Gutenberg Changelog #108 – Gutenberg 19.3, WordPress 6.7 – Block Themes for Agencies, WordCamp Asia

Gutenberg Changelog 108 with JC Palmes and Birgit Pauli-Haack

In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and JC Palmes, engineering manager at WebDev Studios, discuss Gutenberg 19.3, WordPress 6.7 – Block Themes for Agencies, and WordCamp Asia.

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Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

JC Palmes

Announcements

What’s released:

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 108 episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg’s 19.3, WordPress 6.7 briefly, block themes for agencies in WordCamp Asia. 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. For the first time on the show, I have a great pleasure to introduce to you, dear listeners, JC Palmes. She’s one of the local leads of the WordCamp Asia 2025, and in her day job, JC works as the engineering manager at WebDev Studios. Welcome to the show, JC. How are you today? How’s the weather in the Philippines?

JC Palmes: Hi, Birgit. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to join you on the show. The Philippines is still very warm today. Well, warmer than usual. We are supposed to have a typhoon coming up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, no. Oh, no. So the Philippines is in the tropics, right? So it’s similar to Bangkok from the weather in Florida.

JC Palmes: More or less. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. So the Philippines, I don’t know a lot about the Philippines that will change when I come over for WordCamp Asia, but the Philippines comprises of about 7,000 islands. So where do you live?

JC Palmes: Yeah. It’s 7,641 islands to be exact. It changes on a decade to decade basis, I guess. But yeah, I am in the Panay Island in the city of Iloilo and it’s a small island, but it’s a vibrant hub for tech and innovation. Yeah. It’s not as traffic heavy as Manila, which you will experience next year. You’ll love the people here if we come to visit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, I’m sure about it. Yeah. But when you say you’re active in the community, so you organized WordPress meetups in Iloilo, and you also organized or started the WordCamp Iloilo. When did this all happen?

JC Palmes: We organized WordPress Iloilo Meetup Group around August 2016, 2017.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You almost at eight years.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Over eight years.

JC Palmes: Started our first WordCamp in 2018.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, wow. Yeah. And then you had one 2019, right?

JC Palmes: Yeah. We did.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Did you also organize one after the pandemic?

JC Palmes: Yes, we did. We organized… Well, we had one last 2023 and opted not to do 2024 because WordCamp Asia is going to be in the Philippines and most of my local organizers here are also organizers in WordCamp Asia and volunteers as well. So it’s a lot to ask them to pay local WordCamp as well as the flagship one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, I wouldn’t have thought that there would be a local one when there is a regional one, because that takes a lot of out of you as an organizer or especially a lead organizer, but also if you just going to have a team organizing role, it’s a lot of work and you don’t want to lose focus on that. Yeah. I totally get it. Yeah. So yeah, we had the last month we got together because I connected with you about two things, right? There was one was the webinar for WebDev Studios on the lunch-and-learn.

And then we also discussed, I read the article by Lisa Sabin-Wilson on the website, WebDev Studio that you started to have working with Block Themes. And then when I read through the article, I found that you had created a starter theme that your agency is going to use for projects. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about it because we get a lot of questions about how agencies work with Block Themes and all that. So I just wanted to, being with the source as the engineering manager, I think you had a major role in putting that together.

JC Palmes: Yeah. WDSBT was, well, it’s kind of a brainchild between Lisa, me, and Mitch, our director of engineering, and it’s a starter theme. We stands for, of course, WebDev Studios Block Theme. And the goal really was to create a flexible block-based foundation that fully embraces modern WordPress capabilities while also allowing for highly customizable websites. When we initially started this, we started with Brian Gardner’s Powder theme for inspiration. But because I spearheaded the project, and really when I started this, I was learning about Block Themes, and as I go along, I found that instead of changing, adding into the Powder theme, we needed to make it entirely our own ’cause we have a design system and we need to make sure that the theme that we are going to create aligns with that design system. So the original setup with the Powder theme didn’t really align with the vision, so it was mostly overhauled by me. So…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Tell me a little bit about the design system, because a lot of people think about design system that is not in WordPress, but maybe in Figma or in some other design tool. How are you working with that? Is that something that you now built into the Block Theme or is it separate?

JC Palmes: It’s built into the Block Theme. So what we did was take that design system, so the design system was created with blocks in mind. We have sort of redesigned the core blocks in a way that it would be easier for us to create the components that we mostly use in our projects and would be easily extendable based on, of course, on a project-to-project basis because every project is different, but all of the elements in a component are going to be the same. And the core blocks as is with our design is pretty solid, but we needed more. Well, clients needed more, and that is what our design system allows us to do. And by integrating that with the theme, it just makes our work with whatever design our senior UX designer, Jennifer Cooley creates and just makes things easier and faster.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Excellent. Excellent. So when you put this together, how long did it take you to from learning about Block Themes in zero learning to, “Okay. We have a solid foundation for our projects.”

JC Palmes: It took me probably around two, three months. It would probably take a lot, well, it would probably be faster if I already knew the structure. And I’m saying that because I’m dyslexic, so I work with patterns and learning new things kind of takes me out of my comfort zone. But because of how Block Themes in general are structured, it’s structured enough for me to pick up the patterns right away. And it took two, three months before we are actively using it on projects. So we’ve used it on three successful projects so far, launched projects.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So what did you find coming from the classic theme in the agency? So what you found easy to do with or easier maybe in switching to Block Themes and what did you think was very hard?

JC Palmes: So what was relatively easy is the process of working with native WordPress blocks. That’s the mouthful. Again, my brain works with patterns, right? I’m not sure if it’s going to be the same for other engineers, but that was what’s easy for me. And because of that, it kind of provided us with a solid foundation and really allowed for quick implementation of reusable design elements, which is integrated in our design system. And what was hard, of course, was transitioning from our wd_s PHP-based framework to a block-based approach. Although before it was transitioned into Block Themes already. It was a hybrid theme, but we were mostly using it for PHP based framework still, but transitioning meant rethinking of the entire development process, and that takes a while for it to click, and we are getting there. Again, as I mentioned, we’ve successfully launched three projects. One of those is a really big site and well, the last project that we launched is the first TrueBP Build where we did not really use any shortcuts, I guess.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good. Good. Good.

JC Palmes: And it’s also probably one of the most successful launches that we’ve had with regards to performance and page speed and all those fun stuff. It’s a site with 18,000 plus users and it got 100 performance scores on page speed and 93 on mobile, 100 on desktop, 93 on mobile, and 93 on mobile was big.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s awesome. Congratulations. Yeah.

JC Palmes: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you have a team of developers that also had a different level of familiarity with Block Themes and blocks. How did the transition work for them? What were the blocks mostly?

JC Palmes: Yeah. So the team that I worked with at WebDevs teachers for this particular project are, well, all of the engineers that I have on WebDevs teachers are amazing developers. The theme that created this site already established in Block Themes, although didn’t have the actual experience of building one for clients. They built one personally as I did, and I worked with them closely to make sure that we learned together.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent.

JC Palmes: That’s best, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JC Palmes: And there were a lot of gutters we had to pull in Ryan and Nick. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mean Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego?

JC Palmes: Ryan Welcher. Yeah. Ryan Welcher helped us a lot and figuring things out, especially with Block Bindings, that unblocked a lot of stuff for us.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Block Bindings, so it’s amazing, especially because it works so much with the meta fields and you can have your own data sources. Yeah. So what I often heard from agencies is that they don’t use core blocks, but that seems to be different in yours, in your case, that you mostly base it all on native core blocks and only have variations and primary block styles that you extend them to or with. So I think that’s a great way to leverage all the work that the developers do in core to bring those forward and you can build your sites on it. 

The last question I have on that, and then I think we can move on unless you want to say something more, is so with the Block Themes, there is also your clients are now able to create their own templates or modify the templates. Is that all open to them or what’s the training about? What’s the implementation at the clients? What’s the process there to give them that freedom?

JC Palmes: It’s open to them, but we did add in some guard rails, particularly with what we’ve set in theme Jason, but then again, it’s WordPress, it’s open for clients this time around. We did not sort of think deeply, I guess? That’s the only word they can really think of right now. Features are with a website that is designed for clients, you’ll have to be very careful with telling them what to do, how to use this block, how to figure things out.

And with Block Themes, because they’re able to just create an entire template at an entirely new header and all those stuff, we made sure that we have all of the documentation ready for them. Documentation that is part of WordPress, we just give them the link to that because you don’t have to change it out. It’s all there for them to read. We fully document any custom block that we create. And also all of the custom blocks that we do are also just core blocks. We opted to always do core blocks first if it’s doable, and just go the other route if not. But so far we were able to do everything just using core blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Core blocks. Yeah. Wonderful. Excellent.

JC Palmes: And clients showing them how to use the website and with Block Themes, we thought was going to be hard. It wasn’t it. They were very happy with just having that freedom and being that it’s intuitive enough for them to just go in and add in their content. It’s just amazing to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So when you have one of these large projects, how many block patterns do you… What’s the good number that you use there? Is it 25 or is it 50 or is it… Yeah. I heard other people have 58 patterns in there, or 58 new blocks.

JC Palmes: Oh wow. That’s a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: Because we are leveraging core blocks, we are actively using them for everything. We have variations. So BT, WSBT, we can add in variations with just a couple lines of code and eight variations that variations and block variations. You don’t really need to create that many patterns or blocks because then they’ll be able to just use it. But of course, if there’s a sub layout, we create a pattern for that, a template pattern so that they can just add that in a page and then just change things around. I’m not exactly sure how many patterns we did for this site. I know that it’s not 50 plus, it’s less than that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. All right. Okay. So if listeners are interested in learning from you, and I know developers like to look at code and theme developers even more, especially your theme JSON and how you set up all the assets. And so your theme is available on GitHub, that’s public record, right?

JC Palmes: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s in a public record.

JC Palmes: It is public now. It was silently public for the past few months, and then we opened it up publicly release this post when we set out version 1.0, and it’s that to go up to 1.5 by this week with some modifications with the versioning cache buster, and then fix this particularly to the mobile menu because that needs a lot of love.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It does. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Especially when you have things that are you want on a desktop, but you don’t want them on the mobile and you want to kind of stack things differently in a different order. It’s really hard to implement that. Yeah. Totally get it.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I will show in the show notes if that’s okay with you, the GitHub repo for the WDS-BT theme. Well, maybe you could come up with a cuter name.

JC Palmes: We just really call it BT.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, of course. Block Themes, I get it. Yeah. And it’s the acronym from your company, WebDev Studio.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally get it. I will share that. And I also will share, again, the link to the article that Lisa Wilson put together in the show notes so you can kind of look through it to your listeners. But I find it very interesting to talk to you about that. So thank you for sharing all your insights on that.

JC Palmes: Thank you.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So dear listeners, we have a few announcements for you, and it’s mostly about what’s published. So there’s a data views update number two, has been published on the design make blog with new updates on cam-sounds like what are new features on the data views. There’s some great work being done there. You can catch up with that. So it was the primary filter visibility has been changed. Then you can reorder table columns and view options. So you can hide columns, a feature that was available in the WP admin, but not always all columns and not always all columns are in there, so you can get them in and out.

And then also have a featured image and the title field in the display for pages. And then you can pin columns and rows. And the advanced filtering is really great. You can have and and/or filtering categories in tag or is any out of particular list of tags. So when you’re looking at the 2,000 or 20,000 blog posts, you can narrow down the filtering quite a bit in the admin section there. So check it out, I share it in the show notes. Then there’s two more posts on the developer blog. So if you went to block development more on the beginner side, there’s an article on how to build a multi block plugin.

So with the create-block scaffolding tool, we had a similar article about two months ago, but this is a little bit of a different approach. So you get more variations on how you can approach that, and it’s really great because it gets you step by step through that tutorial. Troy Chaplin is a new writer on the developer blog, and he is from Ottawa, Canada and is writing on the second blog now… blog post. And the second blog post was actually the second part of a series on data views on how you as a plugin developer can use it for your plugin in the admin section. So the first part came out a month ago, like using data views to display and interact with data in plugins. And then the second one is called actions from data views. So how to add the image that you bring in from the data into a media library.

So it’s kind of an app pretty much that you can build there. It’s a React app and you get through in the tutorial from beginning to end. So it’s a really interesting series of blog posts. And with that, there was a data views developer hours where both JuanMa Garrido wrote the two articles that I just mentioned. But then there was also Nick Diego was in the developer hours, and Andre Manero who’s one of the developers who put this all together. And the recording I will also share in the show notes. And the last announcement… it’s not the last announcement, the second last announcement is you take it’s about WordCamp Asia.

WordCamp Asia

JC Palmes: Oh, yeah, right. Okay. WordCamp Asia. So the next batch of tickets for WordCamp Asia 2025 will be released on October 3 at 12:00 PM Philippine time. I’m not sure what that is in UTC. I’m really bad with time zones.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, it’s kind of earlier in the day. It’s in the morning. Yeah. So October 3rd in the morning is the ticket release. Yes. Yeah. Awesome.

JC Palmes: With those who don’t know WordCamp Asia 2025 will be held at the PICC in Manila Philippines from February 20 to 2022… No, 20 to 22, 2025. So yeah, be sure to mark your calendars and secure your tickets as soon as they’re available. Maybe we can talk, if you see me just say hi.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I just saw on Twitter a series from Sushi about the photos of the walkthrough of the organizing team in Manila. So it was, if you follow him on Twitter, I can share some links that as well in the show notes. So you can see how grand this convention center is where the conference will be held. So I’m really looking forward to that.

JC Palmes: Yeah. They’re doing that today. I did fly out because, well, I need to fly again in the next couple of weeks. But then again, also I do have one more thing with WordCamp Asia 2025, you’re also still looking for sponsors.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

JC Palmes: Yeah. So if you or your company are interested in supporting the event, feel free to reach out. I’d love to discuss how you can get involved.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I’ll link the call for sponsors page in the show notes so you can check it out what the options are for different levels and all that and what’s all included into the sponsor packages. I think that helps. No, that was really good. Thank you. Well, that’s a few months to go. So some people are really late in their decisions and it’s the next year, so their budget is not out yet. So I can understand that some people are a little bit hesitant to get this going. So the speaker is also, you got a lot of submissions I heard for speakers.

JC Palmes: A lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Was it more than last year?

JC Palmes: I haven’t checked yet. So I’m mentoring sponsors, operations and the technology team. Global leads are sponsoring other teams. And then one of the local leads as well, Andrew is he is mentoring venue, which takes a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah.

JC Palmes: So we all have our hands full. We are getting there. We have an amazing set of organizers as usual, and I can’t wait to see them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m so grateful that everybody puts things together. And the two WordCamps Asia that I… ’23 and ’24 were just amazing. And I had a great time and it was great to talk to everybody there. And they were also open. And yeah, I’ve made a lot of new friends, so happy to also hopefully get there again next year.

JC Palmes: You should. It’s in my country.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And if I come, I’ll spend a few days. So my approach is always I come in early, maybe a week or four days early, get over the jet lag, get the lay of the land. So I don’t know. So when I want to meet people. I know where the restaurants are, I know where the venue is, but I also get to do some sightseeing in a place where I haven’t been. So if it’s the first time… Yeah. I’m really looking forward to exploring Manila the few days that I have beforehand. I haven’t booked the flight yet. I need to wait for the okay. Of course, I don’t see why not. We’ll see how that goes.

JC Palmes: That would be nice. Amazing. I mean, Manila is an amazing city to explore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m looking forward to that. 

What’s Released – WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 – Create Block Theme

So next week, WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 is going to come out in October. On Thursday, October 1st, no Tuesday, sorry, on Tuesday, October 1st. And if you want to refresh what’s on the docket, I’ll share the link to the roadmap from 6.7 that Anne McCarthy put out. But I’m also hoping that by then after that, she also publishes a little bit more updated, because I know there is some change in the Zoom out feature, which I really love and I know the best part that I love will get in.

What was a little bit harder was to figure out how the editing works when you edit what you zoom out on your site for design. And if you want to contribute and have some time and want to learn at the same time, keep an eye out for that. The Make test team is about to publish with the beta, the help to test WordPress 6.7 post. It’s going to be a long one, but you can pick the features that you want to learn about or you want to test about, and the more you test, the better the version becomes. So that’s a big appeal to help us testing the beta versions.

JC Palmes: Yeah. For sure. I do want to touch on ’cause you’ve already mentioned some of the big updates, right? I think it’s also worth mentioning some of the smaller fixes that don’t always get a lot of attention, but really make a big difference in day-to-day use. There are a few things that I really love personally and versus there’s the great Block theme plugin that now allows you to, no, they rename on assets when saving or exporting, and it’s a small but neat update, but that makes asset management easier for developers working with custom fonts. And we work with custom fonts a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

JC Palmes: So fonts are now copied directly to the local theme folder, which is such a time saver when dealing with multiple customizations. One other update that I think is worth mentioning is removal of the categories hidden tag.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I haven’t mentioned anything about the… So when we are talking about now about the create Block Theme plugin new version that was released a week ago, and are you using in your Block Theme building process, the grade Block Theme plugin? How do you use that?

JC Palmes: We are. So it’s integrated in WDEVS BT, we are able to create… Well, this scaffold new blocks using a template that we have set in BT and leveraging the create-block script. So we have that added in our package JSON, and when our developers create a new block, we just run the script and it will scaffold all the files they need as part of the theme and they can just start creating a new block right away. It works right away, right away, right away. Yeah. It works. Once you run the script, it takes the template that we’ve set and then scaffold is a block and you have a very simple block showing up right away.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So that’s the create-block script. And that’s where probably Ryan came in because he’s a specialist in the…

JC Palmes: Yeah. That one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

JC Palmes: And also we are… So this is an internal thing that we do with the create blocks plugin where we use it for a versioning thing or when we are doing patterns, changing patterns, and editing patterns and grading patterns. And it’s still a work in progress of course, but we are actively using that plugin and also the script and amazing plugins.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the create block theme, you create the patterns in the editor and then you…

JC Palmes: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay. So you export them through the create block theme plugin methods into the…

JC Palmes: Yes, part of. So the create-block theme plugin right now does not really take patterns, but we somehow are finding a way to override that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. Yeah. The newest version of the create block theme plugin had a few things, and you mentioned one that was the rename of the font assets, when the theme is saved when exported, there’s also an attempt to try to add the synced patterns to the theme on save. 

JC Palmes: That one I have not tested yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It hasn’t been out long enough probably.

JC Palmes: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It just came out last week. Yeah. So that is definitely something to test for theme developers and that were really waiting for that to happen. And then the remove categories hidden, you wanted to mention that?

JC Palmes: Yeah. So removing categories hidden from the default pattern header, and it’s a very subtle fix, right? But it just cleans up the UI, making it easier to manage and organize patterns, especially when you have more than 50 plus patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: So if you want to keep things tidy, you have to organize.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And then another new feature is that it wraps the main tag around the Query Loop instead of the post content. It’s necessary because, so the skip to content kind of goes to the Query Loop instead of the full page kind of thing. So that has solved quite a few accessibility items there. And then the last one I wanted to mention is, oh yeah, that the fonts are copied and you mentioned it as well in the local theme folder. When you use a different font for a style variation, it automatically is downloaded there and added to the theme as its folder. Yeah. Cool.

JC Palmes: Yeah. I actually have two more.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Go ahead.

JC Palmes: Yeah. So you’ve mentioned the main tag that’s also one of the things, and I think that just makes it, that’s an accessibility thing that we really need to improve on and that will help ensure better semantic HTML and accessibility. And also there’s some behind the scenes cleanups that I really like and it’s removing unused styles and unused style rules in data views, and it just makes for a leaner code base and better performance.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent.

JC Palmes: Also, the swapping of the pre-published check buttons was another nice tweak because I’m visual when I’m coding, so if something changes, I notice right away because dyslexic. I work in patterns. So if one thing changes and I think that is a really good change, I check it out and see how and why that is like one of the… it’s one of my top, it just makes it leaner and easier for me to work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m glad. Yeah. No. I find it very helpful to have this plugin and in combination with the site editor and then you make some changes there and it gets better and better even goes a little bit further than core, especially with the sync patterns for themes. I think that’s a little bit of a step forward that is outside of core because core is not yet ready for that and to get it into hands of theme developers to test it out and see how does it work and how good does it fit in into the development process. Yeah. So that’s our create Block Theme plugin update, and now we come from the big one, that’s the Gutenberg 19.3 plugin release. 

Gutenberg 19.3

The release had about 165 PRs following 52 contributors, including 7 first-time contributors. Kai Hao was the release lead and he published a release post that I certainly will share with you in the show notes.

Enhancements                                                       

So there are a few enhancements that we’re going to talk about. There are also new API or one new API. I’m sorry that my voice is a little horsey. I come from a week of nasty cold and I’m glad that we can connect today. Yeah. So I’m happy that you also can take over some of the things JC with me. Okay. 

So the first enhancement is actually not an enhancement. It’s kind of an update on the minimum PHP requirement for the create block script, which is 7.2. You cannot be on an older PHP version anymore. And using that script to create blocks, sometimes they need to point out that thing. So in the restore, there’s a restore, the move to trash button disappeared in the document settings and people were looking for it. They found them in the three.menu, but they needed it more prominent. So it’s coming back.

JC Palmes: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the inspector controls, so when the developer talks about inspector controls, they talk about the sidebar on the block editor and now they changed that when for custom blocks, they didn’t always have the block name in there to highlight that out. So that has changed. It was actually a bug I would think, because you want the name of the custom block name also in the inspector control. So that has been rectified and for patterns you can now change. It’s not for the patterns, it’s for when you go to add a page, your editor always comes out with a set of patterns that are available and you don’t want them. Now there is a user preference that you can switch on or toggle on and off in your preference sidebar or tool. So the modal, you can disable that modal and not have the selection in front of you. It took a while, but there was definitely something they listen to users to have that. Same with a move to trash button. The developers always, not always, but often listen to users when there is a strong emotion coming there away.

JC Palmes: Yeah. That’s amazing. I have strong emotions with that trash button as well. Having that not there is just, it’s making things off for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s kind of disconcerting. I want to have just trash it. Where is it? Yeah. 

Components

So in the components, it’s not a public component yet, but the developers are working on a tabs block component or a tabs component, and that is actually used throughout the editor, but it’s not available yet for blocks. It’s not public yet, but you can definitely look at the PR and see how it works so you can prepare yourself and they just improve the animation and the related utilities to make it to prepare for coming out of experimentation.

JC Palmes: Tabs block would be amazing. We’ve had to grade our own custom tabs block just because it’s not available and having that as one of the core blocks would be really awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Same with the accordion block, I think there’s someone working on that as well. I saw some prototypes how that works. But yeah, it’s not going to come. I don’t think it’s going to come for 6.7 because they’re still in experimentation and we have what? Four days to go. Three days to go for beta, so I don’t think it’s coming.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Just three days.

Block Library

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what else? The block library had some changes, especially here now for the image block. I think there was…

JC Palmes: Oh, yeah. That one. Sorry. Yeah, with dropping multiple… not just multiple images, right? So you are now able to drop any kind of media and it’ll automatically translate to whatever that is. If it’s a video, it’ll be an actual video and images. It’s a time saver.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It automatically… So if it’s all images automatically creates a gallery block.

JC Palmes: Gallery. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I tested it quite a bit and you need to be a little bit… When you drag and drop, you need to be quite precise with your mouse.

JC Palmes: With that. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. To get it next to the image that’s already there to create a gallery out of two images, but it’s just a little practice that you need. And then it’s really saving so much time to upload and download and gallery block and oh, I changed my mind. I don’t want one image, I want two images. So now I need to remove the image and put a gallery block in and yeah.

JC Palmes: Yeah. It’s just a time saver really.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Especially when you’re someone who changed their mind often.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And what’s also there now is for the gallery list block to have now added a drop-down for the taxonomies so you can really select all the categories that you want to have in there. And then there were quite a few enhancements that are coming under the umbrella of a zoom out feature. 

Zoom Out

So the zoom out mode is officially out of experiment and it’s now available to all users. And this mode allows you to zoom out, to edit, or create at the pattern level over granular block editing. So you’ll see it when you want to add a pattern to a site, an existing site kind of zooms out so you see more of your page and then you get the insert outside of that, so where you can insert it without getting into other container blocks kind of thing. Yeah. So it’s actually really neat to see how a pattern would change the content of your page in relation to the other patterns or other page content that’s there. So it’s a really interesting way of helping you with the design of things. Have you experienced that on the Gutenberg plugin level yet? 

JC Palmes: Works not so much yet. Yeah. But that is one of the things that I want to play with this week. I just didn’t have the time to do that last week, but with all of this new things, so I just want to play around with it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, when you say play, it’s testing, right?

JC Palmes: It’s testing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s testing.

JC Palmes: Well, in my brain it’s still playing love to code. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Mine too. Yeah. It’s kind of, “Oh, I’m going to play around with that.” But it’s more like, “Yeah. We need to test it.”

JC Palmes: Testing, creating, and all that fun stuff.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thinking about use cases, thinking about how to break it because that’s-

JC Palmes: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … yeah. And last month ago, or maybe three weeks ago, I got a kudos from a co-worker who said, “Well, you always find creative ways to break things.” It was my superpower, you know?

JC Palmes: Super power.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah., the zoom out toggle that is in the header section of the editor, there is a zoom out toggle. So you can say, okay, give me 50% of the view or give me the 100% that’s next to the preview tab. It might not stay there, but if you just want to kind of test it a bit and you don’t know, and I don’t always know when I would trigger that there’s an automation when all of a sudden it zooms out. But if you want to be in control of it, there’s a little toggle switch in the editor header and then you drag and drop your patterns into the zoom out mode. And then you also see of course everything in the list view and have the top level section in the zoom out mode and the list view is open. You only see the top sections of your site.

Block Editor                                                       

It’s really interesting. So the block editor got a few things. So this release also had a few other drag and drops, not only the image or the pattern, but you also can drag and drop a mix of audio and image blocks into the canvas and it will automatically create those individual blocks. That’s what you mentioned earlier as well.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then there is the link editing. That’s a small fix, but it’s something that was really missing was to create a link for the phone number. So if there’s a phone number or a recognizable phone number in your content, it will automatically create the link for it. So when you watch it on or look at it in mobile, you get the button-

JC Palmes: You’ll be able to click on it. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … call button. Yeah.

JC Palmes: Yes. ‘Cause adding that is going to be really awesome. It’s missing, and we’ve been adding that for some clients who needed that. So having that automatically added is just a nice small thing to have.

Post Editor

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Absolutely. So there is a new preference modal in the new media section.

JC Palmes: That I didn’t know about.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I didn’t know about it either. Yeah. So this preference for the media section is to switch on client-side media processing. So it doesn’t all have to go to server sooner or later it will go to the server, but you can do it actually in the browser window. And then you have a lot more options open for dealing with media. And it’s the first part of the client-side media processing by Pascal Birchler. He had a featured plugin where he tested all that out and now this one comes into core. That’s really great. I’m really happy about that. So it’s definitely for mobile, also interesting for mobile users because they can’t wait till everything is done on the server because if you have a slow connection, you want it still to be processed without having to wait for all the back and forth there. So that’s really cool.

JC Palmes: I just let this pre-upload compression and having that as a toggle. And then, yeah, the approval step is sometimes when media is optimized, it just does not always look the way that we want it to look. So having that approval step is nice to have.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So in the page editor, you can now double-click on the template part. So when you edit a page and you click into the template parts, it’s going to sometimes tell you this is a template part, you can’t edit that or go to the edit template part kind of screen. And now with double-click, you can switch over to template part editing. So it’s much faster now to, and if you know what you’re doing, it’s definitely helpful to have that there. I was always trying to do that with a double-click. I don’t know why, but it was kind of really-

JC Palmes: Oh, same. I do that too. I like this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you publish a post in the pre-publish section there, there is a warning in a notification that you might have pictures and other from a third place so that the images are not on your site and they’re linking out to either Google or some other place. And the feature offers you to upload all the images to your own media library so you can really have your… You’re not surprised when all of a sudden images go away from the third party.

JC Palmes: That is a very helpful fix. We’ve had issues with that where with patterns, when you copy a pattern, it will try to, it’ll look for images in your local, right? And you don’t always know that it’s referencing your local, because when you look at the site and it’s uploaded on an environment, you see that images are there and it’s only because it’s referencing local images and you are viewing the site in your computer. So you see that, but other people would not know. So having that would be a lifesaver.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it was in the section there, but very rarely did it pop up but now… and it was only working for gallery blocks and image blocks. But if you had an image from a third party in a media text block or in a cover block, it wouldn’t come over. It wouldn’t recognize it in that, and now it does. So it’s kind of expanding that feature to other block types. And I experienced that when I was working. I’m working on a tutorial on how to use Playground for a theme demo site so you don’t have to spin up your own site and you can get everybody their own link to Playground.

And I was trying to figure out how is the content or what do I have to do with the content? And I used a theme that had some patterns with the local assets, with the theme local assets, and I needed to get those into the media library. So when I import it to Playground, it knows, okay, I have those images because it wouldn’t go back to the theme assets for that. So it was really interesting to figure that out, and this was really helpful to at least get the marker, but it didn’t do it for the cover and the media text blocks. So seeing that here in the new release is really interesting.

JC Palmes: Yeah. It’s going to be very helpful that that is missing for those blocks. And we’ve been using those blocks quite extensively.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: They’re wonderful blocks to use. Yeah. They make a really great design all the time. So the next thing is also about the pre-publish screen, but it kind of switch the cancel the publish button so that the publish button is always under the mouse. So when you hit the publish first and then the next one, it had the cancel button there. So people sometimes cancel their publishing, although they wanted to publish, so now you can just keep your mouse there and have the second publish there as well. That’s a very good and nice quality of life kind of feature, but obviously somebody needed to think of it to do that. Yeah.

JC Palmes: That’s one of the things that I mentioned earlier and one of my favorite bits, so just swapping that is just, it just reduces unnecessary cursor movement and improves the user experience.

Block Bindings

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah. So totally. Then is the block bindings, your new favorite feature has an update. So what the feature does not do yet is give you an interface to actually create the post meta data or metafields, but now it uses the label that you put in your registration for the block bindings and not the variable name, which is definitely an improvement for that, especially for users who are not developers who always kind of little put back when they’re not reading normal words, but words with underscores in it and all that.

JC Palmes: I just love block bindings and I’ll always be on the lookout for whatever is new that’s going to come into it. We’ve been using that and learning more about how it works and just again, playing around with it and trying to make it do things that it’s not doing yet with core.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which part? What are those?

JC Palmes: Well, we’ve kind of packed it around to be able to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I love that when you say, “Oh, we hacked around it.”

JC Palmes: Just allowing to show meta that it’s not supposed to… Well, it’s not that it’s not supposed to show it’s always there, right? It’s just not ready yet. But it’s a play around between checking on the database and then checking things on. It’s a lot of experimentation in order to get what it natively does not do what we needed it to do for the project that we were working on before.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you were ahead of your time with your needs.

JC Palmes: Well, we had to, right? The client work that would really… We can’t really wait for when a feature that we need is going to come out and WordPress the way it is. And with all the things ready for us to just change, I guess. No, not change, build on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I heard from a few extenders that’s plugin developers, theme developers, agency developers that they feel, oh, it’s time that more blocks are actually… Because you can only do block bindings for four blocks. One is the paragraph block, the image block, the button block, and the headings block, but all the other blocks, you cannot do a list block with things here and all that. So yeah, it definitely is time to expand the range of blocks that can hold bindings to metadata, definitely. And I know that the team knows that they’re definitely working on it. I’m scrolling through things.

Experiments                                                       

Yeah. There is one, speaking of block bindings under the experiments is now bringing the UI to the site editor to edit the values for the metadata or the block bindings. So you can do that in your… and they built the rest API endpoints for that so they can go back to the server and come back and have it all saved. So that’s a really good… It’s an experiment. You have to enable it through the experiments page. But yeah, test it out. Developers would love your feedback on it.

JC Palmes: Oh yeah, we’ve kind of done the same thing, but it’s not visible to users. It’s more in the code where we are able to change things around. But then again, it’s having that as a visual changeable thing. It’s just going to be a time saver.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Documentation

What I also want to point out, for those who are keen on learning more about the data views, the documentation has been updated, and especially the storybook has now better styles for the combined fields stories and also allows more layout for the combined fields storybook. So definitely an enhancement for those who want to look up the documentation for the data of use. And the stories for that storybook is kind of a component, is a documentation style to have each single component outside of the context of the block editor to what are the properties and how does it behave when you change settings just alone for that component.

And it’s a really great way to learn about all the WordPress components and not a whole lot of people know about it. But that will change because the design system that the design team is working on will be also based probably on storybook because for the admin, if you ever want the data views to be part of the WordPress WPAdmin, there is a whole lot of work to be done to cement the design system about every single screen and all that. So they’re working on that for the color scheme and the typography and all that to make it more seamless. And I think somebody did a test or an audit on all the color strings that are in the WP-Admin sections. And I think she found 68 different colors. So it’s all kind of different gray tones. It’s different. Yeah, blue tones, different dark blue tones. And I was really amazing. And they definitely is not increasing the standardization when you have so many colors and a thing too about the design system-

JC Palmes: So it could be a nice thing to have that revamped on and just be able to make it more visible to everyone ’cause it’s a very helpful way to when you’re creating components and creating blocks.

Code Quality

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the next two items I think are more for the developers because they are code quality related. The editor uses hooks instead of higher order components in the block manager. So that’s interesting for contributors. And then the data view fields store is, and the actions are moving from the editor package into the fields package. So if you have already done some exploration on the data views and data view fields, you need to make a note of that, that the package has changed a bit. I think the Gutenberg developers are very good and do the warnings in the console. So you probably see that when you use them. All right. So that’s the Gutenberg Changelog for Gutenberg plugin 19.3 and my voice is a bit fading, so I’m really happy that you walked this through with me. JC, it was wonderful to have you. We are coming to the end of the site, so if people want to get in touch with you, what is a good place for them to reach you? WP Slack or is it more on the social webs? 

JC Palmes: I’m always in Slack and I’m always on Facebook and Instagram as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah. So I will share the links in the show notes as well too. So you can get in touch with JC Palmes if you have questions about WordCamp Asia or the Block Theme that they’re working on. It was wonderful that you have been on the show. Thank you so much. And as always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 108, and if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@utenbergtimes.com. All right. Well, thank you everybody and thank you, JC.

JC Palmes: Thanks so much for having me, Birgit. It’s been a great conversation and I really enjoyed diving into all these updates with you. This is also my first podcast, by the way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, right. Oh, we got you.

JC Palmes: Yeah, amazing. I love it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So until the next time then if I may, I will ask you to come to the show again, maybe after WordCamp Asia and we talk about our adventure in Manila, how about that?

JC Palmes: I love that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Well, thank you so much. And do you have a wonderful weekend or rest of the evening for you and see you all and hear you all, dear listeners, in two weeks. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

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