Gutenberg Changelog #104 – Block Themes, Gutenberg 18.8, WordPress 6.6

Gutenberg Changelog 104 with Carolina Nymark and Birgit Pauli-Haack

In this episode, Carolina Nymark and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Block Themes, Gutenberg 18.8, WordPress 6.6 and more.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special Guest: Carolina Nymark

WordPress Profile @poena

On X (former Twitter) @carolinapoena

FullsiteEditing.com

Updated pages:

WordPress 6.6

WordPress 6.6.1 RC1 is now available

Announcements

Gutenberg 18.8

What’s new in Gutenberg 18.8 (17 July) 

What’s discussed or in the works

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 104th episode of the Gutenberg ChangeLog podcast. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about block themes, Gutenberg 18.8, WordPress 6.6, and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress Core, Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic Five For The Future Program.

Today I’m delighted to have with me on the show Carolina Nymark, core contributor, sponsored by Yoast. She writes on fullsiteediting.com and she regularly updates and adds features to the Gutenberg plugin and block themes, and she’s from Sweden. Thank you so much for being on the show. How are you today, Carolina?

Carolina Nymark: Hi, I’m well, thank you. June was a very hot month, but July has actually been a little bit cooler. We have had some rain here just outside Stockholm, so it’s been nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, the rain… In Germany it’s still very hot or it’s up and down. It was cooler earlier this month, but it’s now really, really hot. And I’m glad, I’m going out to the lake or maybe I’m going to go jump into the lake that’s a little bit southeast of Munich over the weekend. So hopefully the weather holds to actually have that.

Carolina Nymark: That sounds amazing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, we’ll see. We are also working on the house of my parents, to fix some of the things, and I don’t know how much time we’re going to have. Yeah. So yeah, let’s just get into the show. 

Announcements – WordPress 6.6

The long-awaited release of WordPress 6.6 happened earlier this week and it’s named Dorsey after the legendary American big band leader, Tommy Dorsey, with the smooth sounds.

The release post actually sports a Spotify link with a playlist of his great songs. It took about 630 contributors from 51 countries, and this release also welcomed over 150 first-time contributors. That’s a huge number every time we have a release with the new contributors. So I’m really happy that we can onboard so many new contributors and get them on the release.

Well, since the roadmap came out on 6.6 in March, we talked about the upcoming releases quite a bit. So for you Carolina, the next question I ask almost everybody who was on the show, what are the most exciting updates in WordPress 6.6 for you?

Carolina Nymark: Well, I hope this isn’t too repetitive, but there are several things. The updated block style variations or section styles is a great addition. It helps users quickly select a pattern or a part of a page and just really changes the style of it. It helps WordPress developers to work faster as well.

I’ve heard some rumors that this is only a feature for block themes, and that is not true. You can use these section styles even in classic themes, as long as you’re using the block editor. Because you do not need to use JSON or a theme JSON file to register these. You can register them with PHP.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s true. Yeah. The block styles have been in Gutenberg for a long time, but the section styles are just coming in that you have a group of blocks that the styles apply to for the container blocks, like the group blocks, the columns block, and what was the other one? Was it media text?

Carolina Nymark: Cover perhaps. I’ve mainly been testing it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, with the cover. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. You’re testing them out? You were going to say?

Carolina Nymark: I was going to move on to my next favorite feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So let me just say that we have in the show notes two things for you, dear listeners. And that’s going to be the dev notes about sections styles. And also the latest developer blog post about styling sections, nested elements, and more about the block style variations in WordPress 6.6. So what else is exciting for you?

Carolina Nymark: We have the update where we’re using theme version three, which solves problems with the font size and spacing presets. And the presets are the default values that WordPress adds. So before we can upgrade to version three, of course the developers need to learn about the changes. And they need to decide if they actually want to upgrade or not.

And this is going to depend on, well, which WordPress version do you need to support you. If you’re supporting WordPress 6.6 and forwards, then you can definitely switch to version three. But if you still need to support, I don’t know, 6.0, 6.3 and so on, then you have to consider this more carefully.

So of course there’s been many discussions about this with theme developers, especially in WordCamp Europe. And so for example, their discussions about, so if I switch to version three, I’m also going to have to update the spacing that I’m using inside the templates. And again, we come back to, okay, so if I update the template, how do I make sure that the end user knows that there is a theme update, that to actually receive this update to the template they might have to go and reset the template on their installation. It’s just tricky. It’s an important decision to make if you’re supporting many different WordPress versions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That has always been a bigger problem for theme developers when they update their templates and the user has modified the templates through the Global Styles, that the updates are not overwriting those. Because the user has the latest priority or the highest priority. So a theme update wouldn’t necessarily come through and make this available for all the sites. Yeah, that’s true.

This doesn’t go away with the theme JSON version though, version 3, but it makes it probably a little easier. But what will make it easier is another feature we’re going to talk about, but I just wanted to point out as a side note that Carolina Nymark has updated pages on the fullsiteediting.com site to include all the new developments and updates, and I think there are five pages that were updated.

There was one on Global Styles and theme JSON. Theme JSON color options and typography options for fun, size, line height, font rate and more, and then how to add shadows with the theme JSON. So the great site, fullsiteediting.com that focuses so much on block theme, teaches you even more on the new developments. So thanks, Carolina, for putting all the work in. Yeah, so what’s next? So we had the style sections, we have the theme JSON changes, and then…

Carolina Nymark: We also have the overrides for synced patterns. This helps you to keep the overall form, shape, the sign of parts of the content that they have inserted, but still change part of the content. For example, if you have this group block with the specific image and the heading that highlights your feature and the button, then maybe you want to use different images and you can go in and only change that image.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a great tool.

Carolina Nymark: And go update. So it’s not super easy to explain, but yes, it’s very helpful for site creators. From a theme developer perspective, there’s not much one can do with the overrides for synced patterns, since themes cannot register synced patterns, only regular standard patterns.

So there’s no attribute that I as a theme developer can add, for example, to my patent PHP file to make it synced on theme activation. That doesn’t exist. But hopefully we can continue working on that and find ways to make that happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so let me unpack that for a little bit. So if a user wants to create a synced pattern and use one of the theme patterns as a blueprint for that, they need to use the duplicate feature in the panel manager.

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then switch on the synced part and preferably also rename it so they don’t see it twice in the list of patterns.But then if the pattern gets updated through the theme, they could see it, but their duplicate version won’t update. So they need to take care of that.

But I like the synced pattern for site builders, because it releases quite a few headaches that you had before. That you couldn’t update the patterns and styles through the Global Styles, now you can. And now you can also have your users or your other editors use the same and just change your mind about the background.

Carolina Nymark: It helps if you have editors and you only want them to be able to edit specific things, then the synced patterns with overrides definitely helps with that. That’s one of their biggest purposes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Also for myself, if I had a pattern that I can change the content of it more and more or more often, and reuse it for a book review or for just a call for action. And I always have the same design, but the call to action is a different one. It also helps me as a site owner quite a bit to streamline my processes.

But you’re right, so developer block has an introduction to the overrides in synced patterns. That will be interesting to learn about, if you want to read, if you want to learn about it. And then also link an iteration tracking issue for synced pattern in WordPress 6.7. It’s still named a draft, but it has, when you look at it, it lists all the issues that theme developers had with the synced patterns and that they want to get fixed or enabled or feature requests. And one of them is actually make synced patterns available for theme developers.

There’s also great discussions from quite a few theme developers in the community that have been vocal about that, and the responses from the developers like Riad bringing it all together in an overall model for synced patterns. So I’m really looking forward to how that works going to progress. I’m not sure if it’s going to be coming to WordPress 6.7, because we only would know by the end of September, but there’s two months or two and a half months to go to actually work on that. Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: I’m just thinking that two and a half months, it’s a very short time. The release squad for the 6.7 release, the post where you can sign up or actually apply to be part of the release squad has been up. I guess we’ll know more later next week.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so. I’m going to put it in the show notes, what you’re just saying, the post with a proposal for the release and raise your hand if you want to be part of it. And there’s also a section, on the core block was another post that was, what would you like to see in the theme Twenty Twenty Five?

Because every year the last release of the year also comes with a new default theme. And I’m looking forward to what’s going to be next in there, and how many of the features that we are talking about right now are coming into the default theme.

Carolina Nymark: Yes, absolutely. So there actually is a GitHub repository already open for Twenty Twenty Five, where you can submit issues with what we’d like to see. For example, maybe you want to see an example of how we see negative margins. Or maybe you want to see the new grid variation, which is now… So the grid has been available in WordPress, but it hasn’t had the same kind of UI interface and options that we see in 6.6.

So in 6.6 we have the grid as a group variation. I’m looking forward to learning more about how to actually use these settings. I’m not familiar with them yet. Actually I do find it a little bit confusing. So I have to really set dedicated time to learning this. So we have the grid and we are able to, for example, set how many columns we want in the grid. We can adapt how our content inside the grid will flow into a different row, for example.

But then you have to go and select there the block that is inside the grid and decide, do I want this particular block to be two columns wide? Or do I want it to be two rows, for example? So once I feel comfortable with that and know how it works, then I think we’re going to be able to create some really interesting layouts.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you do. And there was a hallway hangout and you provided that link to it also with Isabel Bryson who actually worked quite a bit on that feature. And she showed off how she’s going to use it or how she worked on it and what you can do with it. I really liked the way that you could say, okay, any column that is in the grid needs to be… Or any cell that needs to have a minimum width of 300, and then it automatically flows with the screen size.

So if it’s a mobile screen, then you get them all stacked, and if it’s a tablet, you get two columns, or maybe… Nah, three is probably not wide enough. And then when you’re on the big screen you get as much as the layout of your website allows, and stack them, have three or four in a row.

So that’s really good. And it’s a responsive way to make your layouts without having to think about responsiveness. So I think that’s a great feature for users because it’s a new concept anyway, and our users that haven’t been able to create layouts or do some editing on their theme or of their headers and that, there is another jump there to make to get the concepts right. Because I think we have some anecdotal evidence that for some people it was hard to figure out are we editing a template or am I editing this particular page?

And we are then surprised when they thought they’re editing a page that it changed for the whole site. So yeah, there are now a few guardrails in the site editor. I’m not sure if there are enough, but I’m also thinking that it gets better and better the more people are using it and the more people get confused and talk about it to find the right way to do this.

And a grid layout, you don’t have to think about that much. That’s a concept that people can really adhere to or find, maybe not that hard to… I saw quite a few of those layouts where you have a stacked group block inside a grid cell and those are really cool. Or have a row inside a grid cell. And those behave really well also in the responsiveness.

So I’m excited about the grid layout. I’m really waiting for a masonry grid layout that goes with the flow in every direction. I’m not sure if that’s yet available. I have the feeling they’re not, but there are some experiments that you can… If you use the Gutenberg plugin there’s an experiment page and you can switch on interactive grid layouts and do even more experiments, explorations with that feature for 6.7. Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. I definitely have to go and check that out. One thing that I would like to see, I’m not saying it’s possible, I don’t know if it’s possible, but when you have a query loop and you have the post-template block inside of it, you have the option to select between lists and the grid. And I would like that grid option that you select in the toolbar of the post-template block to have the same type of options. So that I would be able to have… Maybe I want the second post in my query to be two rows tall, for example. I’m not sure if it’s possible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not yet. I had the same question.

Carolina Nymark: Have all the signs for the post. Well the thing is, it’s a loop, so of course it loops through every post. I’m not sure… We’ll get to that later when we talk about the plugin, I think. Because in the query loop, of course you can’t add it. If you add a block to your post-template it’s going to be the same block, same text for whatever these posts. I’m not sure if it would be possible to have one post to be taller or wider than everyone else. Unless of course you want to go and do custom CSS, which is absolutely possible. But from the editor, I’m not sure, but I would really like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. In the editor it’s not possible yet. I did, well many, many years ago, a layout for a news outlet that had I think six columns and the main post was three columns wide and then one was two column, one column and underneath there were six different posts that are kind of in the header section. And that’s not available yet, that you can…

Carolina Nymark: No, exactly. So if you wanted, for example, one full word sticky post you’d have to use, today you’d use custom CSS to achieve that. Or maybe you’d even have two query loops, which of course at some point it’s going to be a performance issue if you have to do it twice. But you can’t do that with the options on the block now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Maybe we can… One can say that the sticky post is always, I don’t know, two columns or three columns. But yeah, it’s all… Because all of a sudden everybody has a different need and then I cannot imagine the interface, how many dials. And so you could offer the user, though they have every use case in there. But yeah, we’ll see what’s going to be possible later on.

And I’m thinking that that’s also a great place for plugins to extend the core blocks to use the grid block in certain ways and try that out to say, okay, what is possible and push the limits a little bit on that.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. I’m sure there’s going to be responses now saying, oh, but this has existed in my plugin for three years. Awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Sadly I have not seen it. I do not have time, there’s many page building plugins or block collections, unfortunately.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. So as I said, so I think, is there anything else from WordPress 6.6 that stands out for you apart from those theme-related features?

Carolina Nymark: I’m a theme nerd. Everything is theme-related. We have the background. So the background image settings where you can now add the background image to various blocks and to the site wide Global Styles from the site editor for block themes.

I have mixed feelings about this because I’m glad it is more now… It has a higher… How to say? It matches the customized settings better where you could add the background image. But I’m a little concerned that we are going to end up with these group blocks where people are adding text on top of the image and the text is not going to be readable, it’s not going to be accessible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: We’ll see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think all the design tools bring hives to some designers because they don’t think that a lot of WordPress users are good designers, so they shouldn’t have access to those tools. And I’m reminded that there was a big movement in the internet, it’s called GeoCities or MySpace, where you had all those tools already at your fingertips. And there were quite some funky signs out there. But that’s kind of the creativity that is bred when you give people tools.

Carolina Nymark: That’s when we used the tables, HMO tables to other layouts and we had the dancing baby in the diaper and more.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Chip animations, yeah. Using spacer. But we found that spacer images are coming back with the spacer block, right?

Carolina Nymark: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. So again, we are going to talk about this, about improving the block supports. So in the Gutenberg 18.8, we’re adding shadow supports for groups.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Carolina Nymark: I don’t know if I should bring this now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s your PR, right? Well let’s talk about it when we go through the Changelog and we’ll be there in about 2 minutes.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. In relation to the space block, so we are now not only adding the shadow, we’re working now for the next release. To add color options and spacing options to more blocks to make it more consistent. Because we have text-based blocks. It doesn’t even have text color. One of these ideas is of course, are we going to have a background on the space block or not? That discussion might be interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Indeed, indeed. Because there are also some great separator blocks and spacer blocks. It’s kind of both. Yeah, right, it’s a spacer or a separator that has some design to it. And the other CSS you can do some really funky things with waves and going from triangles and that kind of thing. And different kinds of patterns, how the background shines into the next block.

And I like those. I’m thinking maybe putting a plugin together with, there was a site that has a lot of separators CSS already displayed, and you can probably fairly easy, add them to a plugin so people can have an additional… So it’s a web dev separator generator, that’s called.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. Okay, interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m going to look at that. It’s from the W Web Dev, GitHub group. So I’ll share the link in the show notes and…

Carolina Nymark: Yeah, a plugin would be a good idea for that. Because it can of course be used in any theme. The problem with doing this kind of thing, like a pattern, if you wanted to do the pattern and submit it to the pattern directory, is that you can’t use custom CSS.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Or add it to a theme, but then it’s not going from theme to theme. Yeah. Then it’s not…

Carolina Nymark: No, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It kind of goes away.

Carolina Nymark: Omitted.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, right. I know that we can talk about quite a few things and we will, but today, just right now this minute, I wanted to do a side note. Because with all the features that come to developers and for no-code site builders in WordPress 6.5 and 6.6, you might not need to create a custom block to extend core functionality, that much anymore, because you could use block bindings or you could use other tools. That is not that.

So on July 23rd, JuanMa Garrido and Nick Diego will hold developer hours again, and with the title Do You Really Need a Custom Block? And they will explore with you, their listeners if you want to join them, how to add new functionality to core blocks by content only editing and the allowed blocks attribute and patterns.

So a lot of people review their custom blocks if they couldn’t replace them with patterns because they don’t have to maintain so much code or integrate block bindings and block variations. Well block variations, you need a little bit more development there. When effective block blocking and naming as well as of course our latest, most favorite feature synced pattern overrides.

So July 23rd, a 1500 UTC, that will take place. It’s a live stream on Zoom and that’s 9:00 AM eastern in the US, 1500 UTC, 9:00 AM Eastern on July 23rd. And also for the same topic, there is also a developer blog post out that lists 15 ways to curate the WordPress editing experience from disabling specific blocks. So panel directory or unregistered formatting for the rich text block to disabling certain sidebar panels.

And I know switching on and off for features is really important for clients and content creators, that it’s a major concern for agencies and publishers. And we talked about it earlier as well. And this post is a great snippet collection. It also points it to the right places in the documentation and there are always ways to disable custom colors and core presets in the theme JSON.

And I’m sure the Full Site Editing Global Styles and theme JSON has some notes about that too. So that’s kind of about the overall WordPress experience. Do you want to comment on any of that?

Carolina Nymark: I’ll try to attend. It’s sounds really like an interesting call. Yeah, I enjoyed the post about the 15 ways to security experience as well.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 18.8

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so we’ve come to what everybody’s waiting for, is what’s Gutenberg 18.8? So 211 PRs merged into the plugin release. 57 of those were enhancements, 77 were bug fixes and 35 of those bug fixes were actually back ported to core and made it into WordPress 6.6 and were included in the release candidate three.

But that’s all snow from yesterday, as we say in Germany, badly translated of course. But it’s in 6.6. Sixty contributors worked on this release, 10 of them, again, first-time contributors, so congratulations to all. So what’s in there is a good mixture between experimental stuff, updates on UI as well as some developer stuff and of course bug fixes.

But the one new feature that comes in as an experiment is the data form. We know about data views. That’s how all the list views in WP admin could look. When you look at the site editor, you see how pages could look and patterns and all that, organized in new views and grid layouts and all that. But what it does not have yet is a data form component. And this is now implemented as a first prototype in the iteration process to duplicate page actions.

So there is a modal that opens up and you get a form, you have to fill that in and hit a submit button, and that is the prototype that comes in. But take a look at it, if you’re a plugin developer, you probably can already see how that works for your plugin maybe, or how that can go into the WordPress 6.7. I think it’s still an experiment though. It hasn’t been released as an official or maybe not.

Carolina Nymark: I’m not sure actually.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, it’s actually in the plugin. It’s not an experiment, any duplicate… So it’s in the duplicate action that you can see. So when would you duplicate it? You would duplicate a pattern, you would duplicate a page, you would duplicate a template. Yeah, so all these duplicate actions will use that component.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah, it’ll help with the consistency and also of course make it easier to reuse these forms.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And also have a standard way of doing forms and you don’t have to make decisions as a plugin developer on, how do I do this? Use the form. But it’s not there yet. But what is an experiment is having… So we have pages, we have patterns, we have templates, we have styles, template parts, which are our patterns, what we don’t have in the new admin section are posts.

You still have to get out and go into the WP admin to add that and you still would have to do this. But there is a PR in this release where it at least has the framework around to putting a post list into the data we use as well. This is an experiment that needs to be enabled through the experiments page of the plugin. The next thing is yes, you know all about it. Carolina, is that support for shadows for the group block. Yay. We were waiting for it. Thank you.

Carolina Nymark: I received so many comments in praise for this and I’m like, okay, thank you. But sorry, this change it’s… So when you create a block support, you create these setting and the UI for it and you do that once. Because it’s the support blocks opt into it, compared to a block attribute, which normally is unique and only developed for that single block. So when you enable support on new blocks or in your plugin, you change maybe three lines of code and then you’re done.

This is usually how it works. And this is how it worked for the group block shadow. It was a very simple change. We needed to do some manual testing to see about how to consider the overlap and the shadow was very long. Do we need to do something about that? And we ended up not doing anything, except labeling it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and with the… Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. There are some other blocks where it’s not as simple. We are discovering bugs recently, early this week, not in this plugin release, but maybe the next one or the next after that. We found that there were still some remaining styles from the list block that affected other blocks that used the list element. So that was fixed, so that’s good.

So we discovered this one when we added background color and realized, wait a minute, the background color, it’s a little bit off here. So that’s how we discovered it. So sometimes it’s very easy to do this, but I also have a pull request for adding the border to the site logo, which has been going on since Twenty Twenty Three. And that is way more complex because we have to work with a link. Without a link we have to work with a resizer, have to work with a cropping tool and so on. So that one is not merged yet. But I’m hoping to get reviews of it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s interesting to look behind the scenes, how complicated they can be. And when you think that something that is newer, because the group block is relatively new in comparison to other blocks, they fit into the architecture better because it’s a more formal architecture, that wasn’t the case earlier on. And so yeah. But thank you so much. And also looking at that. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard. And we do it because it’s hard, right?

Carolina Nymark: It’s interesting that way. It’s definitely challenging.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And talking about some quality of life around blocks, not quality of life, but a QA around blocks. There was also an effort from quite a few developers amongst them, Maggie Cabrera, to add example snippets, two blocks, especially the query block, the post list, the excerpt block, log in log out block. So when you hover over them in the inserter that you see on the right-hand side, what kind of block is that? Some of the core blocks don’t have that and this was an oversight that has now been rectified.

And so this is just going to make it a little bit more smoother and make it a little bit more consistent. The next one is… I wanted to put out is from the inserter, that the PR says, remove the dialogue behavior and that is the behavior, that when you click on things something opens up. And when you’re done, click in there. And you’re done with it, it closes automatically.

And the inserter and sometimes it’s a little bit of a harder… Was harder to use, because you had to click every time you wanted to add a block and open it up again. And now with that changed behavior you can now have it open and add multiple blocks at the same time to canvas. So this is definitely a quality of life for streamlining the workflow for creating content.

The next one is what you already mentioned, block background UI controls and have the controls move to a popover, so there’s background images. The blocks have gotten quite a few refinements in 18.8. Do you want to talk about that?

Carolina Nymark: It’s a bit changed in the UI.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s definitely also streamlined and consistent through the… Global Styles, you can add background to blocks through the Global Styles as well as through the blocks, properties or settings. So they also streamlined those processes. The next one I found interesting was… That’s about the group block and they had a name, they renamed the fill feature to grow and that indicated… Can you explain what that indicates?

Carolina Nymark: I read the pull request, so it’s partially to make the name a better match with the CSS functionalities behind the scenes. But it’s also about not mixing the fill in this context with the background color fill or the background image. So that’s the reason why they changed this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah. So it’s easier for people to translate and not have overlap ideas about things. But it also, I think the fill only has the connotation that it’s a fixed width, to be filled. And with grow it also indicates that it grows with the blocks that come in. So when you put a bigger one in there and that grow part, that’s what those CSS is actually for. The property is called grow as well. Yeah, flex-grow. It’s for the flex CSS there. Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah. And then of course that’s a great thing, is we get color support for the list item. Now we can have stripes in our list. In each list item could have a different color and that is really cool. Talking about designs, can you also grade gradients around it?

Carolina Nymark: I haven’t tried it. I would definitely look. I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing some kind of border support. Because I would like to sometimes have my list items like underlined. That’s one thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the underlying feature is not available for lists in the inline?

Carolina Nymark: Well, I don’t necessarily want to underline text, as in it being your name.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, you want the same. Yeah, you want the same link of it? Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Like the whole list item. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m going to try out the list block color support with some funky designs maybe over the weekend. It’s really cool. Then the next one is, that’s a small change, but it definitely clears up a lot of questions that came in through user support or that the justification formatting is also coming to the block toolbar in addition to that is in the sidebar because most people didn’t find it in the sidebar when they were looking for it and thought it wasn’t possible to justify a certain block or a certain series of blocks. So now it’s also available in the toolbar. That’s restricted to a few blocks I would think.

Carolina Nymark: Yes. It’s largely inconsistent what’s in the toolbar and what’s in the sidebar for different blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s true.

Carolina Nymark: True. Let’s say if the pull request probably mentions if it’s…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s definitely available for the flex box in the group log.

Carolina Nymark: I only see the post content that the group mentioned, but I don’t think that… I think that was just an example.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s for the group block. I don’t know if that’s going to come to columns as well. Yeah, we need to test this. Dear listeners, we haven’t tested this little thing yet, sorry. But if you test it, send in what you think of it and how you use it.

But I like that these things are going to be consistently updated anyway and somebody notices it and says, okay, I’m going to fix it. 

And then the next item is a change in the block API. That’s more for developers. It’s very technical, but it allows a custom block developer to add a file name to the variations fields of the custom block that they’re building. So you can create a block and then you also assign variations to it. And then if you don’t want it all in the same file, you can add a file name to the variations field and then it pulls it from there. Very nifty.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. And especially now if we’re saying that the number of variations that the block has… Like the grid block, that it keeps growing. It’s definitely absolutely useful for block developers because the grid block now has four.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just kind of thinking, but that was style variations one, not block variations. So we have a proliferation of the word variations and styles and blocks and you can mix it anywhere we want.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah, block style variation, block variations. It’s very similar. Also in the interface, they’re also very closely positioned in the interface. As long as you have opened the styles panel, you can have the variation just below the block name or then the description and then you have the style variation inside the panel. Also at the very top.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. They all look the same. So if you’re a visual person, like I am. I always know where something stood in a book, I knew the page number and then where on the book. I could find it very easily. But if it’s just all the same, yeah, it’s kind of I need to… Maybe, can we have a background if something is color coded. Or can we have a shape or something like that?

But it’s just a name.

Carolina Nymark: So this is not part of Gutenberg, now I’m skipping again. So of course immediately after a major list, contributors are monitoring the support forms, and of course the Gutenberg tickets and the track tickets. One of the tickets that stood out a little bit, and I’m not going to talk about the underlying, is actually the page and post, the summary, or what used to be a summary panel. And this user was supporting that. They weren’t able to find the comment settings.

Because when you look at the top of the panel now it’s links, so they’re not in separate panel anymore. And this person who just saw this for the first time probably, it wasn’t easy for them to find it. And that’s one of the changes in 6.6 that we actually haven’t discussed. Not in this call at least. People will get used to it. I don’t know if anything’s going to be moved back. I don’t think so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, there was between… I’m not sure if it was from one version to the next, but I know that there was a discussion about where should the revisions panels be? Should it be under the three point options kind of thing, or where should the sticky post thing be? And of course when you know, okay, that worked, that’s there now. And I can remember that.

But for the first time, the shock, oh, did it go? Yeah, where did it go? You just want to get your work done and all of a sudden these hurdles come in with a new version.

Carolina Nymark: And the featured image also moved to the very top. It’s a little bit different.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I like that actually, because I’m always going to fear that I forget the featured image. A lot of designs are actually very visual and you have that in your post loop in the list of the block posts and there’s a featured image and you want to make sure that that’s in there. But yeah, it’s a change.

Carolina Nymark: That’s a good point. A good reminder to have it there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But what I also like with the new workflow setting is that the number of words is right there. How many are in the post. That you only had to do three clicks to actually get to that? So in the outline tab of the list view, so you had to open up the list view, click to the outline, and then see how many words are in the post. Now you just go to the…

Carolina Nymark: So I hope that you’re all keeping your blog post at least 3000 words now, right? For SEO purposes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And 15 blog posts make a book, right? 3000 words. Does that come from a search engine kind of quality content, needs to be 3000 words?

Carolina Nymark: It’s a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a lot.

Carolina Nymark: Only your most important content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, our writers on the developer blog, they’re always kind of bumping up on that number quite a bit. But that’s because we have some great code examples and explanations there and it’s always about our real world kind of example. And it takes that long to explain.

All right, what else do we have in 18.8? We have a lot of changes in the component sections, but that’s so highly technical, about the custom select control version two. There’s a version two, dear developers. Those will be probably… If they come to a WordPress version they will be in a dev note, complete together, so you get them.

Because they’re all smaller fixes that are in a bigger context. But now with the PRs it’s harder to describe what’s the bigger picture about it. So I would wait until they get into the WordPress major version where you try them out. For the block library, we have two things that we wanted to talk about. One is the aspect ratio control for image blocks in grids. That was something that was missing.

Also in the hallway hangout, you saw it, that Isabel tried to get the picture into the grid and then it wouldn’t fill up the whole thing. And so now you can control the aspect ratio of those image blocks. It’s really cool. And then the other one is when I see reduced specificity, I first have a hard time pronouncing that word.

Carolina Nymark: Same. I also have difficulty even trying to spell it if I take it out. Yeah, reduce specificity of the social link icon color. I believe this is a bug fix. I guess the colors were either impacting something else or were impacted by it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it wasn’t possible to control them. So now themes can control it. But yeah, CSS specificity was definitely a topic on the WordPress release in 6.6. And there were a few rumblings around, because for some features, theme developers fixed something that core didn’t do or needed to override. And now with 6.6, core fixed what they were doing, but then it affected what theme developers were doing.

So they had to reduce certain things or revert some of the changes. But it also maybe was a little bit pushed too far with the underlined issue, the link underlined issue. And overall it was ripping off the bandaid to make section style possible, to reduce the specificity on certain CSS and have… It only affected a few theme developers that were very heavy on CSS, on style CSS still. So how did you find that change in 6.6 with your themes or you? Or in the discussion with the theme developers?

Carolina Nymark: So I spent so many hours testing these changes early on, but not through the latest release candidates. So I obviously missed many, many things. I couldn’t keep up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nobody’s going to fault you.

Carolina Nymark: With some of the changes. I have not had time to test my websites with 6.6 or my themes. I’m just going to wait a little and not just automated upgrade. I haven’t had time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s of course a good way to say, let other people find the faults. And I know that the core team is starting to work on a point release to come out somehow next week for 6.6.1 and you probably want to wait for that to update all the sites. So the release candidate is coming out I think tomorrow or today?

Carolina Nymark: I think it’s today.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s today. We are recording this on July 18th. So sorry.

Carolina Nymark: That’s correct.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just wanted to say what today is because it’s different for our listeners than it is for us.

Carolina Nymark: So today on Thursday the 18th, there are 10 fixes in this release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. All right. And in two weeks we’re going to talk about it. So synced patterns got some updates as well. The one PR ensures to disable override buttons is active for image blocks with captions or links. Because you could override the image URL and the alt text, but you couldn’t change the captions or the link that the image went to. And that is now changed.

Carolina Nymark: The part of the bug was that if you already had the original image, had a caption, and the caption setting was only visible and you replaced the image, the caption did not update and you were not able to edit it. This sort of solves that in one way, but more work is needed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that actually went into 6.6. And then the other bug fix for pattern overrides was to fix the aspect ratio with the image overrides. So it wouldn’t adhere to the aspect. When you uploaded a new image, it wouldn’t necessarily adhere to the aspect ratio that was in the original before. So that is fixed too, and made it into 6.6. Yeah, was backboard to core, yes. All right. And then we had this disabled post, meta editing and blocks, that’s one of the inside query loops to finish my sentence.

Carolina Nymark: Yes. So this has to do with the synced patterns, the rights and the block bindings and it prevents bugs. Again, like with the query loop is… Again, it’s the loops. So everything you add to the inside, it’s going to be repeated and that’s why it should not be editable that way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there was a feature there that if you needed to change post-meta for a certain block, you could do it in the query block, but that is now stopped. It’s disabled now. So there’s no confusion in overriding some. I think there were race conditions on the database for that. So that’s a good thing that it’s not on the query loop. If you want to change the metadata for a post, go to the post, do it there.

Then there’s one fix there that’s just for those who use the image block for plugins. And that is that the media ID and the block HML are supported for the block bindings. But that’s just… It’s really a technical update and a bug fix for 6.6. But it had quite a few discussions there and how that’s going to be fixed. But it is fixed now.

And then there are quite a few experiments and we talked about that, that grid layouts or interactive grids is one experiment in the Gutenberg plugin. And there are two features, allow inserting blocks directly into the empty grid cells, wire drag and drop, and then also use the manual placement attribute to set manual grid mode and allow responsive behavior in both modes.

So in the grid layouts in 6.6, when you switch on the manual feature in the sidebar, it takes away… And you say, okay, I wanted three columns width in manual, then even your mobile version has three columns because that’s what you said in a manual grid. And now with them they allow… this is an experiment to allow certain manual grid attributes and make sure that it’s still a responsive behavior. So it’s kind of… Not quite sure if that is the right UI or the right approach.

So go there and experiment with it to see if that satisfies. Because of course it’s surprising that if you put some manual in there, I want four columns and all of a sudden you see it in mobile and it is not responsive, that that disconnect is really hard to decipher.

And Nick Diego, who was the author of the 15 Ways to Curate The Editor Experience, found a gap in the documentation and he added how the rich text formatting or switching off rich text formatting features is done for the editor curation documentation. So that’s good. And then another documentation enhancement is that the interactivity API documentation now includes a few more examples and the reference for more examples in there. So if you are trying to get your head around the interactivity, API that might be even better.

Just an announcement is CSS hacks, Internet Explorer 11 have been removed from the block editor from the Gutenberg plugin. And I don’t know how many, I think when we removed the Internet Explorer 11 support in general in WordPress, there was quite a big number of code line changes or removals. I don’t think this would amount to it. It’s probably most of the time an if than else hack. But it’s removed and it’s a clearer way to look at the CSS. All right, anything else you want to comment on for that?

Carolina Nymark: Fixing documentation is always awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And sometimes there’s quite a few things that need to be fixed. Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so this concludes, dear listeners, our review of the Gutenberg Changelog for the Gutenberg 18.8 release. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

So we are on the section now, what’s an active development and discussed. And I want to point out three things to you.

One is a very smaller one and that is adding color and other style options to the audio block. That is a PR or an issue right now that’s discussed on how to manage that and what is the minimum viable product on that. Do we need a featured image? Do we not use a featured image on that? But chime in on that so the developer who will take that on has your input if you to it. Of course that’s a different story, but it’s definitely good to form opinions and to make them available.

Carolina Nymark: And over time already, I guess I get a little bit excited talking about WordPress. So the audio element which is used in a block is almost impossible to style without either basically completely covering it with another element using CSS or with JavaScript. And it’s impossible to do it with just CSS. To add color options for everything around the actual audio element. Yeah, that’s an interesting approach to it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s definitely something. And it’s also a… There’s another element out there like the video elements or some of the embeds that also could use some additional style options. And I think working on the audio block gives everybody a feel how that can be approached and what would be needed there. So it’s also the iteration process.

I also wanted to share with the audience a link to an experiment on free form image cropping. The image cropper is quite difficult to get your head around. And the block editor as well as in the classic editor, there is no… Both are abysmally… So there is a PR that a developer is working on. And definitely it’s still in draft so it hasn’t been even merged or full review, but it’s definitely something you want to look at and maybe you can try it out.

And then the biggest link that I wanted to share with you dear listener, is the updates for the media library. So the next step for the admin redesign is of course the posts, but that’s a small thing because the most things for the post everybody knows already. But the biggest one is how to rethink the media library with a new data admin. And Ramon Dodd started the process with a tracking issue and there is quite some discussion there. What else would be needed to change things or to bring over how it’s working now.

So there’s quite a discussion there that’s first interesting to see what everybody else is thinking, but also to chime in and figure out what is the first version going to look like when it comes to that media library in the new data admins.

And with that, we are at the end of the show. Thank you so much Carolina, for being on the show and letting us all know about block themes and what’s in 6.6 and what’s coming and talking about the Gutenberg’s 18.8 plugin. Is there anything that you want to announce from Yoast or for what you are working on that you didn’t get to talk about? You get about two minutes or three now.

Carolina Nymark: No, it’s okay. I work on Gutenberg when I find issues that are easy enough for me to work on. But that usually means that this looks easy and then four hours later you’re completely down a rabbit hole. I’m still trying to help out with the bundle teams triage, the bundle team task force and continue to find the problems, reporting new issues, and then we solve it together. So it’s working, mixing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you so much for the great work on all of it, on what’s in WordPress and listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is number 104. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

And if people want to connect with Carolina Nymark, it could be definitely on WP Slack. Your name is Poena, right?

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And on Twitter, it’s Carolina Poena.

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you want to follow her on what she shares on the social media. And thank you so much for being here, Carolina, it’s always a great pleasure to have you.

Carolina Nymark: Thank you for inviting me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. And I will do so again in a few months. So I hope to see you soon. I don’t know on any of the WordCamps, I don’t know, you’re going to go to Rome to the Core days? Or what’s your next WordCamp?

Carolina Nymark: Undecided.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Undecided. Yes.

Carolina Nymark: Maybe Rome or maybe not until the next WordCamp.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m undecided too, so I’m kind of… We’ll see. Yeah. And if not, we see each other on the interwebs.

Carolina Nymark: Oh, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And take care. Bye-Bye.

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