Gutenberg Changelog #110 – Gutenberg 19.5, WordPress 6.7, Create Block Theme Plugin and a Thousand Block Themes at the Repository

In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Joni Halabi discuss Gutenberg 19.5, WordPress 6.7, Create Block Theme Plugin and a Thousand Block Themes at the Repository

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special guest: Joni Halabi

Announcements

Snippet: Conditionally unregister patterns

1000 Block Themes

What’s released

What’s in the works

WordPress 6.7 Source of Truth

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 110th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about Gutenberg 19.5, WordPress 6.7, Create Block Theme plugin, and thousand block themes at the repository. Yay! I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic.

Today’s special guest has been on the show before and I’m thrilled to have her again, it’s the wonderfully smart Joni Halabi from Georgetown University in D.C. She was a guest on episodes 97 and 91. And she’s also the author of the article Static vs. Dynamic Blocks: What’s the difference? on the WordPress Developer blog. Welcome back, Joni. How are you today?

Joni Halabi: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m doing great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. So for our new listeners, maybe you can briefly introduce yourself and your connection to WordPress. And I know you changed responsibilities at Georgetown, so what are you working on now?

Joni Halabi: Yeah, so hi everybody. My name is Joni Halabi. I have been working at Georgetown University for the past eight and a half years. I started at Georgetown as a senior web developer with our web services group. And most of my responsibility was developing custom blocks and other post editor customizations in WordPress for our now over 500 sites that we support, which is super exciting.

I recently, as of about three and a half weeks ago, just switched roles and I am now the senior web manager for the office of the president. So I’ve gone from development to content. My primary role right now is to basically update the content for our president’s website and make sure that it has all of the information people need in terms of our university initiatives and other things that are important to our office.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome.

Joni Halabi: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, no, absolutely. Always great to have you on the show, Joni. So 500 websites, that’s one number that I’m in awe of. Then going from custom block development to using as a content creator is probably a total different challenge because you can look back on so and so, “Oh, did we do this right?” kind of thing, yeah? And so bug reports.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, I think my old team is not going to be very happy with me because it is such a different perspective. As the developer, I never really got that 1,000 foot view of our websites in terms of how a content editor really sees these blocks. And to be on the other side of that and to be using these blocks and thinking about, “Okay, this is the story that I want to tell. How can I use these blocks,” it is such a different perspective. It’s an exciting perspective, but I already have ideas for new blocks that I want to exist.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Ok.

Joni Halabi: Sorry, services.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I’m not drilling down into that, but there’s certainly something to unpack for the next time you’re on the show. But it’s so great that you actually can change the perspective and kind of feel, “All right, now I get a 360 view on the whole WordPress content creation experience and block development.” So the next hurdle would be to tap your toes into block themes and kind of see how that works for your organization, for the web team, yeah?

Joni Halabi: I would love to. I did some experimentation with block themes while I was there, and I could speak for the next 40 minutes about this, but the high level overview was I did an experiment where I created a block theme but connected it to our external patterns for different blocks in different parts of our pages because we were using KSS node for that to create a pattern library. And I’ve actually given a couple of talks on this topic. I did one at WP Campus last year. They’re all linked to you for my website, but yeah, it was a fascinating experiment. It’s complicated and not complicated. Like I said, I could talk for 40 minutes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. We’ll share the links in the show notes for our listeners to have a different perspective on things, so that’s really good. So you did get a 360 view on WordPress with all the experience that you have. Excellent, yeah.

Announcements                                                       

And for the show, we have a few announcements today for you, dear listeners. One is the developer blog or the contributors at the developer blog, we are starting something new, and that’s kind of a snippet library. We have one snippet online, that’s the first one because we need to iterate on the layout as well as on the editorial process for that. But it’s conditionally unregistered patterns. And Justin Tadlock put that up and he has a few use cases. One of them is, okay, you build your own custom blocks on the theme and use patterns for that, but if that block is not available on your site, you need to unregister the pattern too. So it’s not going to come in with, “Oh, this block is not available kind of thing.” So I think a lot of people who curate the editor experience for the clients can definitely use that as well to unregister some patterns from my block theme or so they haven’t built themselves. Yeah.

So if you have ideas about that, you can comment on that either on the Gutenberg Times on the podcast show or on Storify, where our podcast also landed and has a few listeners. So there is a little comment button on your mobile app where you can comment what other ideas you would need for snippets. I know that Nick Diego and Justin and myself and Ryan, we will probably brainstorm the first hundred snippets for that relatively fast.

Community Contributions – 1,000 Block Themes

And then as from the intro, we have the announcement, a thousand block themes are now in the WordPress theme directory, yes. And it’s really amazing how fast. It took a little while. The first hundred took, I don’t know, a year, the second hundred another year, but then it kind of sped up until now. And we have three people who actually covered that this week. One is Ganga Kafle, he’s the co-team rep for the theme team, and he had statistics and that is that the first theme was done by Carolina Nymark early on. And then Automattic has 116 block themes in the repository. That’s about less than 10. Well, a little bit over 10%. And then there are other theme shops that have 20, 28, 30. Really the first 10 theme producers I think come up with about 400 or so. I haven’t ended up, maybe it might be 500. And then the rest is divided up by other people from the community. So yeah, bring your blog theme to the repository too.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, this is amazing to me because these only count the block themes that are in their repository. And I’m sure that there are so many authors and companies and organizations out there that have their own custom theme just for them that is probably a block theme. They’re just not in the theme repository. And it is so impressive that the adoption of block themes has happened this fast because it feels… I know it’s been a few years, but it feels like it’s only yesterday when block themes were introduced.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think they’re only kind of viable now with the theme parts and the site editor where you can edit the templates. And then have the query loop has really emerged as a power tool for theme developers.

Joni Halabi: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And there’s a lot of designers who don’t have to touch code to build themes and they use the site editor. So it’s just really amazing.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, it’s fabulous. I mean, you can start with the Twenty Twenty Four theme. I did this recently with the site. You can start with the Twenty Twenty Four theme, use that site editor and then copy. If you want to save all of your customizations, you can do everything that you want to in the site editor and then copy the HTML for your new templates, your new template parts, and paste it into a theme. And you have that saved if you need it. And it is so powerful. You don’t need the code. Somebody like me, I need the code. But somebody who’s not familiar with HTML or CSS or is intimidated by it, you don’t need to know it anymore. And it’s game changing.

What’s Released – Create Block Theme Plugin 2.6

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. And the global styles and design tools that come with it, you can really say change the default look of blocks and it’s going to be saved. So the next thing that I wanted to point out here on this show is, and we talked about it before, but it seems that we talked, Joni, that you haven’t really used the Create Block Theme plugin yet. And that really helps theme developers to use the site editor to have everything that’s stored in the database, then exported into the theme files. And that is the most powerful thing that I’ve seen, that you can create a child theme, you can create or clone an existing theme on the site, or you start with a very bare bone skeleton, but then you can use the site editor to style your blocks, your sections, create patterns, and it all kind of comes together with saving the theme, exporting the theme, and have it outside.

Because the layer of having core styles then having theme styles, and then the user styles can only all come together in one theme if you want to reuse it. And that’s kind of the gap that the plugin really closes for that.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I don’t know if you would know the answer to this, but has there been any talk about bringing that plugin into core because that feels like eventual core functionality?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there is talk about it. And that plugin is pretty much like the Gutenberg plugin, kind of the beta version of what might come into core. I think it’s more the explanation while everything in core that touches the theme and the styles and the section styles and variations, those are still in active development. So the plugin is kind of following along in core and even goes a little bit further in core with the patterns, for instance, saving the patterns. But yeah, it would definitely be something that the developers kind of looking at, maybe bringing some of the features into core that are a little bit more mature once the features are kind of set in their ways, because some of that data views and some of the global styles that’s still so active in development that I think otherwise you couldn’t test the concepts if you put it in core because then it would be released and then it would be backwards compatible, and you don’t want to kind of be tied down to backwards compatibility.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that’s a lot of work. But I do. That’s great to hear. And I also do love this pattern of actively developing and testing something in a separate plugin with an eventual goal or a thought of bringing it to core. And it’s something that I always thought was unique to the Gutenberg plugin, but it’s nice to see that it’s also happening with other pieces, like larger pieces of functionality.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That happens actually also with improvements for the media library. The performance team has actually published, or Pascal from the performance team has some media experiments on his repo that are in the plugin. They’re not officially kind of WordPress. The Create Block Theme is on the WordPress organization, separate repo. But yeah, some of the contributors have done that with their own experimentation. So it’s really good to see.

Dave Smith has a plugin. He’s a core contributor, and he just released a plugin for the responsive navigation that’s not in core yet, but it’s kind of testing it out outside of the Gutenberg repo to get faster to feedback. And so I will share the links and also in the show notes, so you can explore those too dear listeners. But yeah, use the Create Block theme plugin to create your theme for the repository. You can then, I think there’s even some instructions on how to get it then into the repository, but that’s kind of with the SVN version control, it kind of is a different level of complexity, I would think. So having it rather than GitHub.

We also had a… And that might be interesting for you too. We had a hallway hangout with the designer of the Twenty Twenty Five theme, and she also works on some of the automatic themes. They have a process that uses Playground, the Create Block plugin and GitHub, to push changes to a theme from the site editor to a pull request on GitHub. And that’s just amazing. That process really amazed me and how that’s even possible, but there are magicians behind it, but it works.

Joni Halabi: That sounds amazing. When is that hallway hangout?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was actually.

Joni Halabi: Oh, was?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I will share that in the show notes. And there’s a little video also with were Beatriz Fialho, who designed Twenty Twenty Four as well as Twenty Twenty Five, shows the process. It has one single little change, and then kind of from playground to GitHub, how that also works. Yeah, it’s really, really great to see.

Joni Halabi: Oh, I will definitely be checking out that hangout. That sounds amazing. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, block themes. Yeah, go.

Joni Halabi: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when I kept a close watch on the numbers throughout the last three years, and I always looked at some and also on the Gutenberg Times on the weekend edition, I sometimes said, “Okay, there are six new block themes. Who developed that?” So I looked at them. Some of them I really tried out. Carolina Nymark was one of the first theme developers. Who really embraced the process was Anders Noren from Norway. These a very successful theme developer, and he had a few quite interesting designs. But what I have noticed is that many, many block themes not only have some interesting style variations. And you can see them in the repository. You can see how the theme changes also has some of them have 30 patterns in there. It’s just amazing what creativity can do to the block themes now. So you don’t need to put one block at a time into your canvas. You can kind of take five patterns and your page is done. So it’s really good.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I keep using the word game changer, but I mean, it’s-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it is.

Joni Halabi: … facilitates so much creativity. I love everything about it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I see many, many themes that are actually focused on certain verticals. So there are restaurant themes, there are for certain shops, there are for digital pieces for recipes. It’s very focused on the use case. And those make the patterns as well as the imagery that comes with it and the look and feel so much more focused to get a person from zero to hero on their own website. It’s really a great phenomenon.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You and I, we can talk more than 40 minutes about block themes.

Joni Halabi: I think we could. But this is not just the block theme show, we promise.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So well, two more things. The Create Block Theme plugin is in a new version, 2.6 came out this week. And it fixes two bugs, important bugs, that fix the image URL localization when you make a child theme so that the images come over from the patterns into the child theme. And the URL is the right one. The other one was that if you had in your blocks, HTML, it would escape. So when you use that pattern, you had all the HTML code in there and not the rendering from the browser, and that was fixed as well. So that was kind of an interesting bug to fix.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, those are always tricky, the encoding, encoding bugs. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, though that’s the smallest release of this week. 

WordPress 6.7

We had a bigger release that was the WordPress 6.7 Release Candidate came out. And with it, also the field guide. So if you haven’t tested 6.7 yet, now is the time you only have three weeks to test it against whatever product you have, your themes, your plugins, your maintenance processes, or just the sites that you have. And with playground, you can actually do a staging site, but there’s also InstaWP to kind of have a staging site.

And if you want to know the highlights from WordPress 6.7, there will be a YouTube live stream on November 5th at 18:00 UTC, and it’s with Jamie Marsland, Nick Diego and Rich Tabor kind of walk you through all the different things. We will talk a little bit later about them, the highlights that I see for 6.7 after we cover the Gutenberg 19.5 release.

Joni Halabi: Sounds good. Yeah, I’m excited for 6.7. Like you said, it’s coming November… Looks like November 12th.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Joni Halabi: And I know especially for my previous team, it’s so important to start that testing now, especially if you have a lot of custom code on your sites. This is something that has burned our team in the past. Sometimes custom code is not backwards compatible with changes that are happening in core, like our own custom code that we write.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. It’s the future compatible.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, we’ve needed to make a few changes, and it’s just important to get all that testing in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely the dev notes will help you. They’re in the field guide. And there are quite a few changes, not breaking changes, but additional feature in there for developers where APIs are expanded, like the block bindings API and the interactivity API, block books, some performance tweaks as well. So definitely look at the field guide. And the links will be in the show notes. And I also will link all the block editor relevant dev notes individually in the show notes. We have space on our show notes. Anyway, yeah, well, let’s go into the Gutenberg 19.5 plugin release.

Joni Halabi: Yes.

Gutenberg 19.5

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So release-lead Hector Prieto wrote in his release post, “This release focuses on stabilizing existing features, but also brings some improvements to the general UI and the zooming, editing experience with 116 PRs from 47 contributors.”

So yeah, let’s get going. General interface changes. One is the right design tool. Now you can persist your user preference through the preference option on the plugin, in the plugin editor. So that’s good.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. That one I have been waiting for because I often switch between the visual editor and the code editor, and I don’t always remember that I do that. So if I go into a page and I switch into the code editor and then I have to edit another page, I expect to go into the visual editor. Sometimes I’m surprised when I am somehow in the code editor because I just forget that, “Oh yeah, right. The last page I was in, I was in the code editor.” But I always found it interesting that WordPress made the assumption that because I went into the code editor last, that is something I will continue to do. So I love that this is a setting now.

Enhancements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I’m not quite sure it is actually the setting that you’re thinking about because the editor has now on top of the toolbar, there’s also a write and design tool. There was previously the select and edit tool where you can switch, especially for those who are traveling with a keyboard instead of the mouse, there was a difference between getting into a block to work in the block or to travel from one block to the next. So that was the select was the traveling from one block to the next. And then the writing part or the editing part was actually the block part where you can use the toolbar or you added content to a particular block.

Joni Halabi: I think I interpreted the Git, the pull request wrong then. Interesting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there is also a change in how those two modes behave when you are in the zoom out mode.

Joni Halabi: Wow. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: 6.7 brings us the zoom out mode, but not the editing of design switches to it, only for the pattern. So that is the next thing on our list, is that the zoom out mode in 6.7 is just with a toggle button. With a new Gutenberg release, if you have that, it will also automatically zoom out when you use the pattern tab in the inserter when you want to drag and drop a pattern over to your site and you need a little bit better of a bird’s eye view on your page instead of just having that one kind of block in front of you. It’s a much better way to add. So you can now kind of drag and drop patterns over and move them up and down without having to deal with all the blocks around it or in it.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, yeah, no, there’s a great animation of this in the pull request that it’s nice to be able… Because when you’re talking about a pattern, you are talking about more than one block that can stand a good chunk of your page depending on the pattern. So it is nice to be able to see that in context, to see your entire page as it stands. Now if you’re trying to add another pattern and it just helps you think about, “Okay, well where can this new pattern go?” with respect to the entire page.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly.

Joni Halabi: That is definitely one of the important ones. There are a number of changes to that zoom out functionality in this release, but that when you select the pattern tab, but that’s definitely one of the biggies.

The next, I guess, really two sets of changes have to do with the component storybook. So there are a couple of changes to note. One, adding type tokens to storybook. And the other one is just stubbing out documentation on existing colors in a theme. And I think these are so fundamental because storybook talks about design in terms of the components in the UI. And I guess it just surprised me that it wasn’t there before, but color and photography are so basic to any design for anything that it is. I think it’s a wonderful change that these both are being added into storybook now. You can see basically the colors that exist in the base styles now, and then having the type tokens, you can see all of the register of typography. So you can see semantic tokens, like what are your different heading levels, for example. What does body text look like? And these are just fundamental design elements that I’m glad they’re there now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You have been part of our live Q&A and design systems. Now the WordPress design team is actually building out their design system through that storybook because the admin design now needs also the funds. And not only just the data views, how they’re in the site editor, but when you go to the next level and have the admin move over to the new design, you need to have standardized colors and standardized funds and all that. And that’s where the storybook comes in to have a unified system and standard for all the contributors that are either back end or front end or plugin developers to kind of figure out. So none of the developers have to make all the design decisions. Again, it speeds up the plugin development or the core development quite a bit when there is a design system there, yeah.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. That’s fabulous.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For the global styles, contributors improved the navigation logic for the revision screen. That had quite a change in a few of the plugin releases before and how do you get to the revisions of your styles. It’s a great change to see how you can see the revisions for your styles that are a little compressed and much easier to navigate in the animation. So it talks about the global styles are in the right-hand sidebar, and that’s also where you find the revisions of your changes. I’m so happy that we have those revisions because after playing around with a theme or with a site for, I don’t know, 30 minutes, I don’t know, I reversed some of my decisions because, “Oh, that looked nice 20 minutes ago, but now I don’t like it anymore.” So reversing that through the revisions panel is really cool. The team is working on, it’s really cool.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, no, no, no. I love that they’re working on that because I feel like a lot of our content editors don’t realize that revisions exist and it is such a powerful tool. So to be able to make improvements to the UI and maybe make it a little more obvious about how to use revisions, I think, will help our editors a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it’s not only… Well, they still have to work on the content revisions for posts and pages.

Joni Halabi: That’s it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: They still don’t know what to do with blocks, but yeah.

Joni Halabi: I mean, that does help you then.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that’s coming.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I mean, revisions, being able to work on the UI for revisions at any part of the styles or the… The styles, I feel like, is step one. So this is a great updates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: They’re already there, yeah.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. So in black bindings, we’ve now added the ability to register binding sources in the widget screen. So block bindings, for anyone who’s not familiar with, it’s when the content of a block is tied to some sort of external data source. So you could have a paragraph that is tied to some RSS feed maybe or anything.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Or meta fields, a custom field.

Joni Halabi: Right. Or meta field, yeah. So this particular change makes sure that a block, like a paragraph, inside a widget can also be bound to some sort of custom source, like a meta field.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And we haven’t heard about the widget screens for a long time, so I’m really happy that there are some people still thinking, “Okay, there’s another block editor that has been neglected for a bit.” But I think the unification efforts between post editor and site editor, they’re done now. And I think looking at the widget screen is one of the next steps. And having the binding sources there definitely helps because that’s what you want to put in additional information there.

The cover block experience, they refactor of the settings panel. It streamlined all the different features for a cover block and has some pull out. Up until now in the plugin, you had all the settings for the cover block in one sidebar. From top to bottom, you had to scroll. But now there is a three-dot menu there where you can switch off some of the features so you don’t have to scroll to them all of the time. So it’s similar to the typography settings as well as the dimension settings. Now, it’s just adopted the same philosophy there that not all the features are shown at the first time or by default.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, this is nice to see because the cover block has gotten complex for a reason. There’s a lot going on in terms of settings with the cover block, so it’s nice to see improvements there in that UI.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. 

Bug Fixes

So that kind of covers all the enhancements that we had, but there are a few bug fixes we wanted to talk to you about. The code block now has a left-to-right direction for right-to-left languages. Can you explain that to me?

Joni Halabi: Yes. So it’s tricky to read, right? So right-to-left languages, so think Hebrew, think Arabic. When you write, the paragraphs and the headings that you write go from your right hand to your left hand. But when you’re writing code, if you’re a native speaker, if you’re writing prose in a right-to-left language, but you’re writing code, your code is still left-to-right. So this is making sure that, let’s say that you have a page, let’s say that you’re blogging in Arabic and you’re blogging about this really cool feature that you just wrote and you write your paragraph and it’s in Arabic and it’s from right to left, but you want to feature a code snippet. This is to make sure that the code on your page is still displayed left-to-right, because that is still how we write code regardless of what spoken language we are writing or reading or speaking.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That makes so much more sense now. Thank you.

Joni Halabi: It is. I mean, it’s a lot of letters in that headline, so I understand why.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And for someone who never knows where left and right is, it’s going to, “What?”

Joni Halabi: I still have to do the hand trick where I make my index and my thumb form basically be at right angles of each other. And the one that makes the L is my left hand. And I still do this, so I understand.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well that’s when my husband says, “The other left” when I go wrong.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, it’s always fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now… Go ahead.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, no, so another fix is do not… I’m just going to read this title, don’t render image when the source attribute is empty, which feels very obvious. But this was a bug fix where if you had an image, an image tag, but an empty source, that image tag was still getting rendered. And there’s no point in rendering an image tag if there’s no source. So this fixes that bug.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It sounds like a rookie bug, but sometimes they just sneak in.

Joni Halabi: Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I have done a lot of dumb things like that. And then one is PR is in terms of extensibility, it kind of renames the register block template from W_register_block_templatetoregister_block_template. So the WP prefix is kind of taken away because it seems to be obvious and it follows other register block kind of function. But if you have been testing things with the new register block template for the plugins, you might want to look at your code and kind of remove the prefix kind of thing. I think that was back ordered to 6.7, so it’s in the 6.7. But if you have done it up until beta 3, I think with WP you can remove it now.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. And I think you have to, because if I’m reading that PR correctly, there is no backwards compatibility for the WP prefixed version of this function, which it didn’t seem like it was supposed to be in anyone’s code anyway like in a custom developer’s code. But please double check your code.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, it’s a new feature for 6.7.

Joni Halabi: Oh, okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it wasn’t backwards compatible, it just kind of wasn’t a kind of discussion now through co-op contributors. So this comes as a new function, “Can we make it uniform with the other register block kind of functions and remove the WP?” And so there is no backwards compatibility because it hasn’t been in the future, but it was in WordPress 6.7 alpha up until beta 2 or beta 3, and only for the release candidate, they take the WP out. So if somebody wrote a plugin template already to come out in 6.7, when 6.7 comes out, that’s the code to check again. Does it make sense?

Joni Halabi: That does make sense. Thank you, yeah. I didn’t realize that was that new. That’s awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s part of the… So now plugins can register templates for the site editor. So when you have a plugin that does a business directory or something like that, you can now register a template that then a user can modify in the site editor, which was before not possible or was a really hacky way to get it into that. And then you can, as a plugin developer, also document that. So the theme developer can also modify that template or build pattern for the template or something, yeah.

Joni Halabi: Nice.

Documentation

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s nice. I like it. And I wanted to point out a couple documentation changes. There was in a previous version of the plugin and for 6.7 a method to curate the heading level through level options. And that is now documented in the block editor handbook. So you can say, “Okay, if your content editor uses the heading block, you don’t want a heading one, you don’t want a heading four or five and six. There are only two heading levels that they can use. And that’s heading two and heading three.” You can do it now and have also your patterns, follow that through a block attribute. And you can also use it for your custom blocks. It’s in the site title, post title. And for where you ever use headings, you can change that there as well. And it’s in from the toolbar, so it’s documented now.

Joni Halabi: Excellent. Yes, and I love this feature and I love that it’s now documented just from an accessibility perspective because making sure that your heading levels are in order and makes sense is part of your site accessibility. So for example, having an H1 followed by an H4 doesn’t make much sense. You want these headings to go in order. So this feature helps us enforce that. And this new addition to the documentation helps people use the feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. So on the second documentation was just to announce that the components packages now produce the readme file with the documentation through an auto generator. So they’re at least standardized. And developers can, through their code, also control the documentation, but it doesn’t have to be an afterthought anymore and it’s standardized. So that’s kind of the first step to have some standardized component readmes because there are hit-and-miss to be honest. And this is kind of a part to rectify downtown.

Joni Halabi: Nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s it, dear listeners. That’s Gutenberg’s 19.5 for you. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed – WordPress 6.7

So I promise you we’re going to talk about WordPress 6.7 a bit. So there are a few high level things. There are tons of changes in there, smaller ones and big ones. Anne McCarthy publishes for the last 10 releases, I think, a Source of Truth, which is mostly for writers who want to write about the new release to get in-depth information, to also get assets that they can use in their writing. But that is now published on the Gutenberg Times. So I will link through the show notes to that. So you can also follow up on some of the details there.

I like to point out, well, we all know Twenty Twenty Five is the new default theme, and I have had a lot of fun with it. It was really good. I prepared a talk for German WordCamp where I was almost using up all my time with the Twenty Twenty Five standard theme, which wasn’t particularly well organized, but that’s a different story. But my excitement kind of spilled over that I got on a tangent. And so I really, really like that it has about, I think, 50 patterns for all kind of different things because it wants to be a starter theme for a personal blogger or for a photo blogger or for a magazine style site and has templates for all of them, and also different ways for the different templates. So you can have a query loop template with different ways how the post comes in. I think there are about 10 or so different ways to organize that. Then there are services, price tables, testimonials, not only in one pattern, but maybe two or three patterns of that. So that’s really cool.

And what the crown of it is, that there are also four different… So there were color variations for the full theme. And then there are style variations for the full theme that changes the look and feel, but it also has separate color variations. So you could just leave the style like it is, but only change the color combination. Or you can say, “Okay, I want it like it is, but I just want to change the font.” So there are font variations as well.

And then there are section styles. So when you have a group pricing header or a pricing section or a group block with a call to action, you can actually use four or five different styles. So when you add them to your page, you actually can change the color of each of them, but still be in a full theme variation. But it makes it much livelier to scroll through a page that has several sections that also changed the colors, but it’s really well done and they have been all tested. So it’s a really good theme. Kudos to Carolina Nymark and Juan Aldazoro. Oh, I’m butchering his name. Sorry, hang on.

Joni Halabi: I was just going to say while you’re looking that up, you talked quite a bit about the colors and a bit about the fonts, I love that these font variations include font combinations. So the font variation has these combinations of a header. They’re a set of a header and body fonts. And that is one of the most challenging things I have experienced trying to design a site, just trying to find a really good combination of a header font and text font. And this gives you eight different options that I can see that are really solid options. If you’re a bit shy about design and playing with typography, you can choose one of these eight and there are no bad choices here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, the developers and designers that build out the theme, so the design comes from Beatriz Fialho, but Juan Aldazoro is his name, Juan Aldazoro and Carolina Nymark are the lead developers on the Twenty Twenty Five default theme, and they did a marvelous job also. But there are also about, I don’t know, 30 to 50 additional contributors that delivered patterns. So it’s actually a larger group of people who built this theme, and it’s really fabulous. So try it out and look at that.

The query loop, so that was part of it that I tried out the new features for the query loop. It is now optimized and streamlined. So you have all kinds of filter settings. You can filter by author, date, or you can say, “Okay, I want to have a post loop just for a custom post type with custom fields.” And all of that is now possible for any template you can use. Or you can just use them on the post and say, “Okay, I want from the same category or the post from there, except this one.” So you can also include post and offset post. All the features are now available. Some of them were in the toolbar and now then the sidebar complete with all the new ones. That is a really great quality of life kind of change.

Joni Halabi: Oh yeah, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We talked about the zoom out for the template handling. The page views and the site editor, that’s more the data views kind of how in the admin section how you can view the pages. There are some previews. There’s a list view where you have a three pane window. On the left-hand side, you have the block site editor navigation with the published kind of status. And then in the middle you have all the list, all the pages. And then when you click on them, the third pane is a preview of the page. So you don’t have to go back and forth when you just want to look at, “Okay, what’s in the page here? How does it look?” So you can also have it right there. So it’s a really improvement in navigating your pages.

Yeah, I wish that was available for posts, but the developers are working on it. There’s an experiment. If you use 19.5 Gutenberg plugin and there’s an experiment menu item there and you enable the post data views, then you can see how that also works for posts. But it’s a little harder to make it for posts because there are so many customizations and things to look at. So right now it’s an experiment, but always welcome for feedback. Do you have any questions about things?

Joni Halabi: No, no. I was just going to say, as somebody who’s now less on the development side of things and more on the content side of things, I appreciate something that will make editing easier and being able to see those changes easier. Because like you were saying, having to flip between different screens, it’s not ideal. So seeing improvements, even if it’s not on posts yet, it’s coming to posts, that is something I’m looking forward to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, they’re also experimenting with a quick edit part. So yeah, in the current admin you have the quick edit section where you change categories and rename things.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, love it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that also is coming to the data view section, so you can have that part as well if you missed it until now.

A lot of designers are really excited about having background images not only for blocks like the cover block, but now you can also do it for group block. And you can have it site wide. So there is in the global styles, in the first list of typography and layout and styles, and there’s now one for background image. So you can have your clouds there or your tiles or whatever you need from your site. And sometimes I feel we could go back to GeoCities sites.

Joni Halabi: I was just thinking GeoCities. And in my head I was wondering like, “Should I bring it up? This is still very retro ’90s.” Can I just make a shout-out? Please do not put in an animated background. It’ll make everybody who works in accessibility cry.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I think it only… It doesn’t do animated GIFs.

Joni Halabi: Oh, good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it’s just Gs or JPEGs. Yeah, but you’re right. Yeah, that would be really cool. Hilarious, yeah. But I’m thinking that there are some designs that can be quite unique with that. I remember one of my first backgrounds was really bright red and bright blue, and then I had white fonts on it, and you couldn’t read what you were writing or what I was writing for it, so.

Joni Halabi: Oh, yeah. I remember when we were talking about Web 2.0 in the late ’90s, and I was in an electronic arts curriculum at that point, and we were making web pages with hidden links. So you had to explore the page just by moving your mouse around to see if you happen to stumble upon a link. This will literally make everybody sad now. We know better, but this was experimentation in the late ’90s.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Unless it’s a game or something like that, but yeah.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, apart from the developer API changes that are there, so these are kind of my highlights for WordPress 6.7. And there are improved blocks. Most blocks now have border support that we are missing for… Only six or seven blocks at border support. And now almost every block has a border support with 6.7. So again, I will share the Source of Truth post from the Gutenberg Times, and also a link to the November 5th highlight live stream on YouTube for those who want to hear and see things beyond a podcast, which is really hard to demo things, but yeah.

Well, is there anything else that you want to talk about, about block themes, block editor, WordPress or your life?

Joni Halabi: Oh, I could go on about so many of those things, but I think we’ve covered the basics. I think we’ve covered all the important things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So let me ask you this. If you now do a lot of content, are you going to go back to some block writing or coding in your spare time, kind of rest your brain from the content editing and just do some coding?

Joni Halabi: I might. My challenge is finding spare time. My life is very filled with just research and writing, and then also my child and raising a six-year-old, like I will have spare time in about 12 years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. We’ll talk about it. What is that? WordPress 15.6 or something like that?

Joni Halabi: Oh, probably. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, this was lovely. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. And we will hear from you sooner than in 12 years.

Joni Halabi: Yes, I certainly hope so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … when you come back to show. Yeah. Well, it was great that we had you again and you walked with me through all the announcements and stuff there.

I will share some links for Joni Halabi if you want to get in contact with her. I mentioned the Static versus Dynamic Blocks article on the developer blog. Joni also wrote a book, Sweet Little You, and that’s available. And then I’ll have the LinkedIn link as well as the WordPress profile link for you if you want to get in contact with Joni.

As always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is show 110. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com. And this is it. Thank you for listening. And if you want to comment on… What is it? It’s not Storify, it’s not Shopify, it’s Spotify.

Joni Halabi: Spotify.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Spotify. When you listen on the Comcast there, send in a comment. If you listen on Apple, do a review. If you listen on Pocket Casts also, feel free to review our show so more people can join us for the next time. Thanks for listening and goodbye. 

Goodbye, Joni. Thank you.

Joni Halabi: Goodbye. Thank you so much.

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