Gutenberg Changelog 113 – WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1 Plugin Releases

Gutenberg Changelog 113 w. Tammie Lister and Birgit Pauli-Haack

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie Lister talked about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1 plugin releases.

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Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Tammie Lister

Cursor AI

WordPress 6.8

Gutenberg plugin

Storybook

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 113th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog.

Dear listeners, I wish you all a happy New Year, lots of fun and laughter, good health, and most of all, prosperity and peace. Yes, we took a holiday break and there are still three plugin releases that happened in the meantime. And in today’s episode, we’ll talk about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0, and 20.1.

I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and developer advocate at Automattic. Today’s co-host is Tammie Lister, OG Gutenberg developer and designer, product consultant, and long-time core contributor to WordPress and BuddyPress, I recently noticed again.

Thank you for joining me, Tammie. How are you today?

Tammie Lister: I am great. Thank you. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. I’m done with winter, but I think I can control that. So if you’re done with winter too, let’s help and change the weather if we can do it.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I am very done with winter, although it’s kind of nice as long as you just don’t go outside. But also, as long as you wrap up warm, I think that’s the thing, just…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are several days that I stay inside, which normally doesn’t happen, but yeah.

Tammie Lister: I have a wood burner, which makes winter a little bit more tolerable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we have central heating, which is very good. So, well, Tammie, you’re always on the forefront of web and WordPress development. What are you working on right now and what are your plans or outlook for 2025?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I guess over the holidays, I did what a lot of people did, which is I did some tinkering. So a lot of people take time off and the holidays appear to be the time when they sit down and do a project. And it appeared to be that everybody over the holiday has explored with AI development tools.

The one that I chose, well, I chose, I did a bit of Bolt, but I also did Cursor specifically. And I was using it as a rubber duck that’s basically for development. So I was doing a lot of that in my work. I’ve been doing a combination of working on themes, but also working on some product consultancy, and that’s been really interesting to balance those. But also looking at contribution perspective, stepping back into releases. So really for me, it’s with a lot of these tools is how can I get the ideas that are in my head out faster into prototypes rather than maybe them just sitting in my head. But I don’t think I’m alone based on what I was seeing on the socials and seeing in Slack. A lot of people were just brewing ideas and just getting them out, so…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, no, I agree. And for those listeners who are not English natives, the rubber ducking is a process.

Tammie Lister: Ah, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … by developers who talk to actually inanimate object and get it out, but they have it ahead.

Tammie Lister: Sometimes a rubber duck.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a rubber duck. And then by way of explaining it to somebody, most of the time a solution comes or at least, okay, another avenue to troubleshoot something opens up. So it’s a known process and it’s called rubber ducking.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. And a lot of these tools are really helpful for that, particularly with things like WordPress and Gutenberg, there’s always something you don’t know about or maybe there’s a feature you haven’t got to learn about. So one of the things I was able to do was be like it could teach me about that area whilst I was learning to code.

I also did some things which are completely unrelated to that, but on the newer features. I was able to say, “How would you implement it and teach me as you are doing it each stage,” which is really helpful. It’s having that training guide as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I really love it. And it prompts you. So speaking of Cursor AI, it actually prompts you. “Shall I explain this a little bit to you?” kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you say, “Yes, please do like I’m a 5-year-old,” or something.

Tammie Lister: “Explain it to me like I’m the rubber duck.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then one of the AIs, when I say, “Please make it readable for a non-technical person,” and every time they come with a legal analogy. Yeah, legal. Can they do these trademarks? Well, anyway.

Tammie Lister: I like whenever you’re saying with that, if you don’t set any boundaries with things like that, they try and go above and beyond. They’re very over-performing so you’ll find it’ll be like, I watched this when I watched Nick Diego when he did his block challenge and it was just, I think he just said, “Make it Christmas-y,” and it was just like, “Have sparkles, have this, have that, have the other.” And I also discovered that if I didn’t set some boundaries, it was suddenly like, “Have this, have the other.” So just set some boundaries to it.                                                 So a good example from a Gutenberg perspective would be, say, use create block scaffolding, would be use the components. And knowing things like that means that it really tailwind otherwise. It’ll be like, “Put tailwind in it, put tailwind in this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, there’s some components we can use. It’s okay.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But you really need to be knowing something about development to actually guide it also to something that you then also have production-

Tammie Lister: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not production ready, but you can use.

Tammie Lister: And I found that when I was doing things which were not my wheelhouse, which was in thinking not WordPress, and I was just doing some different language stuff. And when I completely didn’t know the stack I was working with and it was just like, “Sure, I don’t know if you’ve just done or just taken me completely down the wrong path.” But then you go through the, “Explain why you did this,” and then it will pick through. And then oftenly, it will self-correct itself. Then you can be like, “Can you do this a simpler way?” and it’ll be like, “Yes, I can. You are correct.” And I don’t know if you find that you’d say please and thank you to it a lot because I say an awful lot of…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sometimes, yeah.

Tammie Lister: … please and thank you to my AI overlords.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I like that when Nick said, somebody mentioned that, I think Jamie mentioned that when Nick was going through, I said, “You are always very polite.”

Tammie Lister: I am so polite just in case.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just in case.

Tammie Lister: Just in case Terminator is correct. You’ve got to be polite.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, but this show, your listener is not in an AI show. We could probably talk another two hours about it, but we have other things to do today. 

Announcements – WordPress 6.8 Release

So there’s the announcement that WordPress 6.8, the release squad is done, the timeline is announced, and the focus is announced. And the schedule is beta one is March 4th. That’s pretty much around the corner. Then release candidate is the 25th of March, the first release candidate. And then the final release will be April 15th.

And Jonathan Desrosiers put up that post and I want to quote from his post, and he said, “The squad is also a bit smaller than usual because of the release being a polish and bug fix release. Also of note, the core tech lead and editor tech lead roles have been combined into a single tech lead role as part of the continued initiative to support more closely coordinated efforts across Gutenberg and Core.” And that’s the quote end. The tech leads are Joe McGill, Jonathan Desrosiers, and George Mamadashvili. So that’s a great team to put this all together. All 10 release squad members are actually long time contributors and have been on many, many releases before. So it’s Jeff Paul, Michelle Frechette, JB Audras, Felix Arntz, and Krupa Nanda. And Tammie Lister has raised a hand as a design lead for the release.

Yeah, so what does a design lead do on the release?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So there’s, as of all these roles, there’s some keeping things on the track, things you do from the design perspective, the about page, getting any materials that are needed for the release. But really the best, the fundamentals are if anything has a niche design or design feedback ticket during the release, it’s unblocking. That’s the best way that I can put it from that. And because this release specifically is a polish and a fix, maybe go into what that really means. It means most of, if not all, of the big features are ready, or we are not really going to be doing so many of those. And I think that that’s something that last year actually was requested by the community specifically to focus on. I don’t know if we’re going to have one, two a whole year. I have no idea. We’re just entering this year.

But, I actually, from a design perspective, it’s quite good because we have quite a lot of tickets that need design feedback, both in Core and in Core Editor. So I’ve been able to look at those right going all the way back and triage them. Maybe a good thing too, because that’s often a word, but to explain the way that triage or at least the way that I approach triage is that triage shouldn’t leave a ticket in the state that you find it. So that could be your audition labels, but you are also moving it on. So we have a lot of tickets that they need feedback, but then they need to go to their next state. So just leaving something with a test or a feedback, that’s awesome, but it just leaves it with test or feedback. It doesn’t move it on. It doesn’t.

Also, some of these tickets, so if something maybe in five years ago was thought to have a design, and I actually discovered this over the holidays, well, just before the holidays when I was going through my old tickets in the Gutenberg repo. And I discovered that a lot of them have already had different interfaces done. So they’re completely invalid tickets now. But because people have been really not… So many people have been doing work and there’s so many tickets, been able to go back over some of those and saying, “Okay, well, the interface has changed. Do we still think that this is a valid application or do we wish it well? And do we want to close it because we’ve already taken a different approach as a project?”

So that’s one thing that can be done. Those aren’t all that common. But also just looking at because something has an easy fix, I call them paper cuts, there’s often little things that can be done as well. And I suspect there’s going to be quite a few of those from a design perspective, some little paper cuts we can get in. Design also doesn’t just mean visual design. I always like to include some CSS and styling in there because of my hybrid nature as well, so yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool, yeah. Well, thank you very much for stepping up to the plate and thank you for everybody stepping up to the plate and being on the radio.

Tammie Lister: And there will be of us joining, I think that’s always the important thing, is there’s a post on mixed design about how anyone can just step up and join in if you have an hour, half an hour a week that you can just sit there and do some triage that’s been involved and just raise your name and then you can get included in the release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yes. Yeah, so that’s on WordPress 6.8. I think we will, on this podcast, talk about what’s going to be in there a little later in the year, maybe after WordCamp Asia, probably have another Gutenberg Changelog episode. We will have one before WordCamp Asia and one after Asia.

But we say the Gutenberg plans keep rolling in, two big ones and one not so big one. One was 19.9 that was in December. Then the first one in January was 20.0. And then just last week, oh, this week, we were recording this on January 17th, so this week, George Momotos really just did the 20.1 release candidate. So the Changelog we’re going to talk about is going to be from the release candidate, but the other two have been released and I share with you the release post.

Gutenberg 19.9                                                        

So let’s get started with Gutenberg 19.9. 

Enhancements

So what was a big change is something that’s probably not in any release, but it’s in the plugin release, is that the experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin has Anne McCarthy went through it and give it better titles, a description, and a little bit of an order on the experiment space because there are now 13 experiments listed on that page. So that is definitely a good thing, especially when you want to check them out and enable them and play around with the things. What’s in the experiments page is a few data views, then all the collaborative editing things and experiments then some new blocks. The grid layout, the interactive grid layout, is in the experiments. So those are there.

Tammie Lister: I think often people forget about that page, so it’s really nice to see it called out because I think it should remind people that it’s there as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Tammie Lister: So number one I’m seeing here is add PHP admin support for environment enhancement and document layout in Storybook. A lot of this is improvements to components and Storybook in general. This reminds me, I’m also seeing Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, and it reminds me of the importance of the design system. I’m going back to that. One of the things we are really looking at in this release is: how can we bring that awesome work that’s happened in the editor into those other areas of WordPress, and seeing this really good work from the Storybook reminds me of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Storybook, just in case you heard this for the first time, don’t confuse them with Stylebook. That’s a total different thing. But the Storybook is a way of documentation, certain components with their attributes and their different options so you can see them in isolation. And it’s actually available on the WordPress GitHub pages, and I will share the link in the show notes. So if you haven’t looked at it yet and you are developing for WordPress, it’s definitely a place to go and see what’s actually in the design system, as Tammie said, and also how you can use it for your own plugins. Well, not so much themes, but for the plugins, or any other admin contributions that you want to do.

The next pieces are more like individual blocks that got some enhancements. First up is the cover block that the image size option for the featured image is now available. You could assign the featured image to be part of the cover block, but you couldn’t specify the size for that. So now you can, and which is good for a lot of things. And talking about the featured image, no, it’s a new feature. It’s not featured image, sorry. It’s about the post template block that you can deeply nest it into the query block. It’s like query block inception over down, down, down, down.

Tammie Lister: And I would say there’s another one here with patterns model to drop down on query block any, and another one, add query total block for displaying total query results. The query block is a block that pretty much most agency workers always had to extend or have a variation of rather than be able to use out of the box for quite a while. And it’s not an amazing block. It’s just not quite got there because it’s so complex and it’s so many different variations. So anytime you add a feature, it’s just a lot to add a feature. So I think being able to see these improvements are really powerful.

And if you remember where the query blocks started, I think it’s great to see how it’s come along. I remember the first mock-ups to try and get a mind around the query block. And wherever it is now, I’m just really excited to see. And also from the sensibility perspective where it is now and the fact that I think a lot more cases, probably at least 30, 40% don’t need to extend it now. And I think that we’re probably only ever going to get to 50/50 because it’s such a complex situation, but being able to get to that from where most couldn’t use it is really powerful for the query block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and it’s so much the jump from the classic theme to a block theme is that a user can actually get in contact with a query block and really adapt it to what it needs to do.

Tammie Lister: And within, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How often have I had the request to remove a date or remove the author or remove the category pick? That was all developer-oriented kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: And a theme of understanding it, just a theme of being able to understand query blocks. So one of the big things that just learning as a themer is a real block, a block, a block. A blocker for you as a themer is trying to understand, and it often puts off a lot of people in theming because they may be more on the design side and they’re just like, “Oh, now I’ve got to learn the loop, got to learn how to do coding, and I’ve got to learn how to do that.” Well, with the query block, you don’t have to. It doesn’t mean if you know it, you can still use it. And I think that was really important to say when we’re talking about query block, that you can use it, but you can also use other methods or you could extend it and have your own really powerful option. And that’s something that I don’t think people will often hear is you have an option. And I find that a lot of times it does it for me now, but that little bit that it doesn’t, extending it is really powerful as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you mentioned the query total block. That’s a new block and it helps you display the query results ranges, so to speak. You get the total results, but it also gives you so, “12 results found,” or in the pagination it says, “Displaying 1 through 10 of 12,” or something like that. And it gives you a little bit more flexibility in display query related theme designs here.

Tammie Lister: And that’s a good note. The query block isn’t just a block. It’s a block with the blocks. And a lot of our mega blocks, I don’t know, nested blocks, a lot of those one are that. And we’re often, I don’t think we need more terminology, we really don’t, but we don’t see the complexity of them. And the query block is one of those really complex blocks. Navigation block is similar because of that nesting and because of the complexity inside it. If you look at even title image, the way that you have the content loops and the way that that can be, you don’t even need to have the finite control now. You can just have the content now and all those different options.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it takes a little bit getting used to and also getting experience in what works and what doesn’t work for you. Different thing, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I remember the time when I would try to get the pagination block on my page and it didn’t go. It didn’t show because…

Tammie Lister: Oh, that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … it was not inside the query button exactly.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, you’re reminding me. There used to be a thing where it used to, I think there was a while where it could easily just go outside and it would just hang around just outside. And it would never error so you would never know why it was erroring. It would just be like that. It’s pagination that you could click the pagination and go up and down it, but it wouldn’t do anything. But that also shows how far we’ve come because if you have that now, it would give an error. And now a lot of the system is interactive enough to self-correct itself, and it’d be like, “No query found,” or there’s a lot of error catching and correction in the system, or it’d be like, “No, that block has to be within the container.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or it doesn’t show up if it’s not inside the container.

Tammie Lister: Yes, which is the refinements and the polish, which brings us lovely back to 6.8. I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: But that’s part of it, right? With all these complexities.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think the next one is a separator block that can now also divs instead of horizontal lines. So it can be styled, better styled. And it also is not announced because it’s a decorative thing. It’s not announced through the page reader, the screen reader.

Tammie Lister: Which was always interesting to listen to initially, the screen reader doing the spacer block and then when you hadn’t done it correctly and then doing the separator block and he was like, “Rah, rah.” It’s shouting at people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, we laugh about it, but I think for someone who reads a screen reader, it’s not funny.

Tammie Lister: No, but that’s the thing. It’s like you’re laughing at the refinement.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Tammie Lister: But it’s good. And only because of the really awesome feedback that we’ve had from the accessibility team and the learnings that we’ve done have we been able to get on that. And I think again, that shows that the learnings and the refinement and the collaborative work that has gone on behind the scenes between the team, we’re laughing with the gentleness of history, I think, right? That’s what we are able to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And until you hear actually a screen reader shouting at you, you have no idea how that actually works. So it’s always been an epiphany for me to not talk with people who know how to use a screen reader or teach me how to do it and do it myself. And then you say, “Oh no, that’s wrong.”

So the next part is about Stylebook. We talked about Storybook. That’s a developer stuff. Storybook, it’s a designer stuff, but that’s in the editor. And the Stylebook actually lets you go through all the blocks on your site with the style attached to it. So if you use one of the style variation and you open up the Stylebook, you see how each of the blocks, image block, paragraph block quotes look with that particular style and you can actually edit it. And as I said, there was something like that it’s a side editor thing, but now Stylebook screen comes also to the classic theme. And that I think is a really good move to have that there because there have been for eight years having blocks displayed in classic themes and not something like a Stylebook was available. Now, it is.

Tammie Lister: The only option before was to get the block theme tested data and then put it in. And then generally people, when you release the site, you had a page and then on that page you listed every book. I’m laughing at the work I’ve done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I hear you.

Tammie Lister: I love Stylebook. Often I surprise clients by showing them it. They’re like, “Huh? Where did that come from?” And the reason I like it is I use the editor like Dreamweaver, and one of the things that I find is when I lay my foundations in a theme, I will then go straight to Stylebook. So I’ll do the foundations, the color, the typography, and then don’t make that noise, but yeah, and then I go to Stylebook and I’m like, “Okay, particularly color.” So one good thing I’ll be able to do calendar always, I can be like, “Oh yeah, no, the colors won’t necessarily going to reflect so well.” So I make sure that I get in my naming and my colors and all those things going so that I can have that dynamic base that pulls in on different blocks depending on what the block is and all those ways that I can have borders and shading and different things.

So that’s one of the things that I try to do when I’m pulling something through. And that can be whether I’m doing a base theme or whether I’m using Ollie or any number of different themes as a foundation, doesn’t matter. That’s exactly the same as a child theme. Doesn’t matter. It’s exactly the same approach every single time. And so Stylebook, whenever I show someone, they’re like, “Oh, I want to use this.” Still waiting for the day where I can have it detached and front end show someone because I still think that that would be chef’s kiss because the amount of projects I’ve had to do zero or something like that, or those other tools that you have to use on top of it. But yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, I really like the Stylebook. I remember the time where I had a GitHub test with all my test blocks and variations of the block and how that’s going to work, yeah. And the next one is also a Stylebook one that is a render overview colors in four columns. So one of the new features is that the color variations, I think, is the right terminology are now shown on top of the Stylebook. So you can see when you change the style variations, how the colors actually change. It’s cool.

Tammie Lister: So the post editor, I guess we’re moving to, so we have inline commenting, added new sidebar as extension of the canvas. And with inline commenting, we order the comments and the sidebar and UX enhanced comments. So this is all really adding the commenting and getting us on the path to that awesome work as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a collaborative effort. And inline commenting is asynchronous, not synchronized collaborative. You can only see it when you enable the experiments for it, but it’s really cool where you can add the comments per block and then you can reply to it. And there are some quirks with it in terms of the list of posts where you see the number of comments, but it never matches what the comments are. So there’s some kind of a bug in there. But as long as the feature isn’t settled yet, I don’t think there’s a sense in fixing that one because that’s the last thing to fix.

Tammie Lister: If you use Google Doc comments, you can use this. I think that’s the best way to describe it to someone. It’s very like how you would expect commenting to work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, try it out then if it doesn’t, post some feedback on GitHub.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, try it out. And if you find a bug, report it. You see it, report it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that’s about the enhancements of 19.9. It’s a pretty solid release and has a lot of bug fixes as well. 

But Fixes

There is one thing from the bug fixes that I wanted to point out. I think that was for the sync patterns. The content-only block was editing mode was removed because it’s not really, if you want to sync pattern, do you want to edit the content? So the editing mode was reversed to do that just in case you ran across it and you couldn’t edit your patterns. 

Documentation

And then documentation improvements or a lot of Storybook updates were there, as well as the documentation of the fields package, which is a part of the data views package for the developers that if you use the data views outside of the site editor for your own plugins, you definitely want to look at the fields package.

Tammie Lister: And there is a deprecation on icons, which is important to think about if you are looking at using the design system. So warning has been renamed caution field. And the only reason I raised that is if you’re already using it in your design system, being aware that icons have changed, but again, in the Storybook you’d be able to find that information.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I think was, I think that’s all I wanted.

Tammie Lister: Did we do one of the releases? I’m very excited with all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we are done with 19.9. 

Gutenberg 20.0

Now, we come to Gutenberg 20.0, and 20.0 means that’s the 200th release of Gutenberg. Who would’ve thunk in June 2017 that we will have…

Tammie Lister: I know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … the 200th release? Who was ever thinking that far? Yeah, there are 274 merge PRs by 71 contributors, 13 of them were first time contributors. I think that’s one of the largest numbers of first time contributors for a Gutenberg plugin. And the project came with 83 enhancements and 82 fixed bugs. We are not going to read through all 83 of them. Sorry, people.

Tammie Lister: My brain’s still stuck on the 200th as some… Because at the first, I’m like-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You were part of the original team?

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For many, many years. Three or four years, I think.

Tammie Lister: Which I think is the first few are always unexciting because you’re just like pushing pancakes. But I think if you, from the first 10.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Where did that expression come from? Sorry, sorry, sorry. I need to go back to what are you doing? Pushing pancakes?

Tammie Lister: So your first pancake is always not such a good one. It’s like the first pancake you put out, right? That’s the first few releases or something that you put out. They’re just like, “Eh, it’s just good.” But you’re not counting those because you’re just like releasing. You’re just getting it out. But by 200, and the thing that I’d like to reflect is the cadence. And I think that that’s the important thing.

So with WordPress, we’re very used to having regular releases throughout the year, but they generally have a gap now. You’re having three or so throughout a year. That’s our cadence. But with Gutenberg, because of its plugin format, you’re having that real frequency of release. So we’ve got into that habit of a proper sprint release is what people have got into. And the sheer amount of things that go into it, it’s overwhelming. Every time I come and do this, I’m like…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a lot. “Who reviewed all that?” HPR has some review and a lot of people have-

Tammie Lister: And testing. HPR has someone that creates it, the original issue, someone that works on it, someone that then tests it, someone that then documents it, someone then pushes it. Well, it has at least two people that will review it. And then there’s so much work. So at least probably five to seven people have touched it per PR potentially.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s so important to have a few different views in there to really fix all the bugs before it gets released. But you’re never successful in that. But I also like, I sometimes go back to some of the issues as well as the PRs. And sometimes they’re a year old or they started with a brilliant idea but the software wasn’t there yet. But then people keep looking at it and say, “Is it there yet? Is it there yet? Oh, could we do this?”

Tammie Lister: Back then, we couldn’t have achieved most of what we do now, which is why everything should be re-looked at. I often say if anything really is left at the interface when I first worked on it, we maybe have a problem because it should be iterated and changed on. Because even down to animations and interactions, we know more how people work on. People have changed and adapted. There’s a whole pandemic happened. People interact devices have changed. The Playground, look at what can be done with devices.

And I guess that leads us on to even looking at these lists. You look at the blocks, the thing that we have listed here is the block library, I guess. You have the details block. That strikes me in this release, the details block was something that when they originally came out, it was the paragraph block, right? The first block, and then it’s added up. So now we have a details block, we have a page list, social lines block, things block, and all these different blocks that are also maintained on top of everything as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we also have old widget blocks. The latest post thing is really outdated. It should be deprecated because you have the query block now for that. It’s evolving.

Enhancements                                                       

So what’s in 20.0? So there is an enhancement on the create block scaffolding tool or two of them. So now you can use external templates and customize more fields. And then the other part is that you have a default template that helps you with the multiple block plugin case. Up until now, it was only you could create a plugin with a block and then you had to get the additional blocks in with a certain flag. And now it’s a little bit easier, I think, to do that.

I like this tool. A create block is such a neat way to start out with a block and then just focus on the editor and the front end. And you don’t have to all come in.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I love it. And to me it means that it stands with other, going back to when we were talking about Cursor, it uses it. It picks it up. And I think by if I looked at any other language that I’ve started playing around with, they all have their own versions to do scaffolding. So it makes it over par with that and just easier.Can you do it by hand? Yes, of course you can do your own thing, but it also helps from a learning perspective. And then you can just do it right from the start. Same as I love the create block theme plugin, all these tools. Can I hand code a theme? Yes. Can I hand code a block? Yes. Can I do other things while those tools are doing it for me? Yes. So it’s about the tools doing it. And also with what you are saying, it’s going to mean that I’m doing it. I’m having that foundation to then build up on top of.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you do it the same time over and over. So maintainability is also pretty big with using that. There’s also a wp-env environment, the development environment that comes with Gutenberg, and now has multi-site support. It’s definitely increasing the footprint of the developers who you’re going to use it. So the block library has some consistent work done where the blocks sidebar has changed the component and brave contributors go block by block and make it consistent going through that. So it is a different panel and it uses a tools panel item and the tools panel instead of the settings panel. It’s definitely they changed the components out of it and used the tools panel drop down for that.

Tammie Lister: So in this release, we’ve also got some focus on Stylebook. So we’ve got to give Stylebook its own route, so it can be linked to directly and add the appearance design menu through admin action. So again, this is iterating on Stylebook and improving it more, which is really, really exciting. I’m curious to test out the linking to it directly as well to see if what that happens with permissions. So we’ve achieved what I wanted it to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good idea, but I think you need to have some edge.

Tammie Lister: I do. I don’t think it’s quite the front-facing thing that I’m wanting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s not.

Tammie Lister: But it’s getting there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: In there, yeah. Its own route is really powerful when you…

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you want to link to it. And then the block hooks got two additional enhancements. One is to apply the block hooks to post content on the front end and the editor so people can see it, and the other one is in sync pattern to actually also apply the block hooks. So before then, the block hooks wouldn’t work in patterns. Now, they do. Block hooks is a method to add a block at the end or at the beginning of another block for display. And now with this release, you can also see it in the editor and edit there. So the user has a little bit more control over there, the blocks that are automatically added.

Tammie Lister: Speaking of tools, there’s adder in the plugin, there’s adder Playground blueprint JSON to the assets blueprints folder of plugin repo. So anytime I see anything about Playground, I get super excited. For those that haven’t explored it, the way that I describe it is a collection of awesome recipes to be able to either pre-run or from testing to your plugin or to be able to just run. So you can even run a testing PR with them. There’s just so much that you can do with them in the browser. You can either have single installs or you can have a bit more perpetual sites as well with Playground. And it’s just really, really powerful in getting more powerful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And if you want to learn more about blueprints, the Playground, new interface for the last month actually, has the blueprint gallery coming into the Playground interface. So you can actually read through them and test them out right away. And they are really cool as examples to, okay, if it can do that, then maybe it can also do that and you have a blueprint on how to do that. So I love that. And well, I built some of the blueprints, so I’m really excited about getting those done.

And my next thing is to enable all the experiments or more than one experiment in the good mug repo and have a Playground for that. And the next one, and that’s just merged into the blueprint gallery. But I also am thinking about the distraction-free writing experience that if you have a Playground to just do writing, so you need to have the distraction-free enabled and some other things that need to be enabled, but so you can really have a writer try it out without having all the distraction things.

Tammie Lister: I love that idea that you could use Playground to test modes like what you are suggesting. And that’s also really important to say with Playground you can also and gone into a sidetrack off Playground, but with Playground you can also install plugins. And that’s something that often is not thought of. So the recipe can also be add Woo, add this, add that. So it can be the whole configuration setup. As you are saying, it’s not just open the editor at a certain point. It’s not like if this, then that workflow, it’s also installing things and configuring them as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you could even import some demo content because most plugins only shine when you actually have content to look at.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the “hello world” not always does it.

Tammie Lister: Could I have it with Stylebook lockdown? Or I’m just like, “Is this how I get my Stylebook?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now with the root, you could actually make the Stylebook your landing page.

Tammie Lister: And that’s how I get my design system. So okay, now we solved my problem. How do we solve the next problem on the Changelog? So we solved both our problems today.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Tammie Lister: So moving on from that, we have write mode, allow template part editing in write mode. Anything that is improving write mode is also exciting for me because it’s one of those little paper cutters, it’s probably like a small version of it, but it’s an easing of the experience to me and that is also really useful. So I had love to see these iterations over time as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. Yeah. And for the longest time I wasn’t really getting what the difference is between design mode and write mode. But now with the template part, I am actually getting it. It’s really cool.

Tammie Lister: I describe the difference between using Google Docs and Dreamweaver. That’s the best way I can describe for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Very good analogies. For a long time document about…

Tammie Lister: When you add things in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, this is a fun show and we are, I think, that’s true with 20.0.

Tammie Lister: Two down.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Two down, one to go. And it only had 94 PR so it’s not that much in there. 

Gutenberg 20.1

But the Gutenberg 20.1, it has not been released yet at the time of this recording. And so it will be released on January 22nd will be the release of 20.1. There’s a lot of 20s in my life at the moment.

Tammie Lister: There are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s 20.1. All right, yeah. So what does it bring?

Enhancements

Tammie Lister: This has a lot of things again in the block library. This is the details block. So really requirements with the allowed block attributes there, and that reminds me of a lot of these blocks are created and then I need to be gone over again. And that’s something you were saying about going over the components and then bring them in. But a lot of these, a new feature like allowed block attributes or different things happen and then you need to go back over the old blocks and reiterate them because they maybe came out after or before and different things. So yeah, some of that’s going. Page lists, add color support, anything that sees adding support to a block gets me very excited from the senior perspective. And social links button, add clear button for color option, that seems like a small thing, but I know how important that is. Clears color is really, really important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Every time I say, “Where did this go wrong? Let’s clear the colors first.”

Tammie Lister: Yes. And then with, I kind of made move on to design tools because that’s the next one after that. But with post comment link, showing border controls by default, and query total show border controls by default, again that’s deciding on the best defaults is also something you only know when you first release something you are not too sure, particularly with the design tools and to give a frame of design tools. That’s anything from borders to backgrounds to anything that is styling things. And it’s generally the things that are in theme JSON with the tooling visualized. So that’s when we’re talking about design tools. It’s the visual knobs and things that you can push to do that fall and interact with theme JSON. That’s a weird way of framing it, but that’s the best way I can put it.

And a lot of these defaults are guessed first time when something comes out. So the post comment link, a guess will have been come up that needed to be on, that needed to be off. So by having these things adjusted, it means that this feedback was given that that should be on by default or this should be off by default.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But there are so many people. That’s just a 50/50 decision, but people are not 50/50. So sometimes they want it and sometimes they don’t want it. But yeah, I had a constant…

Tammie Lister: I had a toolbar where the option had to be added because that’s constantly my example of there is no good answer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but there is a shortcut, a keyboard shortcut.

Tammie Lister: There is an answer, put that option in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also remember it. That was also a part of it. That block editor remember me or my choices. Yeah, the clearable option, the color because is also available for the navigation block and it now surfaces the menu name in the list view. That’s for the navigation block. That was something that people just wouldn’t recognize the various menus in the list view. And the list view is your friend. So yeah, whatever we do for the list view is actually really a quality of life enhancements there. So the next one is, I’m not quite sure what this refers to, but maybe you know, the new default.

Tammie Lister: I’m not sure about this one either, I’ll be honest. So it’s the new default rendering mode for editor via post type supports. Looking at it a little bit, what it seems to be doing is similar to what I was saying, which is it basically says it updates how the new default rendering mode can be set for a post type. So to me, it responds to feedback given. So it says it doesn’t require best endpoint or any API-related changes.

So reading between the lines, it says that it would be feedback had been given on that and it says existing add post type support can be used to change or reset the default rendering mode. And then it gives some code examples to that. So again, it’s giving options that you can decide on defaults, which is what you were saying about. Really you don’t always know, but initially you have to make a best bet and then you can bring those refinements in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there’s an enhancement for the data views that it adds a media field to the UI for content preview of the posts and pages in the grid view.

Tammie Lister: I get excited about anything coming into data views.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Data views, and it’s for the media field is really important for featured images and all that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. I know it’s an experiment, but being able to just play around and any new feature that comes into data view is just exciting to be able to play with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I find them so much modern and I really would love to have make a kind of a snip decision or snip feature that kind of switches out the WP admin with the data views. But of course it cannot be that fast because it’s been-

Tammie Lister: I think you have to go a little bit gently with humans.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. A friend of mine said, “That’s for you, humans.”

Tammie Lister: Yeah, but I think that that’s why we have experiments. We’re going to make sure that the cake is having some testing. I know at core days in run, that was something that the ad was definitely sharing that by it being in there, it can be tested. It can be all the best version can be done. And then really those people call them edge cases, I call them stress cases because they cause stress. They can be felt afterwards and implemented. Otherwise, it would just take way too long to do so. At the moment, it’s the best case. That’s what data views are. And that doesn’t mean it’s all the cases.

So that’s part of the work with data views is really to go back over it and make sure it does all the work. And if you think of WP admin, anything to come out of the isolated view really has to just do all the work. And that’s something I’m very aware when I’m looking at what design things can I bring through. It’s like sprinkles at the moment is the best way I can put it because it has to be stuff that’s really, really packaged and baked already.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And looking at how the WP admin had been extended by plugins for 20 years, yeah.

Tammie Lister: How has it not been extended by a plugin at this point.

Because it’s been so long. It’s so long and tried and tested and it’s known. So that’s something when you bring something new. It will be there and we’d be talking in a couple of years as if it had always looked that way. And it will be the WP admin. It will just be a case of it has to be done in a certain way because and then everybody will be able to use it and understand it and implement it in that way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But that’s actually a very good way to end this podcast. I think we are through with 20.1.

Tammie Lister: Three for three.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We did three in one.

Tammie Lister: Yay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s really good. And so thank you so much, Tammie, for being here.

Tammie Lister: Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I am so glad we are back in 2025 with the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast, and this is episode 113, 113th. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And you can also leave… If you listen to that on Spotify, Spotify also gives you a feature to comment on it. That’s a great place to leave questions so we can answer them in the next episode. And thank you, everyone, for being a listener here and welcome back to 2025. And thank you, Tammie, for taking the time out of your life to be on the show and share all the good things with us.

Tammie Lister: Thank you so much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, you take care. Bye.

Tammie Lister: Take care too. Bye.

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