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Gutenberg Changelog #112 Gutenberg 19.8, Create Block Theme Plugin

Gutenberg Changelog episode 112 with Birgit Pauli-Haack and Sarah Norris

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Gutenberg Changelog

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Birgit Pauli-Haack and Sarah Norris talked about Gutenberg 19.8, Create Block Theme Plugin, WordPress Day for Developers in Lisbon, Developer Hours, and so much more

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Announcements

Gutenberg Fun & Games

Code is Music

Play Snake

Play Dodge

Gutenberg 19.8

What’s in the works or discussed

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, hello and welcome to our 112th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about Gutenberg 19.8, the Create Block Theme Plugin, Lisbon Developer Hours, and so much more. 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, Five for the Future program.

With me, the wonderful Gutenberg contributor, full-time core contributor Sarah Norris, also sponsored by Automattic, is today’s co-host and she brings updates to the Create Block Theme Plugin, as well as impressions from last week’s WordPress Day of Developers in Lisbon. Sarah is also the co-core team rep together with Joe McGill. If you have any questions about the core team and contributing, find her on WP Slack, Mikachan. That’s M-I-K-A C-H-A-N. Sarah, how are you today? Thanks for taking the time to join me, the last episode of the year.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, last episode of the year. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I’m good, thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent, excellent. So yeah, tell me about the… What was the Developer Day like in Lisbon? And I can also contribute what the Rome Core Days was like in Rome a month before. So yeah. You’re just back?

Lisbon Developer Hours

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, the Rome Core Days is very similar, wasn’t it? Yeah, so Lisbon WordPress Day for Developers, so it was all for developers, totally focused on tech talks and tech workshops. It was a relatively small event. I think there were about 60 people. As a speaker I think that’s better, but it’s really good as an attendee as well. It feels like you get to meet nearly everyone, if not everyone. Because it is about the right size to get around the room.

We had two tracks. One was the talks and then the other was the workshops. And then I think I spent the majority of my time on the talk track because I was doing one of the talks, so I thought I wanted to stay in the room, not move too much. We had some great talks. We had Milana, Cyril, Miguel, Shadi, Mikael, and there was a lot of talk about, new features in WordPress, like the interactivity API and the HTML-type processor as well.

So that was really, really cool to see. It’s great to see them being talked about and people asking questions about them and getting excited about them and using them on client sites and stuff. It’s so good to see. And my talk was about contributing to Gutenberg. So I always like to encourage more contributors to get on board. Because it’s so satisfying as a developer as well. I’m biased, I know, but I really think it’s a good repo to work in, so many lovely people to work with.

I also talked through a few things that I’ve been working on recently as well. Because I find that often when I attend these events, people are really interested in what you’re working on, what’s coming up in Gutenberg and stuff. So yeah, I talked about some stuff I’ve been working on in the Query Loop Block and then some DataViews bits as well.

So yeah, it was good. And also the food was amazing. You might be able to beat me, actually, because you were in Italy. The food at Lisbon, it was so good. Probably the best food I’ve had at an event like that. So good. Yeah. What was Rome Core Day like?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Rome Core Day was similar. It was more about, was a lot about contribution, because there were three talks about it. One from Olga, one from me on Gutenberg, Olga Foucault. And then Stefano also talked about contributing to the accessibility team. And also had a talk track. Carlos was talking about the Block Bindings. The DataViews with Andre and Riyadh was very interesting. And then somebody talked about… Oh, Bernard Reiter talked about the HTML API and stuff.

And then there was a second track and there was more a discussion panel kind of thing. And that was also very interesting, but the panel competed with the talks. So everybody left the room for the talks and went to the panel, because it was hot topics or something. And then the talk room… But it was also small, was really… I liked that, a small event. It was a little bigger than… Lisbon was a 100 people, about. And also had some sponsors there, that was cool.

Well, the food was actually from a mall, so we were adjacent to the station, to the train station, and there was one food court there where you can go from all the different booths and then have a central place where you sit and talk. So everybody picked up their food, what they liked, and then joined the other ones, either on the second floor or the third floor to just have a big table there. And it was really nice. And it was good food, but I like Italian food. But I have found in Porto, when we were for work in Porto, that the Portuguese have really… It’s not hot food, but it’s very tasty. It has these explosions of flavors in their food and I know a few Italians that can do that, but yeah, it’s more likely tomato, meat, noodles, pizza kind of thing.

And I figured from the description that you all talked about contributing and my talk about contributing, I think we would make a good kind of event that we could do virtually and put this all together. Because I think yours was more like the tips and tricks to get your hands dirty, so to speak, get your hands onto code. And mine was more like on the philosophical side, who should contribute or what’s it like to contribute, what are the steps to get to your first PR? And that was a little bit different. So I’ll see if we can get this on the schedule for the Developer Hours next year, to have a place where we can share with other people that want to know how is it when you contribute, to watch those two. So that would be really cool. Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that sounds good. Because I think a lot of the time when you’re reading documentation, you don’t really get a feel for what it is actually like to contribute. Well, and I don’t suppose you will until you actually contribute. But yeah, I was trying to… Some tips on finding reviewers and getting help if you need help, and have conversations or keep them going, those kinds of tips. But you do need to know all the other sides as well. You need to know if you can contribute. Of course you can. But maybe you need to know where. So you need all that information as well. So yeah, they sound very complimentary.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I read some of the surveys of why you contribute, how much you contribute, from the WordPress surveys that were done previous years. And I’ve found that many contributors that are freelancers or working with agencies, they have these feast and famine cycles on their business, but they like to contribute in the famine part, but they can’t keep it up when there’s actually really big work to be done.

But they still would like to do those fly-by contributors, I call them, to say, “okay, I have two hours and I want to get my head clear, I do something else and let me see what’s up.” And it’s really hard to find those tasks where you can go and say, oh, I’ll do one of those 15 tasks, that are very well specced out, very contained, and could be busy work for core contributors. But it could be very gratifying for someone who just wants to do something for two hours or so.

So I’m kind of thinking, would that work for Gutenberg or Core, or is it just something for documentation or for marketing or something like that? But yeah, that’s what’s going on in my head about that after the conversations that I had. Because someone asked me in the talk kind of, “oh, I just want to fix one little thing. Do I have to read it all?” And I said, well, you need to, at least some of it. Because somebody’s going to review your stuff, and if you are not following the guidelines, then you are wasting their time and yours too, because you have to redo it again. So I think it would be better to, but that kind of thing, “well, you’re doing it wrong.” Not very welcoming.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. But then it’s important that we have at least some loose standards, so it’s just better for everyone involved with reviewing and writing. I think that’s some really good insight from people who want to contribute. I think there is a lot to read and obviously it’s important to know most of, all of the guidelines, but maybe there’s a big time sync at the start and then once you’ve got your head around it, or maybe you could make your own notes as well, like shorthand notes, and then hopefully after that point it’s much easier to jump in and just do an hour here or there. But easier said than done. And it can be quite intimidating as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it can. And I try to like it with, when you start with a new company. So in a new company you get 30 days, but you are not going to touch code in that 30 days. You read all the handbooks and all that. So it’s kind of wanted and it’s necessary. So why would an open source project not require people to do that? Especially when they’re in there for the long haul. If you just want to badge, okay, fix some documentation and send to PR and then you’re done.

But if you want to really make an impact, it’s important to know how the ins and outs are, because then you develop a shortcut with the other contributors.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we have… I think the numbers are staggering, so every Gutenberg release has at least 6 to 13, so it’s first contributors every release. And 6.7 I think the numbers were really interesting. It was over 780 contributors and 230 were first contributors, so a third. Well, more than a third were new contributors. So yeah, there’s some great brave people out there who start with the open source project and come in and contribute. That’s really great.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s such a good number. See if we can be 6.8 or maybe 6.1.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We’ll see. Yeah, 6.8 might even be more because, it’s such a long runway.

Sarah Norris: Right. Yeah.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So we’ll see, we’ll see what comes out of it. But now all about contributing. Let’s go a little bit further. We have some announcements for those who want to build on top of WordPress, and that’s the Developer Hours. And I made it a ritual that every podcast we’re kind of talking about the Developer Hours a bit.

So there is one coming up on December the 17th and that’s the Developer Hours, Everything you need to know about WordPress Playground, and that’s on December 17th at 16:00 UTC, and it’s the final Developer Hours of 2024. But I don’t think an hour is enough to learn everything you need to know about WordPress Playground, so take it with a grain of salt.

But Nick and Ryan will try their very best. They take a closer look at WordPress Playground. Because this tool lets you create fully functional WordPress instances directly in your browser with no installation on setup required beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground also offers powerful capabilities from testing plugins and themes to running demos, and even supporting app development. No matter how engaged you are with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer to you.

Yeah, I’m a total fan of Playground and I have done some Footprints and also did some workshop. Oh, I’m actually doing a workshop at WordCamp Asia about creating a demo with Footprints for Playground. So you only give the people a link and then they can play around with your plugin or play around with your theme, and that’s such a cool tool to do.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, actually plugin, sorry, Playground itself is so helpful for if you’re doing talks like the WordCamps and events and stuff because can give people… You’re talking about a new feature you’ve built or you’re showing something off that’s just been released and then you can say, now visit this Playground link thing, or you can go and play with it immediately. You don’t have to go back and wait until you’re working on your own instance or…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, you can do it… You could even do it on your mobile phone. It’s a little slow if you have a slow connection. But yeah, I really love that. It’s for someone who grew technical in the age of the early internet where you had HTML, but you needed a server, you need FTP, you need kind of a hosting company and a database server, that you need to hack into with phpMyAdmin. And then of course the application server with PHP and there’s so many things that need to go into, to actually have a website that you want to play with. That Playground is just magic. It’s really something. How can that be, that the browsers are… the machines are so powerful to have it all in one browser, it’s amazing.

Then this week’s Developer Hours recording is available. That was about improving your workflow with WordPress development tools, and Ryan Welcher, and Nick did that as well. And they took a deep dive in the advanced usage of the tools like Create Block Scaffolding or WP Scripts, along with a few others, and they focused on solving common challenges and showcasing techniques that go beyond the basics, even for developers already familiar with these tools. So that’s definitely one to watch for someone who has already got their feet wet halfway into Block Development and see how you can streamline your process and your debugging superpowers.

Community Contributions                                                       

All right, so next up I have three… Fun and Games was a headline that I did in the weekend edition of last week, and today is December 6th that I record this with Sarah Norris, and I found three things that are very fun to do, no commercial value at all, but it shows the fun that you can make with Good Mood. And Aki Hamano demoed on X how code is music and shared a video on how he used his Piano Block to create music and record that. I have not yet found out how he recorded it, but you can actually study the source of the Piano Block on GitHub.

And of course I share all the links with you in the show notes, so you can follow up on that. But that was really cool. It kind of has the Block Editor and then a piano kind of keyboard with a few additional dials and then it has continuing music in there. That was really fantastic, yeah.

Sarah Norris: It’s such a good idea. I really like the code is music line as well. It’s so good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it comes from code’s poetry, right?

Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then Tom Rodes used the Gutenberg Block to run a snake game. There’s a snake coming in and you need to navigate it so it eats the block. There’s a square on the canvas and your snake needs to eat the block and you need to navigate it with the keys WASD with up and down and left and right. That’s kind of in-between when you have a Block on your creativity or a Block on a bug that you need to solve, play that for a moment. It’s really cool. And he also got it inside a playground, so really love that. Yeah, Tom Rodes is on the engineering team of Automattic, and he just shared those on his private personal blog, and he used React to run it in the Gutenberg Editor.

And the last one is from Jonathan Bossenger who created a variation of the dodge game, and you can play it on his site, and he used it to dive into the interactivity API directives. And his code is also available on GitHub, but that is a game where the logos of Wix and Squarespace and Weebly kind of chase the WordPress one, and you need to get out of the way. You’re the WordPress one, and you need to get out of the way with the arrow keys. So it’s kind of interesting. I don’t think he’s finished yet. He wants to display the… What is it? The highest scores as well. But it’s not there yet. But yeah, maybe you can do some tournaments or so with those two games.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s a fun one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s very fun. So that’s kind of coming after Matt Mullenweg asked to bring more fun to Gutenberg. So here we are, first three examples. 

What’s Released – Gutenberg 19.8

And that brings us to the Gutenberg 19.8 Plugin release. It has 149 PRs by 52 contributors, 6 of them first-timers. And there were 34 enhancements and 48 bug fixes.

The enhancements were mostly nice quality of life improvements to make users much more confident about what just happened, kind of what did I do or what didn’t I do. So let’s dive in. Do you want to start?

Enhancements

Sarah Norris: Yeah, let’s see. What have we got first? We’ve got this one about making the Social Block Icon navigation… Well, improving it with keyboard navigation. So previously I think it required two taps of enter, if you’re navigating by keyboard, which I don’t think was intentional and was just the side effects of where we used the markup basically. But now the markup has been improved and it only requires one hit of enter to navigate through the icons.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Like I say, it feels like just a small quality of life improvement, but it’s one of these tiny details that really makes things just feel much better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And when you use the Social Icon Block often you halve your time that it takes to build it out. So yeah, it’s streamlined.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the next one is the page list has now Border and Spacing Support, that’s in line with all the other efforts to bring Border and Spacing Support to as many Core Blocks as possible. And so in 6.7, there were a ton of Blocks getting new border support and this one is now coming for 6.8.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, it’s so good to have those controls. It just feels… Yeah, they’re visual controls, so having them on as many Blocks as possible is great. The next one we have is another… Well, it’s a Social link Block, it’s related to Social, adding the content-only editing support. So I think previously when you’re in content-only editing mode with the Social link Block, you couldn’t edit the URLs of the links, but now that the Content Support has been added, you can edit that link. It just makes sense, as you’re going through the links that you can edit the link itself rather than just staring at the block thinking, there’s something…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, how do I get there? Yeah. Especially when the link is wrong. You can use the Social links for so many things. So if you have a team or author list where you want to put the Social links in or for the website, how to get the people that build the website on the social website, it’s such a versatile block that it definitely needed some more attention. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So part of DataViews, there were two improvements amongst, or the many improvements that came in with that release, and one of them, it’s called the density option of a Table layout, but what it really does is actually have three levels of how much white space or between the rows in a table. Sometimes you want to have it really dense, because you want 60 or 70 pieces on the screen, and sometimes you just want to have four or five on it, and then more white space makes a better layout, but there is now, as a user, you can change those density options. So it’s really cool. It’s between comfortable, compact and default or something like that, that has a line that you just tip on it and see how that works.

The second one is for the extensibility or for plugin developers, and of course also for core that you can register and unregister fields that are in display. So if you don’t want the post layout to show the date of the publishing date, you can unregister that field for the layout. And that is something, because the data use will have such a broad application, so every plugin, every custom post types, any additional features that come into WordPress might want to use that. So the use cases are so vast that extensibility is one of the first things that they look at now when they build that out.

And with the custom fields kind of being part of the… It’s not only custom fields, it’s also fields from the meta places, meta table or Post Meta that you can unregister there as well.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really cool. It’s off of that level of flexibility. It’s really good. Our next section is the global styles changes. Well, a couple of things that were experimental marked as experimental in Gutenberg, but they’ve now been stabilized, so they’re not experimental anymore. It’s probably something that we’re not always that quick to change in Gutenberg. There’s so many things going on, but yeah, it’s always great to see when the experimental flag has been removed. So it’s been removed from the Block. Which one? Which block is it? It’s for borders, is it Block Supports?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s also text, the borders and also the default content. No, it’s not default content, hang on.

Sarah Norris: Default controls.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Default controls, yeah.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. And skip serialization and the border controls as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Developing Gutenberg, you’ll probably know about these things and that you’ve been needing to add experimental, so you don’t need to add that anymore, because it’s…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And they are really heavily working on backwards compatibility, because there are multiple levels where these Block styles come in, and then one is core, one is a plugin and one is a theme. If either one of them uses experimental, what wins? So that’s kind of a little bit of a tricky approach. And I am fairly sure that although that’s merged now and released that there will be some adjustments to be done. But this early release is really important for those who have been using the experimental flags or methods and settings to test the code and see what happens with the code or what needs to be changed, especially plugins and themes.

It also, and I’m really happy about that, as soon as they are stabilized and from this day on forward, the blockers to adjust or adopt Block Development or Block Themes are getting less and less, because that is for a lot of developers, a blocker says, “well, this is experimental. If I base my code on it, I never know what’s happening, because experimental is not documented.” There’s no promise of backwards compatibility and it can change at any moment. So I need to be really watching for that and I don’t have time for that. Or I don’t want to waste time to redo it over and over again because things change. So they held off in adopting some of the features that are now coming out of experiments. So that’s a good sign, to increase adoption of things.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the next thing I really like, that’s what I referred to when I said at the beginning, what actually happened, if the quality of life, when the user knows exactly what happened, the Block editor now has notices after actions that are coming from the image editing. So it will show you, okay, cropping done, or do you want to undo in a little notification settings where you also see view post and these, it’s on the bottom right of your screen once you’re done with either cropping or replacing or something like that on the image editing features, now you know what happened and that it was a success. Yay. Before it was really, did it work? Did it not work? Or let me look at it, how it looks at the front end. Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, yeah. Left you guessing. Really good. The next section we got is for the REST API. So we have a new feature for allowing setting the editor rendering mode by post type. So this allows the user to define the default rendering mode for the editor with a post-type. So it adds a filterable default rendering mode property to the post-type object, allows you to easily switch between the template view and the post-only view, allows you to change the default. Because the template view makes it easier to see what the content will look like on the front end. And there’s a few things that are only available in template view, because it’s more for the design editing, but then the post-only view is for editing content. So for decorations, you’re going to want the different views and this lets you control the view.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there are quite a few developers who like that. That is coming now. And then the next one is in the Zoom Out View. So the Zoom Out View helps you when you add patterns to, or it automatically goes in… Your canvas goes automatically into Zoom Out mode when you try to add a pattern to it and then you can drop and drag it and drop it into a section on that. But then if that pattern has a section styles attached, no, it’s not attached, but if it’s a Group Block and there is section styles for group, then you can navigate through just a little button through the color settings of that particular section and you see how it looks in blue or in dark mode or in black and white.

So that’s really nice to easily organize, see how the page… You don’t have to go to the sidebar and find the switch. You just kind of loop through the button. It’s really cool. There’s also a button next to it that says change design button or change design, and I have not yet found how it’s triggered, but sometimes it’s there and something it’s not. It’s probably that you have a same category for the Call for Action, and then you can change the design for the Call for Action and loop through all the available patterns for that particular task. So that’s also very cool to see.

You don’t have to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to figure that out. You just use those two buttons to see how it changes, and how it changes in the context of your page. So this is a really great feature. It sounds so, oh, we add a button to that, but it’s just a powerful superpower.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. I think anything like this, especially in Zoom Out mode, it really takes the cognitive load away for designing a site and it makes it so much quicker. You can just cycle through all these available styles immediately. So within five minutes you have a design that you probably would’ve taken you hours previously.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Just to see what the theme offers and what you want to use and kind of… So it’s a really powerful thing. Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. The next thing we have is, so in the site editor, again in the Blocks, adding a check for the parent before converting a block to a pattern. So I think previously you could select child blocks and convert those to a reusable pattern, which usually doesn’t make sense, or it’s not ideal. So now there’s an additional check to check that the block is the parent before converting it to a reusable pattern.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I think that’s a good there, because sometimes people didn’t know that it was only part of the pattern and yeah, it’s kind of…

Sarah Norris: Right. Yeah, put it on a Group Block or whatever. If you select the next InnerBlock, because sometimes that’s going to be the more obvious block to select as well, and then you make that reusable, you’re going to miss the block out of the reusable pattern, and that’s going to be holding everything together.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And where all the section styles are applied to, yeah.

Sarah Norris: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re going to miss all these styles.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The next thing is… I also like that, and it’s really, it’s the font family preview in the font family picker. So on the right-hand side, when you open up the taxonomy font family, it not only lists the name of the fonts, but also how it’s actually rendering that. So you see more closely what the font would look like when you’re selected for your header or for your paragraph or even for all the blocks. So that’s another take the guesswork out of it and let me see what I’m doing feature.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. It’s really cool that it’s in a drop-down as well. It’s cool that we have a component in Gutenberg that allows you to show all these different font families.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: It looks so…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That you can style them, yeah.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The font family. Yeah. Yeah. So that was actually all the things… No, that wasn’t all the things that I wanted to talk about. 

Bus Fix

But I also wanted to, there’s a bug fix for Zoom Out, but it’s actually a feature, it’s kind of disabling Zoom Out when in distraction-free mode is activated. And of course, you don’t want to all of a sudden kind of look at the whole thing when you say, I only want to do distraction-free mode, get away from me, all the block stuff and all the features, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a Zoom Out mode. That’s definitely a little bit disconcerting there.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, because Zoom Out is more for designing. You can use it for whatever you want, but I’d definitely say you’re probably going to be designing the whole site if you’re in Zoom Out mode, whereas it’s for free. It’s in the name, isn’t it? You don’t want any control. Don’t show me any tool list or anything.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: So Zoom Out, but it’s a bit of an odd experience. So yeah, good to see that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m writing here, not there. I’m writing here, get out of my way.

Sarah Norris: I need to see the words, don’t make them smaller.

Experiments

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. What happened? And I wanted to point out also, in the Changelog there’s always an experiment section. One of the experiments is the Inline Commenting and it just updates the placement of the reply. So Inline Commenting is when you can add for each block on a canvas a comment, and then there can be a conversation about that with a reply.

And also it shows the author info and all that, and it updates just a placement where the reply is going to be put. If you want to try that out, you need to enable that Inline Commenting on the experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin. And it would be really helpful if you dive in there and add your comments to, there’s a tracking issue, I will share that tracking issue for Inline Commenting in the show notes, where you can leave comments about your experience. Because of course it’s called experiment for that reason. They don’t know yet what’s their final version is of it.

But sometimes you don’t know what you get until… You don’t know what you want until you see what you get, and that’s kind of that part of it. This is what we have now, what you like and what you don’t like.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s so important, even though they’re experimental, I guess kind of related to stabilizing the block supports as well, until they’ve actually been in use and you’ve tested them out and used them in lots of different situations, you don’t really know when they’re not experimental anymore until you know. You’re like, “okay, what happened?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So in the next one, experiment means that the right mode functionality that the team has been working on for quite a while is now a functionality behind the Good Mood experiment. Also, because of the reason that there is so many opinions about how it’s going to work or should work or part of it, but one does not really know what good it does for the whole experience. So yeah, you find that on the experiments page as well.

Sarah Norris: If anyone’s interested in that. There is a very good issue linked to this PR that we’re looking at, and it’s got a well organized to-do list for stabilizing that whole experience. So if anyone’s interested in helping out there, there’s a very easy to use to-do list, which is always the nicest thing if you’re into to-do lists and what checking things up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I’m going to share that also outside the changelog there. All right. 

Documentation

I wanted to point out in the documentation section of the Changelog, all the changes that are made to the Storybook. So the Storybook is a way to see components outside of the WordPress content, but also see what are the attributes and design tools that are available for that particular component.

So for developers, it’s really a great way to explore components that you might use in your app or in your blocks. And it has gotten a lot of reorganization because it was just one long list of components and now they’re categorized. So there’s a layout category, a section layout category and fonts category and all that. So it’s really more organized because it also will house all the design standards that are coming out of the design team with the color settings and some of the other standards as well from settings as well. We all are working from the same interface standards, and it needed a little bit more organization there.

So it’s also differentiating between the stable components and the experiment components. Both of them have all the categories in there and then the block mover story. So they’re called stories when you want to have that interface, be interactive, and some of them are now updated with the Readme files, and there’s an ongoing process to update the documentation for the stories.

Sarah Norris: I think contributing to the Storybook is a really nice intersection between writing documentation and coding, especially if you’re learning to build with Gutenberg. Because as you’re learning and you’re like, oh, this is missing from the docs, then you can go and write a story and fill in the docs. That might be a good area for contributions. I’ve never really thought about it until we were just talking about it here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. But you need to know a little bit about the Storybook library for that, and of course of the React library. But yeah, maybe we can do a pre-beginner’s show about how to contribute to Storybook or something like that.

Sarah Norris: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Like that.

Sarah Norris: You can get really stuck into the stories and it’s kind of therapeutic, because they’re all the same, so you’re doing the same pattern over and over, and it’s very satisfying to complete stories for each component. So it’s a good area for first-timers.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So is there anything else, things that you found that you wanted to talk about or that you want to point out for our listeners?

Sarah Norris: I don’t think there was anything else in this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s all code quality and ESLinting and all components, the other components changes, but they were all just code quality changes, that changed the button size or deprecate some size values. All right, so this is the end of the 19.8 Good Mood Changelog.

What’s in active development or discussed

Create-Block Theme                                                  

So we’re coming to the section of what’s an active development or discuss. I wanted to take the opportunity to talking to Sarah, to talk also about the Create Block Theme Plugin and see what’s in the works. And there was a release a couple of months ago, but there are also things that you are working on, so why don’t you take us through it?

Sarah Norris: Yeah. Yeah. So it hasn’t really been prioritized that much recently. I think we kind of go in waves and it really depends what’s happening in the Gutenberg repo as well. Because we don’t want to be competing. We want to either complement each other or if something’s taken a while to come into Gutenberg, then maybe we can get it into the plugin first. So it’s always a little bit tricky trying to decide what to work on. And then if there’s nothing happening in that plugin, it’s probably because we’re like, oh, patterns seem to be getting quite a lot of work in Gutenberg. Let’s just cool it a little bit in the plugin and see what happens. And then we’ll come back to plugin.

So I think we’re kind of in one of those flows at the moment, but my feeling is that probably in the new year we’re going to pick up work again. And we already have a few things in flight from a lot of different contributors as well. There’s some improvements to pattern management. Bug fixes with the way that Theme JSON is passed. And there’s a fix for localizing the background image URL on the Cover Block as well. So there’s a few specific fixes and then some pattern management improvements.

But then we also have so many issues in there. It’s getting a mini version of Gutenberg really. So yeah, we have got a project board actually, if anyone’s interested in helping out. There’s definitely some triage work that could be done, but we do have an existing list of things that we think are good things to work on next. We definitely welcome more contributors. I think it’s a really good place to work if you’re interested in Block Theming and you like working on Gutenberg as well, but you maybe don’t want to dive too deeply into the Gutenberg repo. It’s a very specific smaller repo, but with basically all the same guidelines and stuff.

So yeah, I don’t have any specific news, but I do think work is going to pick up in the next month or so. And I’m looking forward to getting another release out as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So from the conversations that I had on Core Days and also Word Games recently is that a lot of people really like the Create Block Theme plugin just to get easily out the user changes that are in the Block Editor, in the Site Editor, specifically changing Block Styles or having new headers, changing templates. There’s a lot of things that can go on a site and agencies really like it, that they can get everything else in the file directory style again, and then in the GitHub for version control.

So that’s a really good plugin to use for that, especially when you’re theme developer. Or the site builders are actually no coders that use the site editor to build it out and then you can in one swoosh kind of put it back into the final.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. Yeah, that’s essentially what the plugin is, it’s a good way to sum it up. It’s basically from database to file system.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Sarah Norris: The whole site edits the stuff. Yeah, that’s what we see so often, so many people want… Because of course you want a version control, the new way of theming, but everything tends to go… Because, again, obviously it goes into the database because it’s all changes on that side. So yeah, it just gives you a way to easily pull that out into the files. But yeah, I think we have the same problem as everyone else as well. It’s tough to keep up with Gutenberg.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s what I figured. Yeah. Especially with the section styles that came in 6.7, 6.6, and then I’ll find a nice one in 6.7, with a new theming, the default theme as well. And it’s not settled yet there. There are some quirks with the section style, so I think waiting for them to resolve would really be helpful before you add them to the Create Block Theme plugin.

And the pattern export, that’s pretty much the one that’s missing, what people feel missing, but there is no way around it. Through the pattern page you can actually mark the patterns that you want to export and put it all in one JSON file, and then add it to your… You obviously need to massage those files to get into your theme, but you definitely can at least get them out the database and into a file system, even if it’s just JSON.

Sarah Norris: With the Create Block Theme at the moment you can export patterns. So we do have the starting of pattern management so you can export sync patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, cool.

Sarah Norris: Yeah. Yeah. It’d be great to get more feedback on that, because I think ideally you want to export any pattern.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Sarah Norris: Well, in my mind, we probably need to add UI to the patterns page, because at the moment, all the controls are on the Create Block Theme panel, and it’s getting a bit full. So I think, yeah, we maybe need to add another panel that’s specific to patterns and then we can do some more fine-grained control on the patterns page. And then when you go to export, then maybe you could open the original panel and then you’ve already set up way off, for what patterns to be exported. But yeah, there’s some initial work there, so you can export some patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Excellent. Yes, but not others. Yeah, I think what a lot of theme developers are really waiting for is the Synced Pattern overrides for Themes, that they can offer some patterns. Half the content kind of singled out, but you can’t change them anymore, only change them with… And change them then side-wide. Something that the theme developers are really waiting for. A lot of us have had hoped that it would be in 6.7, but yeah, we will see if it makes it into 6.8.

Sarah Norris: That was partly why we added the Synced Patterns to Create Block Theme, because it’s like halfway to the Synced Pattern overrides that’s coming in Gutenberg. But yeah, we were the same. We were kind of waiting and just like, oh, we won’t work. Because we both, the primary contributors who work on both the plugin, and we work on Gutenberg as well. So it’s kind of like, do I work in this? Do I put all my time into Gutenberg or do I put a bit of time into Create Block Theme? So yeah, because we thought that was coming. But yeah, it is coming. It’s just…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s coming, but it’s tied to the Block Bindings API. And the block bindings API is definitely not finished and it’s only for four blocks, and before they want to add it to other blocks, they still need to figure something out. There are a few technical hurdles there, and as long as the Block Bindings isn’t finalized I think the Synced Patterns overrides won’t make it for themes. Because all of a sudden you also have backwards compatibility issues there with themes. But good things to come for Twenty Twenty Five. Are you looking forward to a special thing that might come in 2025? Well, we don’t have a roadmap yet, but yeah, we all have hopes and dreams.

Sarah Norris: I guess the roadmap probably coming soon though as well. There’s so many things going on. I’m really looking forward to seeing where all the stylebook changes end up. That’s feeling really good and I’m looking forward to seeing where that evolves. And I’m really enjoying working with DataViews as well. I really like all the stuff that’s foundational. Because it feels like that’s going to be like a 10 times or a 100 times in quality or experience. Yeah, I’m enjoying seeing those at the moment, so I’m looking forward to what’s coming next year with both of those.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I have the same thing. It’s kind of the DataViews are really exciting when you kind of think, I don’t know if we get to that in Twenty twenty five, that it will take over WP admin, but I think we get a good look at how it could be. There’s a lot of extensibility issues that need to be worked out because that has been around for so many, many years and people have built on it. And the backwards compatibility piece is really something that you don’t want to mess up too much. So I think there’s a lot of conversations and back-and-forth, and also testing to be done from the plugin developers community that need to come around and figure out what they need and what they don’t need.

Sarah Norris: I’d also like to see some more fun blocks as well, encouraging people to build more pianos and snake games.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well we are also waiting for accordions and tabs.

Sarah Norris: Yeah, that’s exciting. But probably more important, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But yeah, I like the fun part. And also, I saw some great patterns, visual patterns that I want to see if we can do this with blocks, kind of Group Blocks, InnerBlocks, and have some fun with that on a visual part of it and maybe expand the Block Museum again, that has been around for two years now, or even longer, I don’t know. Yeah.

So yeah, I’m looking forward to the State of the Word. I think there’s some great stuff that’s coming in there that we know of, on what the outlook is. State of the Word, if you haven’t seen it yet, is on December 16th at 9:00 AM UTC, though that’s middle of the night for the Americans. But it will be live-streamed and it’ll be recorded and it’ll be available probably within two or three hours of the event ending.

It will be in Tokyo. It’s a wave at the large Japanese community that has pushed WordPress forward very early on. And I think the market share of WordPress is about 80% in Japan of websites. I remember the story that Matt told at one of the town halls or AMAs throughout the years, that Japanese was the first language it was translated to, and they did a complete copy of WordPress and translated every string and then released the new copy.

There was no Holly Glots team. There was no tools to do all that and with the PO files and all that. So that was kind of the start of having WordPress in a different language and Japanese was the first language that it was introduced to. So there’s a big tip to the hat making the State of the Word taking place in Tokyo. And there will be… Yeah, of course the keynote of Matt, but there will also be… We’ll see Mary Hubbard, the new executive director for the open source project and so much more.

Matias is going to be doing some demos I think. So there’s some great stuff coming down. That’s kind of the save the date thing, and that’s the end of the show. Oh, as always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcasts. This is episode 112, a hundred and twelve, and if you have questions, suggestions, or news you want us to talk about, send them to Changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s Changelog@ gutenbergtimes.com. And the Gutenberg Times is now also on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

So if you have left Twitter and all of a sudden in search of information, you can get them from Gutenberg Times as well as from myself. Are you on any of the new kids on the block, Sarah?

Sarah Norris: Yes. Yeah, I’ve been trying to use Bluesky much more and yeah, I’m really enjoying it. I’m finding more and more WordPress news coming out over on Bluesky too. Yeah. Yeah, I’m loving it. Trying to be a bit more mindful about using it as well. I’m not great at social stuff. But yeah, it’s the thing at the moment, I’m going to try and ride that wave and be a bit better at social media.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It feels like less noise, more signal, but I think the more people are coming, that kind of changes again. But yeah, it’s really an interesting small community there. A little smaller than on Twitter, but that’s changing rapidly. I saw in the last two weeks probably they’ve got 100s of followers more, that are coming over. So it’s a really good place.

I’m also diving into the Mastodon ActivityPub, Fediverse kind of thing. And I need to watch Matias Pfefferle’s videos that he did with DocPop on the Fediverse. That’s probably something I’d do for a holiday vacation, because it’s not part of my normal job and I really wanted to dive in and see what’s happening there. 

All right, well thank you so much, Sarah. This was wonderful and lovely to have you.

And dear listeners, we will be back in the second week of January with episode 113 and see what’s happening there. We might even push it until Gutenberg 20.0 comes out and see what’s in there, because it’s going to be… Maybe there are some Easter eggs in there. Who knows? All right, get us out of here. Take care. Happy holidays for everyone and a happy and healthy New Year, and I’ll see you on the other side.

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