Gutenberg Changelog #106 – Gutenberg 19.0, 19.1, WordPress 6.7 and Outreach channel

In this episode, Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Gutenberg 19.0, 19.1, WordPress 6.7, Outreach channel, and Twenty-Twenty-Five Default theme

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Developer Hours

WordPress Releases

Twenty-Twenty-Five default theme

What’s Released

Create Block Theme plugin

Developer Hours: Building WordPress themes with the Create Block Theme plugin

What’s new in Gutenberg 19.0? (14 August)

What’s new in Gutenberg 19.1

What’s discussed?

Inline commenting on Blocks https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/59445

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, hello and welcome to our 106th episode of the Gutenberg Chainsaw Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 19.0, 19.1, WordPress 6.7, and some other stuff. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic.

With me today as co-host is Jessica Lyschik from Greyd, core contributor and theme wizard, and one of the people you’ll find often in the WordPress Outreach channel discussing block themes and other topics. It’s wonderful to have you, Jessica. Thank you for taking the time. How are you today and how was your summer?

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, thanks for having me, Birgit. I’m doing good. My summer was nice so far. It’s a bit hot outside, so I’m here in the cool area, so that’s all good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I just recently looked at the… So I’m pretty much also, it’s very hot. It’s about 29 degrees inside, 31 outside Celsius, and I was just comparing it to Florida because I lived there for 25 years and I found that the advantage here in Munich is that in the night, it gets really colder.

It cools off about eight degrees. So I looked at the weather in Florida even at night they have 25, 24 degrees, and here we have about 16 or 15 degrees Celsius, so it’s all bearable. And a night owl like me can certainly survive this one here.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I’m a night owl too. So in the evening, it’s a bit more chilly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So Jessica, you have been on the show before. This is your third time, but for our new listeners, would you tell us briefly what you’re working on and how you contribute to WordPress?

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, sure. So Birgit has actually introduced me quite well already. So I’m working at Greyd on the products that enhance not just the block editor, but also a lot of stuff to improve your workflows in managing a WordPress website. So I do everything from support, to bug fixes, to new features like the whole package.

And I’m also a WordPress core contributor and have worked on the Twenty Twenty Four theme last year. So it’s now been a year since then. And apparently I appear way too often on the outreach channel on Slack, and I hope that not every time people are rolling their eyes because I have asked another question there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s quite the opposite actually, and I just mentioned it because I don’t think we talked on this show before on the outreach program that merged into a broader scope than it was with the full site editing. And it’s a channel where Nick Diego, Justin Tadlock, myself, and Ryan Welcher actually hang out on the WordPress Slack to answer questions, connect with extenders that build products on top of WordPress or know coders that do theme building.

And so if you have questions or if you think something isn’t right or if you just wonder, okay, I don’t know, is it supposed to work like that or is it a bug? And to figure that out, it’s very hard to do a bug report when you don’t know if it’s supposed to work like that or not. So we figure it out together. And so answering questions.

So when you come, you actually are part of the feedback loop back to the developers as well to say, okay, if Jessica’s confused, it’s confused for other people too, or you’re also an early warning system. Jessica the canary. So keep doing what you’re doing. It helps you probably both in your work as well as in our work, and I want to encourage a lot of other people to come to the channel and hang out. We don’t bite. We answer every question and we hope you get better at whatever you want to do. So that’s why I mentioned it before.

Jessica Lyschik: And I’m the one who asks the most questions, I feel like, in this channel.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sometimes. Well, that depends on what you’re working on.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s actually true. So sometimes it’s like there’s something, a feature we would like to add in our product and it’s like, hmm, how is core handling that? Is that actually right? Or should this be different? Is that a bug? Is that a bug in our end in our product? Can we reproduce this with just for default theme and WordPress core itself?

And oftentimes it’s a bit unsure, is it really supposed to work like that? So I had multiple questions of these and I got them answered all. I think there was one or two that were too broad and maybe not in depth from my side, which is totally okay. But in general, I can say has always been an answer at some point, and if not, then just keep iterating on it. So keep asking again.

And I think it works very well in the outreach channel. Just also from my perspective as an extender, I think it’s super valuable to have this channel so I can just discuss this in turn with my colleagues and then, okay, we don’t know what to do next or where the culprit is so we can ask core contributors and maybe other people have ideas. So I have helped out also other people that had questions where I knew the answer to, so I help them out as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sometimes it’s not just something that doesn’t work right or it’s quirky or something like that. It’s more like how do you approach it in working with that particular API and having multiple voices in one channel actually helps really figuring it out for yourself or for myself, but also gives a better input or feedback on what are the use cases, special features will come in.

We have new APIs for the plugins and can do templates that are editable in this site editor when we talk about it a little later today with the 19.1 release. But that is certainly something that needs to be discussed with a few people. There’s also a GitHub group, it’s called WordPress/Outreach, where about 22 people extenders have said, “Okay, if you ping us with that handle, we are ready to give feedback on certain new features and a discussion on issue on GitHub or on a PR.”

So I think we can close the feedback loops a little bit or make the feedback loops a little bit closer and a little bit more interactive during development and even afterwards. Well, that’s a little excursion, the outreach channel, so join us there. You definitely need a Slack account and you need a WordPress.org account, but other than that, it’s easy access.

Announcements                                                       

So we are at the announcements space on this podcast and it’s been a while since our last show with Ellen Bauer, so let’s catch up on a few things. So there were two more developer hours that happened last month. One was on Hello Blocks, an introduction to block development. It’s not about new features, it’s about if you haven’t yet started getting into block development, I think Ryan Welcher was there how to get started, how to approach it, what are the things to learn, and I think they did a great job in putting that all together.

And then we also had one last week that was the building WordPress themes with the Create Block Theme plugin, and Tammie Lister showed us how she works with that plugin in her theme development process. And it was a great insight also because you also talked about style variations, what works and what doesn’t work and all that.

So the recordings are up on YouTube and of course, we’ll share all the links in the show notes including the link to the developer hours YouTube playlist, so you can go back and listen to the other 25 developer hours that have been done since, I think, last year. Have you listened to any of those developer hours? Not necessarily those two, but others?

Jessica Lyschik: I think I’ve attended a few in the past, so these two were… I’m also already too advanced for this, so I skipped them, but I think for new people or people just starting out or not knowing where to start, I think these are pretty good starter sessions to get into to learn the vocabulary that we use and just to see how do things work and maybe then experiment on top of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly, yeah. It’s hard to get into all the different audiences. Yeah, they are low-code people, there are developer people, so this is definitely for developers that touch code and more than for no-code or low-code site builders. There are two releases, WordPress releases coming up. There’s a minor release, a maintenance release coming up with WordPress 6.6.2.

The release candidate one is scheduled for September 4th and the full release is planned for September 10th. And block editor wise, there is mostly some touch up on the CSS specificity that came out with 6.6 and got a few sites struggling with that. And though the bugs are coming through and we share the link to the release post so you can look up on the track tickets what else is in that maintenance release. 

WordPress 6.7

The second release coming up is WordPress 6.7, the major release and WordPress beta one is scheduled for Tuesday, November 1st. 

Jessica Lyschik: October 1st.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: November 1st, I wish. October 1st. Thank you so much for pointing that out for me. It’s right there. But the reading at the brain… It’s only now it’s only four weeks away and the last Gutenberg plugin that’s going to push features into that release will be 19.3. So there are two more Gutenberg plugin releases to come. And then we know what actually made it into 6.7 release.

There’s a project board for the editor task, and a couple of weeks ago, there was a hallway hangout with demos of what’s next for Gutenberg and it showed some demos from the developers how the new tabs block comes along, how a new accordion block comes along, how the image gallery light box is supposed to work, then how the UI for custom fields going to look like with the block bindings together and with the sync patterns overrides.

And then there’s also a free form cropping tool that people are working on. I’m not quite sure it’s going to make it for 6.7, but it’s definitely worth looking at it because it’s better than what is there now. And then there were status updates on data views on the zoomed out mode, on the grid layout, and also on background images for block support.

So those are things that we don’t have a roadmap for WordPress 6.7 yet it probably will be published with a source of truth that Anne McCarthy puts out, and there probably won’t be a prior WordPress roadmap for WordPress 6.7. So we’ll definitely keep you informed. Anything that stood out for you, Jessica, that you’re excited about?

Jessica Lyschik: 6.7 will also ship with a new default theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good point. That was not on the Hallway Hangout.

Jessica Lyschik: Because I think the Hallway Hangout happened before the introduction post got online I think something like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Jessica Lyschik: So new default theme. So Twenty Twenty Four will have its last days. Nah, just kidding. Twenty Twenty Five will be coming, yes. Yeah, design is up. The work has already started and I haven’t checked in this week, I was a bit busy. But so far, what I’ve been seeing looks pretty good. It’s like progress is made. They have a few more weeks than we did last year.

Last year we had only four, now they have seven, so they have a bit more time to polish things, but I think overall the design is pretty straightforward. It has some nice features in it, but it’s not too advanced that it super much relies on features to be implemented. I know Carolina has been working on post formats as well, but I don’t think that these will make it actually. So I think there’s some more feedback needed or some more iterations needed on that, but overall the theme just looks great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And the listeners, we will share the introduction post that was on the make core block, I think it was… Yeah, I’ll find it. I didn’t put it in the list here. I’m sorry.

Jessica Lyschik: No worries, that’s why you have me here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, right. You are more in tune than what happened in the last four weeks than I was because I was on vacation.

Jessica Lyschik: Everyone deserves a vacation, so that’s fine.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so I also saw that Carolina, and we’re talking about Carolina Nymark who was here two episodes before on the show. She is also facilitating weekly meetings for contributors to the default Twenty Twenty Five theme because there is a call for contributors for creating style variations as well as patterns. And so if you want to contribute to that or just see what’s happening about it, just follow the core Slack block for the theme meetings for the default theme so you know what’s up.

What’s Released – Create Block Theme                                                       

So we are at the stage what actually was released, and before we go into Gutenberg, let’s talk about the Create Block Theme plugin. I’m not sure if you’re actually using that because you’re more into code and not going from the site to use the theme and back and forth again, but that’s what you can do with Create Block Theme plugin. You can make all the design changes and decisions on a theme.

So you can clone a theme, you can start an empty theme from scratch, or you can create a child theme with that plugin directly from your admin for the admin pages or for the site from the site editor. And then you can save the changes that are made through the site editor that are stored in the database, be pulled out into your file system, so being changes for colors or style variations or all that, you can then export it into your theme file system and then use that update so you can use it on a different site as well.

And that’s actually a process that quite a few theme developers use, especially also those that work for Automattic. There was a Hallway Hangout where Beatrice Fialho, who also is the designer of the Twenty Twenty Five theme, has demonstrated her workflow from using the site editor to pull in a theme into Playground and then use the plugin to get it out of it into and then push it to GitHub as a pull request.

So that was really cool. And you don’t need to know code pretty much, you can all do it through Playground. But the Create Block Theme plugin is sometimes a little bit behind core because all the new features need to land in core and then it needs to be decided. Okay, how can Block Theme plugin… God, this hard?

Jessica Lyschik: It’s all worse than one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Create Block Theme plugin help, no coders or theme builders to get everything out again into a theme that is reusable. So there’s a new global style, JSON data inspector. There’s also an update on the black theme, theme JSON. Then the side bar because when you install it’s installed, it has the side bar in the side editor, but on classic themes you don’t have the site bar. So it’s disabled for classic themes.

You can still use it through the admin pages, and now they had to bump up the minimum required WordPress version to 6.6. So if you use that Create Block Theme plugin, I will cluster the links in the show notes with the developer hours with Tammie Lister, the link to the plugin, and also to the Hallway Hangout recap where we have the demo, how the plugin Playground and GitHub can work together to put it also in version control.

It was complicated. I thought it would be easier, but maybe it’s just me who made it complicated. 

Gutenberg 19.0

All right, Gutenberg 19.0, 206 PRs merged by 50 contributors including five first-time contributors. Fabulous. Great work. So what’s new? Yeah, no fear. We will not read all 206 PRs. We only grab a few of those as most of you know, do you want to start Jessica?

Enhancements

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think we can directly start with one of the enhancements, which is font format library at old edit field to inline image, which basically means when you have added an inline image to a paragraph for example, then you can also now add an alternative text, which was previously not possible.

I think there was only that you could adjust the width but not add anything else. And maybe sometimes it would be helpful to have an alternative text there, especially for accessibility reasons. So that’s actually a really cool change. It’s tiny, but it’s really helping. Definitely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, just to clarify, I totally agree with you. It’s tiny, but a very good enhancement. If the image has an alt text in the media library, it automatically was pulled but you weren’t able to change it. So that’s why the edit field was added to it. So if somebody uploaded it without an alt text, you couldn’t edit it unless you go back to the media library and edit it, remove it from the canvas and then put it in again. So this is not so much…

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, sometimes it will be usable or exactly using that case to have no alternative text when it’s just something, a visual indicator. So there’s no need for an alternative text. But as you said, when you can only change it from what’s in the media library then it makes no sense because sometimes you would need it and sometimes maybe even not. Now you can really apply an alternative text or not if you don’t need it. So you have now both options.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, decorative imaging doesn’t need an alt text, but yes, cool. For the gallery link controls, they are now in the block toolbar. So because the link controls not only has, you could either put a link on the image or you can enable the click to increase and those two things were separated, so you could actually do both.

Now you can only do either one of them, which makes sense because you can only do a one click action on the image. So that’s why those things are now combined and you find them in the block toolbar and not in the side bar.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s a pretty good user experience enhancement. So I really like that. I actually haven’t seen this before, but good to have it pointed out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So on the navigation block, the system now hides the overlay menu, that’s the mobile menu. If the block is selected so it gets out of your way. The navigation block gets quite a few incremental changes and improvements, but this one is definitely…

And it’s all a little bit clustered and we find in other releases that or that they’re working on is removing or moving stuff around. So the navigation block will have some additional small improvements, quality of life improvements, which are definitely necessary.

Jessica Lyschik: Border block support, yay. More posts receive borders, yay. I mean it sounds super hard, but it’s actually, I don’t think where Borders started out which block it was just a few, couple blocks, but it makes sense to have them at more blocks available because sometimes you want to style and a block with borders when your layout needs it, for example.

So otherwise, you would have to put it in a group before and now you can just style it on the block itself just like you can do in CSS basically. And I think borders is a really nice example where it makes sense to add it to a lot of blocks. So there are a couple of more that got border block support in 19.0. So mostly post-related blocks, post-date, post-term, post-title, so and then we have site tagline, site title, table of contents. It’s not published yet, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, table of contents is in the plugin, but it’s not in the core.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s in the plugin, right? It’s not in core yet. Exactly. Is Time To Read in core already? I’m not sure, no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No. There were some accessibility issues with Time To Read and also the exclusivity it makes you feel bad when you take longer than the Time To Read puts out there. So there were some concerns in that both are in the Gutenberg plugin definitely, but now they have border support, so if you use them in production, it’s always interesting.

So there were some tweaks on the tag cloud controls and description there were nice because it’s a little bit more organized in the side bar and how the design is cleaned up and it also has the feature smallest to largest. You can now put the side, it’s a little bit more organized and also has a better description. The next one is the list block.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, the list block seems to got a bunch of improvements there. I’m just trying to figure it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Change the numbering style to something much more recognizable like a list style and then move the style controls up to the start value controls. So it’s also the user interface for that. Change the longer title to just for reverse list numbering to just reverse, which would be definitely equally understandable, I hope.

And then remove the default background color control to the list item, which is very nice. I like that because then you can do your own stripe design if you want to And it changed the default icon size to the, what is that? 40 pixels. That’s something that some of the interface items have a different size than others and I think the standardized is to go for 40 pixels.

Jessica Lyschik: I have seen this change now across the change logs recently, so I think there’s some unification there going on to make them all the same size. So you know where do you expect to click in. That makes total sense. No, that’s actually pretty good improvement. So it’s, again, just tiny and probably not the next big feature, but it’s definitely user experience improvement. That’s cool to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there is a Gutenberg polish board that has been around for I think three versions and contributors are getting finally a little bit more through that to make all those changes. So I like that there’s revisit some of the design choices and unify them exactly, especially because there are new things coming in the data views and it would be helpful when they were all standardized as well.

And one of the features in the Gutenberg 19.0 is additional data use extensibility. So it allows now to unregister permanent delete post actions or unregister restore post action or unregister trash post action. That is for site owners or site builders that want to put some guardrails around those state of use actions to help the clients not to get lost or…

Jessica Lyschik: Destroy site.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Save them for themselves. Yeah, destroy their site, yes. But it also opens it up. I think it’s another, it’s also coming, if it’s under 19.1, it’s definitely a 19.2 is that it opens up that particular piece also for third-party additional bug action. So I think that’s the way to where it goes, where it’s heading.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think we need this also because the true power of WordPress previously when you use the old style backend, it’s extensibility. So you could add whatever you needed to work with whatever plugin, functionality was provided. And I think if we lose this then WordPress will lose its user base. That sounds now very harsh.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, you’re right.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s like little steps in that direction and I think when we have this extensibility overall that when we keep this, it was on the old-school WordPress if you will, then I think that’s only the pathway forward because what made WordPress so big is the fact that you can make everything out of it so it’s so extensible.

There are so many plugins, there’s so much functionality you can use with it and if you just do not allow these things, I think this is also where people struggle sometimes where agencies struggle to get the stuff in and we struggle great with that sometimes. So the more, the better of extensibility possibilities.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: As a side note, there is now a tracking issue in Gutenberg repository about the most important extensibility issues for certain areas and so that would be really great, and I will share the link in the show notes, would be really great to get more input on each of those issues in terms of use case and why it’s really important for a certain use case to have that extensibility feature in there.

I will share the link in the show notes, but it’s also something that will be more and more also discussed in the outreach channels and it’s not so much about the data views because I think, so the Gutenberg developers definitely know that the data views will not come to WordPress permanently unless they are extendable to the same or similar grade as it is now.

So one approach is should we replicate the hooks and the filters or should we see, because there’s another level there, is the user can also make decisions on certain things. So that’s why it’s really important for the site editor and the block editor to get the extensibility with that in mind.

For the data views, it’s not that important because the extensibility is a given point, but it doesn’t have the user changing things too much around except for maybe changing the column or changing which fields are displayed are all things that haven’t been done yet previously to WordPress. So it’s coming in additional features, but the extensibility certainly will come back.

Talking about the next thing on the changelog, that’s the heading that’s enable heading level curation. So that is a PR where you can, as a developer, give your clients, your site creators, certain headers that you can only use as default. So one example is why do we have the H1 in that list when you are not supposed to have more than one H1 heading on the page, which is now the site title for now default.

So every other heading should be H2, which works, but then there are other things as well where you say, okay, for the editor, we can only have H3s because all the other things are dynamically graded. So that was definitely one of those extensibility issues for the editor that came out of a conversation with extenders who have hundreds and hundreds of sites on their multi-site system to give them a way to have additional guardrails for their users, their students or faculty members.

Jessica Lyschik: That’s a very good change. I like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And with it actually also comes a new option called level option attribute for other core blocks like the post title, the query title, site title, and the site tagline where you can also control the available heading levels for your custom blocks or your block variations if you want to.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that makes sense to extend that to these blocks as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Because that’s where the headings come in on a dynamic level. Then what comes out of conversations had in the hallway tracks of WordCamp, I think since we have WordCamp’s now more and more and these conversations happen quite frequently and they’ll also make it into core quite rapidly.

Jessica Lyschik: That’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So what’s the next one? I highlighted add the radio scale, but I think that’s the slider for the border radius. You can now add a scale to it through the components. So that is definitely a developer related thing. So you have radius X small, radius small, radius medium, radius large, so you can have presets for your bottle radius I think through the components. That’s cool.

Jessica Lyschik: Nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And do you want to take the select controls?

Jessica Lyschik: Well, they seem to be very much technical.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we can skip that. It’s definitely for…

Jessica Lyschik: I think we can skip that. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s for developers that use the select control. If you have that in your plugins or products, go back and see how that might change how you work with it. It’s all backwards compatible so don’t fear. So the next one, I’m in school, I think we are almost done with 19.0.

Jessica Lyschik: I think I highlighted one that I found quite interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Did I skip it?

Jessica Lyschik: Probably.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Go ahead.

Accessibility

Jessica Lyschik: It’s in the accessibility section, there has been a PR to move the post per page offset and pages controls from the block toolbar into the inspector controls and we’re now talking about the query loop block. So previously, or as of now you have to, when you want to adjust what the query loop is outputting the number of posts per page, if there should be an offset and these things, you have it in a block toolbar and now they got all moved to the setting side bar.

So I think this is a change that probably will leave people confused if they do not hear about it or they will search for those. Where is that toggle? I need to change the number of posts. So I just wanted to highlight that one because that’s what I stumbled upon as well and I thought, ooh. I mean, it’s not a bad change makes sense to move them to the site bar, but if you are not aware of it that things are moving around, then it might be confusing to hear.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally correct to call that out, especially because the side bar is not automatically opened. When you select the block, so you need to have another click and open the side bar settings for that. And I think it also was moved to the inspector controls, which is the technical term for side bar, because there is also additional features are coming for that and it would be combined with those options for the query loop. Yeah, good point. Thank you so much.

And I have another one and we talked about it, but I just wanted to see that there is also a hook to allow for the data view sustainability. There’s also a hook to allow third-party scripts to register and unregister post type actions that is combined with what we previously talked about the same, the extensibility of the data views and I think that was it all, the Gutenberg 19.0 and we are moving right into Gutenberg 19.1.

Gutenberg 19.1

So vacation time, you see they have only 178 PRs merged by 46 contributors. The release post is out and Artemio Morales was the release lead for this one. Let’s talk about the enhancements. There are some quick edit actions for the data views.

Jessica Lyschik: Just as quick edit actions, but I guess it’s related to data views and the linked issues, it says data views. Oh my god, so many changes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the data views, so you don’t have to open up the post to change the post status. So you can publish or put it in draft or move it forward or change the date right from the data view list and I think that’s pretty cool.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s just like replicating what we have or what we are used to from the traditional post overview to exactly in the data views to… When you see something familiar, it just gets easier to adapt to the different look, but it works the same when you use it. Of course, under the hood it’s a bit different, but I think the user experience when it’s fairly similar to what we are used to, I think people will quickly adapt to the new interface.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I totally agree with you, but the interface looks so much more modern so it’s actually delightful.

Jessica Lyschik: Absolutely, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And part of the extensibility again, so there is some great work being done and very pushed forward. There’s also unregistering, duplicate post actions patterns, unregistered duplication from template part actions or rename or reorder page or view post actions and all that.

So you can definitely, as a plugin developer, when you use those data views, you can pretty much make your own defaults for that and use it as you need it for your plugins. So the image block has a reset button.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think this is also an interesting change. It looks, again, one of these tiny changes, but when you have added an image block before and then selected an media either from your library or from URL, you could never reset the block to this initial state where you have this white box with the three buttons and now you can because the reset option has been added to where you replace those, where you can replace the media, you can reset it.

So in case you want to change the image to something else but don’t have the new image ready yet, you can just delete it, but leave the image block as placeholder there so you know when you come back that you can edit again. I think this is, again, a tiny change, but I think it could be a great quality of life improvement for many people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, yeah. You can go back to where you started off and that’s always a good place when you make decisions, you have buyer’s remorse for that and you can just go back and say, okay.

Jessica Lyschik: Maybe I have changed the aspect ratio or whatever other changes you’ve made and you need to start over again. It’s now as simple as clicking into a menu element and not having to delete the block and then add a new block again, which has more clicks than just resetting it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And also staying with the image block, there’s now an overlay with a text shadow possible for the image, so the caption can be on top of the image instead of underneath if you wanted to or it’s now automatically there.

Jessica Lyschik: And the background is not as harsh as it used to be, so when you have added the caption to the image, there was always this big black hole or this gradient that was in your face and probably did not match many layouts I guess. So that’s probably why people didn’t use it and now it’s just, it’s still there but it’s much lighter and it’s not that harsh at the bottom of the image.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there’s an art in painting. There is this kind of, don’t use the black-black thing because it burns a hole in your canvas for a person that’s going to look at it. That’s a similar design move there to not be so harsh on certain backgrounds.

Jessica Lyschik: We have some updates to other blocks. I think highlighting the quote block first is something interesting. So the quote block didn’t have alignment controls, so you couldn’t left align, right align, center width, full width and wide width.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? Yeah. It was the full width and align wide width that wasn’t available.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, exactly. And I think this has something to do also with the pull quote block from what I roughly remember, but you can now fully align this to whatever you need the quote block to, especially like that it’s left and right alignable, so you have that in the text, you have this quote block and then the text floats around it. I think this can be very useful. It’s not here’s an entire block splitting up your content, but it’s actually a bit more usable in this case.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I really like the right or left alignment because you can pull out some of the quotes from a text and make it a little bit more stand out instead of just using a subheader or something like that. So yeah, pretty cool. And now we get some more board support for more blocks.

So all the comment blocks, comment, author content and date have now border controls, as does the post author bio name and the full author parent block and then the query title and the query loop, the query title can have borders for the file block. The list items block. That is actually pretty cool because then now you can do underlined line items. That’s really cool. And then also…

Jessica Lyschik: And alternating it with the background to have also distinct border. Then not just the background color but also have a distinct border in between. Oh, that’s very nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and then you can do it also on the full list. Let us stand out and have a border also for the preformatted block and the tag cloud. They all have now border support in the Gutenberg plugin with the 19.1 release. This release also has a few updates for the zoomed out feature. Have you tried the zoom out feature yet?

Jessica Lyschik: Not yet. I’ve been seeing things around, but I haven’t really gotten into testing it out yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you use patterns, it will click on a pattern. It now can recede the whole canvas into a full page view so to speak. That’s the zoomed out one. There’s also a zoomed out. I don’t know exactly when that happens. Sometimes it’s triggered and now there is a drop-down also on where you do the preview and the mobile and the preview new tab. There’s also a new drop-down on the zoomed out or zoom in.

So you can see, okay, when I want to put in a new section, how does that change my whole feel for the whole page? And that’s actually a great feature, but it has a few pitfalls. Can I edit when I’m in that mode? And so the block insertion points needed to be handled differently, clear out or changed when you select a different block or section and then the default inserter to the patterns tab when in zoom out.

Okay. So you will see when the pattern, when you’re zoomed out mode and you click on the insertor, you first see the pattern displayed because there is the idea that if you are in zoomed out mode, you want to add bigger sections and you need a bigger view on that. It’s kind of those assumptions all need to be tested.

So it would be really cool to have more testing being done and get some more opinions and feedback about it, how that changes your flow when you work it on a day-to-day basis. And there is actually a call for testing out for that by Anne McCarthy. No, she has block binding, sorry. And now she definitely wants you to test us in the outreach channel. She posted that, so get on it, Jessica.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I guess. I’m not so sure the next two weeks will be a bit tough, so probably after WorldCamp US maybe where I think we’ll be almost too late to actually test this, but.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m not sure it’s going to make it to 6.7. There is a full push for it to get it in .7, but I don’t know yet or we don’t know yet.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s a pretty big feature, the whole zoom out thing. So it’s one of those things that probably will need another iteration before they land in core, that will be… I think this way, this is the way to go.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I feel that too, but we’ll see. Because you can’t scale it down to say, okay, I have a minimum viable product and then iterate on it. If it disrupts your workflow too much, you can’t go back and then you have some backwards compatibility of something that you didn’t want. Being on the conscious side is definitely something that we learned with the whole Gutenberg releases.

Jessica Lyschik: As you said, it works better with some other features that are just small steps so that the iterations happen in small steps and they’re not disturbing the actual workflow that people are already using. So this would be one of those things that if you put it in, things would change immediately for people and they have no chance to look into it or get used to it. Probably not even deactivated if possible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, and there’s also the surprise factor will not as intuitive as you want it to be. Sometimes you get some new feature and said, oh, that is cool. It triggers and you say, oh, that’s new and I like it. Most of the time it’s kind of, oh, what happened? Did I do something?

Jessica Lyschik: This disrupts my workflow. So that’s always the not so good option you want to I go for.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So true. So true, yes. Then we come to one of the biggest features landed in Gutenberg 19.1 that a lot of people have been waiting for since Block Themes came out in Twenty Twenty Two. No, in Twenty Twenty. We first talked about block themes and I know because I had the early Carolina Nymark and Anders Noren and even a developer on the Gutenberg Live Q&A.

API                                                        

So the feature is how plugin can create templates that are edible in the site editor and API has landed right now with 19.1 in Gutenberg and almost immediately, well Justin Tadlock was working with a release candidate and he published a tutorial on how plugin developers can work with it or start at least experimenting with it on the developer block.

It’s called Registering Block Templates via our plugins in WordPress 6.7, and it’s definitely worth getting to know that feature now because now it can be issues, bug reports can be found out, so definitely get into it when you’re interested in that.

He has an example on where you do custom post types and custom fields for a book custom post type and then shows how to create the single book and then the archive book template and as well as the custom templates that you can offer for changing the single post book or something like that. 

So there will also be, on September 10th 15:00 UTC, that’s 9:00 AM Eastern and 17:00 European Central.

Jessica Lyschik: It will be 11 Eastern?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: 11 Eastern, yes. I make that mistake. All the time zones, the pain of my existence. So 11 Eastern, 8:00 AM Pacific, and 5:00 PM in Central Europe. There’s a developer hangout, a first look at the template registration API. You can RSVP wire the WordPress online meetup group and if you get the chance to look at the tutorial, you can also bring your questions.

So I like that combination of, okay, there’s an API in Gutenberg, we have a developer block post about it on how to use it and then we offer developer hours to it. So that’s a great way to roll out a feature that a lot of people have waited for and to integrate it into their plugins.

Jessica Lyschik: It’s a full package and I definitely need to look into it because that’s very interesting, especially if you’re registering custom post types in some sort. And then imagine you have whatever plugin you’re using, if you’re using a plugin to register post types and then the plugin is able to provide you with a template or various templates.

Or if you have specific templates, you can already tie that template to the post type when you register them, you can just go into the editor, no other files included, no chat theme where you need to throw in any other template, template files essentially and just start editing from there. I think that’s a pretty nice feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a pretty feature, yeah, it’s something that hasn’t been done in WordPress before and it was not so easy for plugin developers to get it right in the first place, even with classic themes. So this is definitely a move forward and could entice some of the plugin developers that haven’t been migrating to the block editor yet entirely to rethink that piece because it’s probably easier to do it now without having to create custom blocks or anything.

I read through the tutorial, it seems to be pretty straightforward and especially when you are already familiar with block themes and patterns and all that. Definitely.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s definitely on my to-do list for next week to check that out because that’s a really interesting thing. Also for other grade to provide additional templates for whatever you needed, have custom ideas, so that’s actually pretty neat.

Or maybe even just blank templates registering, so let’s say you add a post type and then have a checkbox somewhere that says add templates to site editor and then you check the box, save it, and then go directly to the site editor and have an empty template there without having to go through this template creation process within the site editor. It just takes away a couple steps, but it makes it so smoother.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

Jessica Lyschik: Then creation for the post types. So that would be pretty gassed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you probably could even find out what’s the overall header and footer and so you don’t have an empty template, you just have a template with the rest of the site already filled in. Might be something to think about. Yeah, so that’s the big, new feature right now it’s the first iteration of the API, so any feedback would be absolutely helpful if there are bug reports, put them in the GitHub issue.

If you want to discuss it with other people, go to the developer hours and discuss it and then we’ll figure out or they figure out if there are some additional iterations necessary or feature requests. Also join us in the outreach channel to discuss some of the things. Moving on on the 19.1, do we have more?

Jessica Lyschik: I think that’s it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s it?

Jessica Lyschik: Don’t see anymore.

Documentation

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. I had one thing in the documentation part because… Right. The interactivity API has additional documentation and it’s more on the basis of fundamentals. So it explains three core concept of the interactivity API in more depth, so people who had problems to figure out what the interactivity API is for and how it’s actually works can consult the new pages in the documentation and hopefully, get more clarity on it.

Excellent. So thank you so much, Jessica for going with me through the two changelogs for two plugins. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

I have one more thing and that is what it’s an active development and that touches on the collaboration effort on WordPress, so more people can comment in line on the block editor about content and I share the issue with that. That’s issue 59445, 59445 if you want to grab it.

Of course. The link is in the show notes, but the issue was just updated with some mock-ups on how this is supposed to work. There’s also a PR 60622 that you can definitely put into your playground and experiment with it, but the mock-ups are really nice. You can have in line comments per block and then see also in the site bar, it’s an overlay to the side bar who has with the comments for that particular block. That’s neat. Check it out. If you want to test the PR, it’s not merged yet. You would need to use the playground and punch in the number six, oh… What was it?

Jessica Lyschik: Somewhere in the middle. Six, oh something.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: 60622, and then I’ll share the link in the show notes directly to the playground, the space where you can with the PR installed so you can test it. But it’s definitely something I’m really excited about because when you’re working on a… You can take away the Google Docs commenting thing and not just edit or write directly in the block editor and have additional people comment on it. That’s really cool.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s definitely an interesting thing too. I would be interested if it’s actually possible that two people can already see a block post.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s part of it. Yes.

Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I guess so. It would make sense. You can do it asynchronously, but I think doing it, seeing someone just like in a Google Docs, seeing someone editing stuff and then you can comment on it. I think that’s in a very interesting way forward to work with WordPress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The core contributors are working on so many things and just this section, our podcast almost points out some of the things that would be interesting to get an early view on it to get feedback on it or even figure out if that fits in your workflow for concentration or even in development. All right, we are at the end of the show.

Jessica Lyschik: Already?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, already is good. We have talked about quite a few things today. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything that you would want to talk about that you didn’t get a word in kind of thing? Because I’m rambling on.

Jessica Lyschik: No, I think I mentioned the default theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Jessica Lyschik: I think that’s probably also one of the interesting things for 6.7 or what’s currently going on in the WordPress core contribution world.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: September 10th, 15:00 UTC, the next developer hour is happening on the template plugins. That’s just a little reminder for those that listen to this end. As always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast.

As mentioned, this is the 106th episode, and if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com. That’s the Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com.

So thank you all for listening and welcome all the new listeners that we gathered in the last four weeks. Thank you, Jessica. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they reach you or find you online?

Jessica Lyschik: So I guess easiest is Twitter or X, if you call it. I would still call it Twitter anyway.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You do?

Jessica Lyschik: It’s Jessica Lyschik, just my full name on there, or find me on Slack @Jessica. That’s probably where you can reach me the easiest.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s WordPress Slack?

Jessica Lyschik: WordPress Slack, yes, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wonderful. That’s it. Until the next time. Goodbye.

Jessica Lyschik: Bye.

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