussion. There’s also a GitHub team where extenders signed up or are added to it that want to give feedback on work in progress. So Gutenberg developers can then just ping that team and say, “Well, we need some feedback here. Can you come in?” And right now there are 20 people in the team, but we can always use more because not everybody has time to answer the ping when it comes because we all have lives and we have work to do. So all right, you are in the group, Jessica? In the outreach group?

Jessica Lyschik: I’m in the outreach channel. I don’t know if I’m in the team. Probably I’m in the block themers team. It’s a different one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a different one. Yeah, but I can check and would you want to go on it?

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, for sure. Absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah, then I’ll add you to it if you’re not-

Jessica Lyschik: I mean, I’ve been asking many questions in the outreach channel already.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, so you said somebody needs to. You want to return the favor and give feedback on something.

Jessica Lyschik: If I can.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: … post my 2 cents, why not?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you have opinions. We’ll travel. 

What’s Released – WordPress 6.6

Speaking of which, WordPress 6.6 beta 3 was released this week. And the post lists four different ways you can test the new version and it’s definitely time to go and make sure your sites plugins and themes are compatible. That’s always due diligence before a release. And if you do that and you report the bugs that you find. Well, what’s not working right, there might still be a chance to change it, but the window is closing. I hear rumblings that there will be a silent beta four because there were a few things that still needed another beta. But the release candidate is set for June 25th next week, release candidate one, which stops all development mostly, and one or two bug fixes might get in, but it’s also the time where the field guide comes out, and that’s also string freeze. So the translation teams of the 70 to 200 polyglots teams have a chance to translate the new version in their respective languages. So there string freeze, so there’s probably nothing’s going to change a lot after that.

So there are four ways to test the version, and I think the easiest one is to use playground for it. There’s a link on it too. And if you use the playground plugin on your own site, you can actually create a sandbox of your current site so you don’t have to spin up a staging area or locally install and make all the copies and blah, blah, blah. So you install that. It’s still experimental so it might not work with your site, but if you use it, you can spin up a site and then add the new beta version to the playground and then you can test your site right there. So that’s definitely a great testing ground for playground. I say playground a lot.

Jessica Lyschik: It happens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Have you experimented with playground and how you can use it for your development?

Jessica Lyschik: I have researched a bit about it, how we can use it actually for internal stuff at GREYD. An idea we came up with was for support, maybe if you need to quickly spin up a site and make sure that you can recreate this in a complete default state, for example. But that was shortly before WordCamp Europe, so we haven’t dug into it that much yet. But there are definitely ideas how we can make use of playground to also work within our company with it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I had an interesting conversation just this week with Beatrice Fialo and Sarah Norris. They were showing off the workflow that Autommattic uses for theme development and version control, and they start with Playground, install the Gutenberg plugin and create block theme plugin and then save everything through the create block theme plugin save. Because that allows you to save everything that’s in the database through the global styles and all the settings into the fire system of a theme. And then connecting playground to GitHub. It automatically uses the changes and creates a pull request on GitHub. And that was really, it’s almost like magic. I’m putting together a recap post for that, but that’s going to be on make core blog. But then the outreach channel, you can already see the videos and the discussion about that. So just a side note about playground and what you can do with it and how mind-boggling that can be.

Jessica Lyschik: That’s also very interesting. I think. I’ll have to check that out because we did have some struggles on working with the great theme, when we prepared it for the repository. It’s like how do you bring those changes that someone makes in the editor inside the patterns, how do you actually bring that into version control? So yeah, that’s definitely something to check out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, one caveat, create block theme team that creates a block or works on the plugin. They haven’t integrated patterns yet, so the pattern saving that doesn’t work yet, but that’s definitely on the roadmap for one of the future versions, especially after WordPress 6.6 they’re looking at the sync pattern part. But they also probably need to wait until the core team has a first version about the theme related patterns, sync patterns in themes so they can…

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, makes sense.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … work with that as well, yeah. So there is a little bit of a time delay between what core is doing and then how the create theme block plugin team. Wow, that’s a muscle. Is catching up with it and working with it. They were ahead on the font library. They were testing the interfaces already in the plugin and then they had to take it out again once the core was having a block library feature in there. But we’re getting a little sidetracked. I just noticed playground, as I said, playground is what I’m going to say a lot about. But the dev notes for 6.6 are coming out already in preparation of the field guide, which will be published around, not always exactly when the release candidates publish, but it’s around next week. I will put in the show notes, the list of the already published dev notes. So we have four of them about the block editor. One is about the side wide images in WebPress 6.6, how you can…

Jessica Lyschik: Background images.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: What did I say?

Jessica Lyschik: You said only side wide images.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, I forgot the keyword in there. That was the background images in reference 6.6, how you can make it in theme JSON as well as online with a site editor, how you can add it. Also, the grade theme block plugin also saves that into the assets folder if you want to. There is a little feature for that already built in the plugin. Then the next one is about the theme.json version 3 schema, which will be expanded with features from 6.6. There’s a caveat there. If you are building themes that are used for older versions, don’t upgrade yet to your theme JSONs yet to version 3 because that only is for WordPress 6 and younger. And I think the dev note, I think it explains that quite a bit. So look at that. And then grid layout type summarizes all the things that come in for grid layout with Drag and Drop, with the Rowspan, Colspan and others.

And then we have the unified extensibility APIs in 6.6, that’s a little cryptic. And the unified word actually refers to unifying post editor and site editor. And the extensibility is about the slot fills or the inspector controls that in the sidebar. And now you can, as a plugin developer, your sidebar items will now also show in the post editor, site editor and template editor. So the only thing you need to do is figure out if you don’t want them to show in all the three of them, you need to figure out where in the editor experience your users are. So you can switch them on and off. But yeah, Riad has put in a comprehensive dev note about the slot fields that are available and where you find documentation about that. Anything strikes you as really, “Oh, I need to root this.”

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I definitely have to check on everything basically. So yeah, I’m looking forward to the background images. I think this may enhance the overall design process a little bit now that you can, and you do not have to make one group block around everything and then put a background image in there because that’s already possible. That you can now just define it’s like what? And do not have add extra blocks to tackle this. Theme.json version 3 is definitely interesting because that was what was I struggling with even during the speed build because of a mistake on my own, but not a big deal at all. I got around it. And yeah, Grid is something I’ve been looking forward to, so I’ve been already experimenting with it a bit. So I will definitely come next week to the Hallway Hangout, was it right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The Hallway Hangout, yeah.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you will see me there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And just as a side note, Hallway Hangout is something that tries to recreate the experience in a WordCamp hallway track where you just go from the sessions to the sponsor area and all that and you meet people in the hallway and you start conversations about things. So that’s the hallway, why we like that so much. 

So there are also other posts around 6.6 that are not necessarily dev notes for the release. There is a roster of design tools per block. It says it’s the 6.6 edition, but it’s a snapshot of all the additions since WordPress 6.6. And it gives you a table of all the core blocks and what they support. Do they support borders? Do they support the background image? Do they support shadows or alignment or typography color? Because not all the design tools are available for all blocks. And it’s always really hard to, not hard, but it’s an additional hassle to find out which one it is you put on list.

Jessica Lyschik: Because sometimes you expect one setting at one block and it’s not there. And I remember we discussed this probably a year ago or even more, I don’t know. And I was like, “Ah, why isn’t there a list where I can see what’s available where?” And there was a list.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Now is there…

Jessica Lyschik: So thank you for working on this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. Yeah. It gets me to study the source code of Gutenberg quite a bit on the block.json there to put this together. We are also working on an idea on making that available dynamically so not somebody has to go through all the code and because it’s already there. Riad had a nice site together that’s called Block Book as a prototype for that, but he of course didn’t have the time to pursue it any further. So maybe we’re going to revive that too, because that took quite a few hours to put together.

Jessica Lyschik: I’m sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Maybe I missed something too. Humans available.

Jessica Lyschik: We all make mistakes, no worries.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s how I learn. Another post that’s out there is on the developer blog, that’s the introduction to the overrides in sync patterns by Nick Diego. And he put a nice introduction together and nice examples on how that works with the block bindings, API, and certainly something to look at. Although it’s mostly user interfaces, but the custom fields still need to be created and registered in PHP. So it’s a hybrid thing, but once they’re there, your users are enabled to assign patterns and to the custom fields.

And the third one that I wanted to point out and share in the show notes is the update on the data views by Anne McCarthy. And she just put together a very comprehensive post about what can be used, how you can use it, where the documentation is for, and also where you can follow along and leave feedback. So that’s certainly interesting for everyone. All right. Oh, I saw a prototype of a notes app for Max that uses Gutenberg outside of WordPress as well as the data components outside of WordPress just in a Mac app. That’s really cool that those things can happen without WordPress being involved.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s bigger than we ever thought it would be. 

Gutenberg 18.6

So that brings us to that latest Gutenberg plugin release, 18.6. And I think it’s always confusing for people to figure out, okay, which feature from the plugin goes into the next release? And the 6.6 release is between Gutenberg plugin release 17.8 to 18.5. So with 18.6, all the new features don’t go into 6.6. Some of the bug fixes will make it into 6.6 with a certain backport process that the core lead and the core editor leads from the release decide upon.

Enhancements

So what’s new in the Gutenberg 16.6? I think the biggest piece for it is that the post content block, quote block and verse block, also getting the background image feature assigned to it. They’re supported now. So you can add background image and for a quote that’s really cool because that’s what you do for social image for instance. So you can put the quote in a block, put a background image there. Take a screenshot and share it on Mastodon or X or Blue Sky or something like that. And it really is cool. The same with verse block for some of our poets and the post content block is the block that is in the loop for…

Jessica Lyschik: Or in the templates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, in the templates. Pulling out the content from a post. Of course the background image there shouldn’t probably it be a whole lot of distractions in there, but that’s a different story. Yeah, that’s a design tool.

Jessica Lyschik: That’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Have you been waiting for this feature?

Jessica Lyschik: I don’t think I would need it immediately, but maybe in the future it might become useful. I think the quote blocks one is definitely the one where you or where people will make most use out of it. But for the post content block, I mean you can imagine there might be some very subtle background like small dots or small dashes or something like that. It’s just giving a texture to it. Maybe an interesting design idea to work with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I have seen some websites. Not recently though, but it was more in the ’90s and early ’00s where there was a paper background on top.

Jessica Lyschik: Oh, yeah. I remember.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So maybe we get those back. Yeah, it’s a nostalgic way of thinking going things, yeah. Do you have seen anything in the change log that you wanted to point out?

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think this custom CSS handling to be consistent with block global sites. I did not notice it was inconsistent to be honest. But it’s a good change that things get aligned and work the same way as other parts of it. Because sometimes it’s the most frustrating thing when you expect something to work a certain way and it doesn’t, for whatever reason. There might be historical reasons or nobody thought of it yet. So yeah, that’s definitely an interesting change to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Reducing the element of surprise that if something happens you didn’t expect and then you wonder why on, yeah. It also goes in together with the 18.5 feature that custom CSS styles are persistent through theme changes or style variation changes.

Jessica Lyschik: Style variation, yeah. Oh yeah, that was something I didn’t even realize before, but then when I thought of it like “What, why is this happening? Why?” But I’m glad it’s now fixed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s fixed now. And that came from user feedback who were also surprised about a few things. And I think one of the start they’re like, “In WordPress, we start small and then iterate on things,” and sometimes I hear, “Well, nobody was asked what they think about it. And it started however, three, four months ago,” and that’s the place where feedback would’ve been needed and for the team to move forward or to get input there. 

New APIs

So I would point this out that now there is a bootstrap, has nothing to do with the bootstrap on Twitter kind of thing. A basic action extensibility API for the data views for those who want to start working with that. And I quote from the release post, so it’s very early work. So the very early means inconsistent, not bug free surprise happenings. But the data views is the component that powers some post listing views available in the site editor.

Not only post listing but also page listing, pattern listings. In the future it will become an important part of the new admin design project. We all know that is coming. And now there is an API to allow registration of actions for different entities. Could be post types, could be other types of data representation by the listing. And right now the API is private in the Gutenberg plugin and will undergo further development and testing before being made public for third parties. So right now you can only look at it but not use it. Find out more in the pull requests that I will share. And also the recent update for data views we already talked about, but it’s the time where it starts and where you can read up about it. I’m not sure if it’s even behind an experiment flag, so we’ll figure that out.

Bug Fixes                                                       

And then there was in 18.6, there’s a ton of bug fixes. One is add custom CSS for block style variation. So block style variation is something that will come to 6.6 or is already in there that you can add additional block styles to custom blocks. And now you can also do custom CSS for that. Cool. In 18.6, so it’s not going to come to 6.6, did you look at that?

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it looks promising that you can add. So it’s basically adding custom CSS with the CSS property within theme JSON at that specific style variation. We have that for… I think for regular blocks it’s already available. I remember there’s something in Twenty Twenty Four that does exactly that. There’s just a little CSS snippet somewhere and the theme JSON, and again, I thought this was possible but obviously it was not for style variations. So yeah, that’s a cool change. So you can even more fine tune style variations if there’s a setting not existing for that specific CSS property yet. So that’s cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, you need a feature in a block that can be done with an animation that can be done with CSS, but it’s not available through theme.json or through any variables or something like that. Totally get it. So this is really cool. It opens up the editor to a lot of more creativity that is not yet built into the interfaces. 

Experiments

Talking about experiments, Riad Benguella is one of the lead architect on Gutenberg because the only thing that is not yet in the data views new data views interface is the post management. So when you add a post from the admin top, you get into the block editor. But if you’re in the menu and click on posts that you don’t get through the site editor, you always have to go back to the other WP admin menu and go to posts.

And of course that needs to migrate into the new design and that is now an experiment that you can switch on in Gutenberg and see what it is. Right now it’s only a one page and said, have I come to the post management? But that’s where it’s going to be in the future. Gutenberg plugin releases to find out how the post dashboard is going to look in there. Again, we start small and these are the beginning of things and there’s a lot of documentation changes as well, especially for the slot fields that are both editors that we are all put together so they can be linked off in the dev notes. And that’s pretty much it. I think we are all through the most important things from 18.6 unless you found something that stood out for yourself.

Jessica Lyschik: Nothing in particular, yeah.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool. That brings us to two more things and one is that they are in the section of what’s an active development or what’s discussed. And I wanted to point people to a proposal about the bits as dynamic tokens by Dennis Snell. He put together a very technical proposal. So the first part of it is very good, explaining what it does. And so when blocks came to the scene, shortcuts were largely abandoned. But shortcuts had its values, have their values and they had many problems but they have value. And part of it is, so there was always a recommendation if you have a short code in your plugin, try to make a block out of it that has a functionality so it’s much user-friendly because most users don’t get the square brackets with the attributes and all that. They are not coders. So blocks is definitely a better interface.

But sometimes you just can’t use it because it’s a subscriber’s name in an email form or it’s the author display in a query loop template or you want to have that name in a full sentence kind of thing. Or you want to date in a full sentence. So for those, there is no equivalent to short codes yet and this proposal is going to start exploring that bit of it, pun intended.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, sounds quite interesting. I mean maybe it has a little bit of overlap for the block bindings maybe in some, if you think of it, in some ideas like at the post authors display name in a query loop template. I mean, you can pull that basically from the database. So that would be something interfering with the block bindings feature that we have. So yeah, we have to check out, I think to discuss where are bits going, where are the block bindings going, what is the difference? Because I think even if you haven’t heard of block bindings yet, this can also be a confusing feature for people. So that’s definitely interesting to see. I mean, putting in some variables within existing text. That’s the interesting part of bits actually. So also where you’re pulling this from. So previously you would have to create a block and then maybe put in some magic to make that happen. And now if you would have a core feature doing that. Sounds great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So he had a little two paragraph thing, what about block bindings? To answer your thoughts, I’m not sure if it’s entirely answered, but bits and block bindings he writes are related, but complimentary systems. Why block bindings can be thought of primarily as a developer oriented API where a developer can open up a given block or a subset of the block attributes to be replaced by some other source of data. Bits are primarily author oriented, giving end users the ability to add source content anywhere. There’s likely a large overlap in the data sources that power each system. Ideally the registered sources will be compatible with both.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, sounds good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, if you have any other thoughts, the post is open for comments and there have been quite a few comments already. So that’s a great discussion to have. Don’t just read the block, also read the blog post, also read the comments with it so you get a better idea about it. And I shared of course in the show notes. And another thing that’s being discussed or worked on is, and we mentioned it before, is Sync patterns iteration for WordPress 6.7. So that’s the next version. And Riad Benguella had a proposal.

So there is the need that sync patterns are available for theme developers that they can deliver those with their themes and also sync pattern overrides with that. And Riad Benguella, after Dan Danos wrote an iteration, what are the issues that are pattern oriented already in GitHub and what to make of it? There was a discussion among developers and then Riad put together a summary for that and that’s the comment that I will link to in the show notes where said, so what patterns are and how they should work. And I think it’s a good summary of what’s already possible and what needs to work on. So a pattern is always a pattern. It works the same regardless of where it comes from, comes from the theme, does it come from the user, does it come from a template part or something like that? Or does it come from a PHP or from HTML kind of thing. And can be registered with a theme file. Can be registered directly in the database. That’s the user part, sync to unsync.

So he has the whole list of what a pattern is and how it functions and what is already existing and what is for the future or later. So I really like this post and he did a great job in putting it all together. Of course the discussion continues, hopefully with your input too. That’s why we talk about these things that are discussed so you can again be part of the discussion and chime in.

So this is then coming to the end of the show of our 102nd episode. Jessica, thank you so much for being here. Is there anything that you want our listeners to know about and if they want to get in contact with you, how would they do it best?

Jessica Lyschik: I think that’s it for today. So I mean I shared a lot about WordCamp Europe and what happened there. We had quite a few interesting topics on what’s going on in Gutenberg and their development. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I always call it’s still Twitter or it’s now called X, under my name Jessica Lyschik. Everything will be linked down below, don’t worry. Because I know my last name is a bit hard to pronounce or write down, but links will all be provided. And yeah, definitely reach out on Twitter or on Slack if you have questions. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah, thank you so much. So just for my, is it Jessica or Jessica?

Jessica Lyschik: I don’t mind any. I’ve been used to both, so whatever you prefer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well I’m going either way.

Jessica Lyschik: I’m fine with both.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good, thank you. Thank you. So dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is 102. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And if you also want to have additional links and places to go to learning about Gutenberg or what’s new on Gutenberg, the weekend edition comes out every Saturday with a ton of links and a ton of new information. You can subscribe to it on gutenbergtimes.com and I’m really happy about any new subscribers I get. All right, thank you so much. Thank you Jessica.

Jessica Lyschik: Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was wonderful to have you and have all your insights here and until the next time. Bye bye.

Jessica Lyschik: Bye.

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