Gutenberg Changelog 117 – WooCommerce Starter Theme and Blocks, WordCamp Europe, and Gutenberg 20.7 and 20.8

Gutenberg Changelog 117 with Ellen Bauer and host Birgit Pauli-Haack
Gutenberg Changelog 117 cover image
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog 117 - WooCommerce Starter Theme and Blocks, WordCamp Europe, and Gutenberg 20.7 and 20.8
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Welcome to episode 117 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast! In this jam-packed episode, host Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Ellen Bauer, product lead at WooCommerce for an insightful conversation covering all the latest developments in the WordPress ecosystem.

Together, they dive into the progress on the new WooCommerce Starter Theme, its underlying “workhorse” philosophy, and the ongoing efforts to improve block theme adoption for e-commerce. Ellen shares behind-the-scenes challenges and a sneak peek into the team’s priorities—plus, learn how you can get involved and provide feedback as WooCommerce gears up for a first release in early June.

The episode also offers a preview of what to expect at WordCamp Europe, from Ellen’s session (spoiler: it’s all about WooCommerce and block themes) to hands-on workshops like Birgit’s upcoming walkthrough of using WordPress Playground for product demos. They tackle a listener question on overriding block styles, highlight recent updates to WP-CLI, WordPress 6.8, and the Create Block Theme plugin, and break down the newest features in Gutenberg 20.7 and the upcoming 20.8 release.

Whether you’re a theme builder, plugin developer, or a curious WordPress enthusiast, this episode is packed with actionable insights, pro tips, and friendly encouragement to explore the full potential of the block editor—especially for e-commerce sites. Tune in, and stay up-to-date with the fast-moving world of WordPress!

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Ellen Bauer

WooCommerce

Listener Question on block styles and block themes

What’s released:

Gutenberg Plugin releases

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 117th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WooCommerce Starter Theme and Blocks, WordCamp Europe, Gutenberg 20.7 and 20.8. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times, core contributor for the WordPress open source project, and I work for Automattic as a developer advocate. And I have with me Ellen Bauer, who is the Woo product lead and my resident theme wizard. So how are you today, Ellen? It’s so great that you can join me again.

Ellen Bauer: Thank you very much, Birgit. I’m great and I’m very excited to be on your podcast again. It has been a while and it’s always exciting for me to catch up with everything going on with the Gutenberg updates or like surrounding things like create block theme and yeah, I’m excited. I’m on my way to like halfway on the way to Europe for WordCamp Europe, which is exciting. I’m in Thailand right now in Bangkok, and there’s actually a thunderstorm just rolling in, so I hope that won’t add to any noise in our podcast today. But yeah, I’m great. Thanks for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. Yeah, well, it’s always good when we have some sudden movements on our podcast. It kind of gets us excited, but it’s not so good when you have a lightning strike and this. The power goes out. So that happens America quite often..

Ellen Bauer: In New Zealand as well, where we live. I hope it doesn’t happen. Yeah, I don’t think so.

WooCommerce Starter Theme and Block

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t think so either. So. Yeah, but you mentioned the last time that was the longer time that you’re on the show. So the last time it’s about 10 months ago, and you just had started at WooCommerce and you went on a quest to increase block theme adoption for WooCommerce. So how is it going?

Ellen Bauer: I’m still on the same quest and yeah, we are doing a lot of work and obviously there are a lot of complicated topics to solve because Ecommerce is just another level of complexity compared to just WordPress and blogs like Core WordPress. So the first thing we had to tackle and still like, really, I feel more or less still in the beginnings of it is improving the Woo blocks and, and then like, as a next layer we are building a pattern library. But we really needed to dig into the Woo blocks and we wanted to align them more with core blocks, make it like one experience for users and there were quite a lot of discrepancies and there still are. And we are about to release the first edition of new default Woo starter theme. Not replacing but kind of as an update to the classic theme storefront. Because yeah, it is the last default Woo theme that was there that people recommended or that that was released from WooCommerce. So we are updating that and there will be a first version. It’s really just a starter. I call it the Working Horse because it’s not meant to be a pretty like shiny theme, but really a starter point and also a reference for us to. To kind of test our own blocks to make them practical to see like what can we build and what can we not, and what do we want to build for the front end of Ecommerce stores with. With WooCommerce and what is just not possible at the moment to kind of set priorities on our work on blocks for WooCommerce. And I think that has really helped us to prioritize things that this kind of prioritization hasn’t really happened before. Yeah, you really need to use your own product to kind of see the shortcomings and what you want to fix. So that is the thing. That’s why I call it the Working Horse. And then as a next step once we have this released, we want to improve documentation. We want to help theme builders use this theme as a starting point to see how we think theme builders should work with Ecommerce and like similar to the default WordPress theme Twenty Twenty-Four, Twenty Twenty-Five just as a good reference point. And we are kind of concentrating on one theme because we want to leverage styles and yeah make it more like a mix and match of styles of font sets and a pattern library. Like use the components and make them mix and match rather than having it be one kind of stiff default theme that can’t be changed. So it will become quite creative I feel. And yeah, there’s still lots to do but it’s exciting and I think it really helps us to improve what is possible in a block WooCommerce WordPress world.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, there was a lot to unpack. So yes.

Ellen Bauer: It’s a big project that kind of occupied me for the last 10 months.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no kidding. And others before you. So. So you mentioned first that the work on a theme is also based on the core blocks that are in Woo and that they need to be refined. If I remember correctly. Do you have a call for input or for feedback out for WooCommerce developers? Is that still ongoing or is that already closed? I wasn’t really up to that.

Ellen Bauer: No, definitely we have a call out at any time for we need especially also extension builders. We need their feedback on what they want in our blocks. We need feedback from theme builders what they want the Woo blocks to be able to do. We are also working quite a lot with what we want to bring into core WordPress, and there’s a lot of changes happening to bring more of the default things that users expect from ECommerce into core. So that is happening and it does affect the blocks as well. So yeah, we can add some links to requests for feedback and I’m also always available for any kind of feedback and I think once the theme is out we haven’t promoted it really because it’s still in the works, but it will kind of come out with the next WooCommerce release which is beginning of June. And then we are going to really say hey, we need people to test it and extension builders to test it out and give us feedback.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is there a GitHub repo where people can do a sneak peek?

Ellen Bauer: Yes, there is a public GitHub repo where people can add the link to the podcast as well. And it’s yeah, we’re still doing a lot of changes, it’s being worked on. But yeah, we definitely need any kind of feedback we can get. And I think one of the disclaimers, and I put it in the readme file as well is that it’s a real work in progress, it’s not prettified or so. And I do like that. I think it’s good to show the sweat that goes into the work. And we also kind of still talk about a lot of changes like the patterns, where do we want to put the patterns and kind of looking in. For instance, what Rich Table has built on WordPress.com with a pattern library and if we can do something like that for Woo that they are just available outside of themes and really the next step I want to work on is also what kind of default patterns are shipped with WooCommerce. They will get a complete overhaul and kind of make everything more compatible. The starter theme is also based on the same theme JSON setting the assembler Rich Table’s assembler theme uses so it’s practically based on the same theme foundation. And I remember Nick Diego said to all his themes he kind of replaced to work on the basis of assembler because then we can really mix and match patterns across themes, and I think that’s a little bit limitation of block themes that in theory it’s possible, but it’s not really usable to do that. So that’s one of the things we want to improve.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the standardizations is a little bit harder to do with block themes because people can mesh and mash the patterns from all kinds of different sources. Yeah. So timeline wise, the first sneak peek or the first version comes out of the starter theme in beginning of June. But the block work is ongoing but it needs to come to a certain place so you can release that theme and it’s actually a working example. And then it depends on the feedback that you get and also the integration with other extensions, what the next updates on the theme are going to be.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, my goal for the next step after this initial release is look at the top 10 extensions and work with all of them to make it comfortable with this theme. And I think this will help all block themes to be more streamlined. And we are also really looking at all the cart and checkout pages and order confirmation. My account page is still not blockified. That’s on my wish list. It has been a little bit on the backlog, and I want to change that and kind of everything. Post purchase still needs a lot of work all the page templates there and yeah we will redo the whole default WooCommerce patterns that are shipped. Redo work on the default page templates that are that are in WooCommerce and kind of have a deep look into them and really make sure that this default starter theme just out of the box really works with everything that kind of WooCommerce recommends. That is the goal and yeah that it’s still a lot of work to be able to do that but it’s good to have a theme like a product that we can test it on. I think that was missing the WooCommerce that a lot of times we really didn’t know where to test and I think we have done it with Twenty Twenty-Four, Twenty Twenty-Five. But these themes are not meant to be ECommerce first themes, and I think that’s what we want to change with that project that we just felt we needed an E Commerce first theme to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Ellen Bauer: To really test all our product range and our core plugin with makes total sense.

WordCamp Europe

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So beginning of June, I’m coming back to that because that’s also the week of WordCamp Europe and I know.

Ellen Bauer: So exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s so exciting that we finally are to that place again that we meet up and at WordCamp Europe and if our listeners come. When you see us at the WordCamp Europe and we’re talking to somebody, it’s all just come up to us, introduce yourself and then be included in any conversation. That’s what the WordCamp is all about. It’s not that people who know each other can click together. It’s meet new people, meet new discussions, have a deeper discussion on certain WordPress topics in a face-to-face settings. So. So what’s your talk about then Ellen?

Ellen Bauer: It’s about WooCommerce and block themes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh no, you’re just kidding.

Ellen Bauer: Yes. Yay. So yeah, I’m available to talk about these topics actually. Anything I love to be able to meet in person. I loved last year’s being there at interim and I’m really excited to be able to to be there and getting myself up on stage. I’m a little bit frightened and my talk is going to be the last ones on the second day. So yeah, I’m not sure. I hope I won’t be nervous through the whole WordCamp two days or three days with contributor day having the talk kind of on the end. But yeah, please say hi and reach out to me as well if you see me around. 

Yeah, it’s so it I will talk about the benefits of block themes for Ecommerce because a lot of people I think kind of have the idea that block themes are great for blogs or for websites, for WordPress sites, but don’t use a block theme for Ecommerce. And I think that’s just a little bit of a perception that people put this in this box in this drawer, and it’s difficult to take WooCommerce out of that. I think once people have that kind of thought in their head that it’s not a great idea or not ready yet or so yeah, I want to give some examples to why I think that is not true. For instance the blog checkout, how much better the performance is and what kind of benefits people get. Because I think a lot of times users really don’t know about the benefits and benefits of customizing your single product page and just getting creative on what you can do in regards to maybe even different product pages. And just mainly I really want to show examples to make it just really visually appealing that you can drop in patterns and get a really customized WooCommerce experience with block themes and also way better performance and just the flexibility of it, and the ease and the speed and just all the benefits that are there. And also not forget to mention some limitations obviously that are still there that mainly come from plugin extensions WooCommerce extensions not being compatible and we are really hardly working on it. But there are a lot of extensions. Obviously some Ecommerce WooCommerce sites have limitations but I think it’s just good to highlight that and that we are working on it and remind people that maybe it’s a good idea to switch to a block theme with your Ecommerce site.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Even if not to switch to definitely try it out and kind of see.

Ellen Bauer: Where that is or build a road map.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, I’m. I’m excited about that. I’m gonna, I will be able to come to kind of learn about all that and bring it back to our listeners later on or in the Gutenberg Times Weekend Edition kind of thing.

Ellen Bauer: So what is the topic of your talk or workshop?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m doing a workshop and from zero to demo how to use WordPress playground to put a demo for your product together and we are probably looking at. So it’s a 75-minute workshop and we do it hands-on. We use the Playground built in Blueprint builder. We talk about the steps and the settings and how you get the different landing pages that you could do for your demo. You don’t have to start with the front end. You can go deep into it. So if you have a plugin that shows something in the, that works in the editor that you have a landing page that drops the person who wants to test it out right into the block editor of the Playground instance and have all the settings in there that your plugin needs or your theme needs to be to show off the better part of it and have that ready for one click. And you don’t have to think about a server, you don’t have to think about a database, you don’t have to think about hosting it somewhere. You just use Playground Instance and have can demo your product. So I think the workshop is going to be hands-on. It’s. It’s going really from zero. Okay, what’s this JSON file and all that and then we will build a little demo out. What are the pitfalls for content imports? How the content import needs to kind of be structured so the pictures that you need are actually showing and all these little things that sometimes trip up people who try it out.

Ellen Bauer: That’s exciting. I’m just wondering, do people have to register beforehand for the workshops?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Ellen Bauer: How does it work?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Registration for workshops on the website has just opened a couple of days ago or even just a couple of days ago, and you need to register and you also Registration is not all. It’s a free registration. Of course. If you already have your WordCamp ticket, you need to use the same email with which you bought your ticket and then they can match up the two tickets there. It’s also necessary that you are at the workshop 10 minutes before because if there’s a waiting list and you are not there to claim your seat, it will go to the waiting list members. Well, I’m not in. Workshops are all competing against all the rest of the talks in three tracks, so I don’t know how many people will show up. So it’s going to. It’s going to be on Friday after lunch at 2:30. No 1:30, sorry, at 1:30 in the Singapore Place, I think. Yeah. Workshops. There’s also a workshop with Milana Cap on the Interactivity API, and there is a workshop with the Block Development Cookbook with Ryan Welcher. It’s always great fun to do. And then Berislav also has a web playground workshop and that is a little bit going deeper into using it for automatic testing. So building automatic tests with WordPress Playground. And then those are the four workshops Interactivity API, automatic testing with Playground, demo site with Playground, and the Block Developer cookbook every day. Friday too and Saturday too. So it’s really cool. Well, thank you for asking.

Ellen Bauer: I have to register myself too.

Listener Questions

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. So we had a listener question since the previous Gutenberg Changelog podcast and one is how to override the block styles that come with the theme. 

So I did a little short post on the Gutenberg Times on how to do this. If they are registered correctly, then you can do it over the global styles in the site editor. If you can’t because they’re registered with an older version of the interface, you can definitely unregister them. So add your own block styles to it. I have the link to the how to in the show notes and they are also published on the or that particular post also published on the Gutenberg Times. It’s very short but it dives a little bit deeper into how to do that. You could also how you override it in theme JSON. This is also a it’s not a no code variation but it’s also the theme JSON is fairly human readable and it gives you an example on how the JSON needs to look so you can override it in the theme JSON. And then there’s also a resource and that’s a huge resource on custom block styles in WordPress where you get theme developers and plugin developers can learn if they haven’t yet developed six methods to do block styles. What are block styles? Block styles is a way to add CSS to a Gutenberg core block. So it’s available for the content creator in the sidebar to just switch it over to the style. So if you have an image style and you want a, you want a certain border, you want a certain radius on the border, you want a certain color on it and you want to also a shadow on it, if that’s a standard for you, the theme developer can put that into a block style, and then every time the content creator wants to create use that block, it will show it has a button to show that particular comp more complicated styling and doesn’t have to do it every time click by click by click. So it’s a one click replacing the style of the core block.

Ellen Bauer: One of my favorites is always the button block like outline button. I think that’s like the one of the best examples where we, where we kind of use that main button, a primary button, secondary button, outline button.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And the core blocks come with rounded corners and that’s normally not everybody’s a fan of rounded corners, so you need to override that. But it’s relatively easy to do. You can certainly also do block styles very much more complicated than what’s in the examples there. I’ve seen some very interesting block styles for the separator or quotes and pull quotes. They can have some very intriguing designs, but you need to put them into the theme JSON so people can adopt them through the global styles, not theme JSON in the theme JSONs, or with WordPress 6.6 comes a very easy way to add block styles is to put it in a JSON file under your styles and then just have the naming conventions there in terms of which block they attribute to and what the styles are. So and then WordPress picks up that from that particular place and adds it automatically to it. So you don’t have to worry about your CSS files. You don’t have to worry about enqueuing it on the editor or enqueuing it on the front end. WordPress does that all for you. So box hunts have been in Gutenberg for or in the since the beginning but this is now the most streamlined way to get them into the theme.

Ellen Bauer: And I, I always love that because you can reuse it. It’s like a, just a snippet a component, and you can you reuse it on multiple projects. That is like such a game changer, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. And you can build your own style kind of library. Yeah. And then just move in the ones that you need. Yeah. If you want to go really out, then you can actually put together your own webpack building process where you kind of pull depending on which parameters pull in the particular styles, the patterns and the templates for a new bespoke theme for a client. So yeah, I like that. It’s all now file based and with less code, even more power. Yeah, so it’s pretty cool. So the two articles will be in the show notes linked. 

What’s Released – WPCLI Update

Now we come to the what’s Released section and I just wanted to give a shout out to Alain Schlesser who has done a tremendous job in maintaining the WPCLI components or features, and he just released another update for the version 2.12. Of course the release notes will be linked in the show notes, but I just wanted to highlight a few things. 

Now it’s very developer focused. That’s why it probably doesn’t get so many shoutouts on all the WordPress news. But it’s so called plug and patch commands for caches and transients. That means it can directly manipulate those individual entries. Wired the WPCLI command. And then there are the post list. Can now handle complex query flags in a JSON notation, which just makes it much easier to build the commands out with a text underscore query, which means taxonomy query, meter query and posted date fields. Just to add those with a flag in your command. Post meta can now be forced to return a single value. Sometimes post meta has a certain key, has multiple values over the course of a site existence. So you can now flag WordPress to only return the latest one and you don’t have to deal with all the other entries for that particular key value. That’s a pretty good neat feature there. The make JSON command is part of the WPCLI International component and it’s more powerful now. You can set the custom text domain, and you can also define the file extensions to parse. So that’s a side note. WPI18N make-JSON is the command that is used for JavaScript internationalization on WordPress with Gutenberg. A lot of interfaces have been built through JavaScript and they also need to be translated. So this helps you with organizing those strings for translation. Yeah, and WPCLI is then also fully compatible with PHP 8.4. So if you found that exciting as I do, go and read the release notes because Alain has published quite a few example code and commands and what the output is from those commands. So you can improve your WPCLI knowledge right there from the release notes. Yeah, so that was one thing. Do you want to talk us through the WordPress 6.8 release?

WordPress 6.1.8 Release

Ellen Bauer: Yes. So the 6.81 was the maintenance release and there were a few, maybe you have to help me out, Birgit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, Aaron Jorbin mentioned that there are 15 bugs through core and Block editor that had been released on April 30th. So the most important one is the regression fix that the meta boxes area had unwanted size handles and it broke the auto scroll. So you couldn’t just scroll down in a post to your meta boxes and fill them out. You had to kind of grab the handle and push pull them up because they’re now in a separate iframe or were. And that didn’t work well for many sites. And that’s why we have a release two weeks after the main release that is going to be fixed. So there was a revert on that feature. Also a revert was the edit site link.

Ellen Bauer: The edit site link?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, in the top admin bar it had the behavior that when you click on it, you landed automatically on the template of the page that you were looking at. But in 6.8 it changed that. You always went back to the first page of the site editor, and somehow the muscle memory of a lot of people who were accustomed to the other one, it was very irritating for them, and they made their feedback known and it’s definitely a 50/50 split. And so they reverted that change and are now thinking of what could be a better solution. And maybe it needs to be an edit site menu. Yeah. With multiple different menu items in there like edit template and a pattern edit page kind of thing. But yeah, that’s out in discussion and I don’t know where it’s going to land. But at least we have the previous fix again in there. And then also. Oh, and the rest API handing out the sticky post was a little haphazardous and it’s now fixed. The full list is in the release note, and we put them in the show notes of course. But yeah, update definitely. Yeah. Because it will be a more streamlined experience. And yeah, a lot of releases today. So create Block theme was released with 2.7. Do you want to grab that?

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I can, I can take over. So yeah, I love that plugin. I use it quite a lot and it had been. It’s really improved over the years. And so if you maybe haven’t checked it out yet or don’t even know that it exists, it’s really, really cool for quickly creating block themes or child themes or just kind of creating patterns, like building out your patterns. So some updates that were done in the latest release 2.7 was that there was a bug with the figcaptions not being translated and that was fixed for image and video blocks. The icons for the sidebar. I think there were problems with translations and right to left language. The icons weren’t on the right side or. And the help kind of the help button wasn’t aligned. So you can see the before and after screenshots of the changes. And I think the chevron. I’m not sure if I’m saying that word correctly. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but I never know how to pronounce the chevron. Yeah, they weren’t switching on to the other side, so that was fixed. And I think also some sizing for the icons, and then php CS removed unused files and it just released files. I’m not 100% sure what was the problem there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t know what the problem was, but it’s fixed.

Ellen Bauer: Just some unused files were deleted.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there were some unused files that were not used in the composer when you were putting together a development environment for the plugin. So because yeah, contributors want to contribute but they want to make sure that the environment is in the right place. Then there were some. Yeah, also code quality fixes and the wp-env that’s the testing WordPress the configuration has been improved and offers now certain environment variables that you can set on the command.

Ellen Bauer: So the create block, the major. Say again that were the major updates for that release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There’s right now a discussion going on on GitHub and on the repo about what to do with the pattern management because the advantage of putting the patterns in there doesn’t offset the disadvantages while working with it in the site. So what it does right now is when you say okay, save the patterns, it will remove the patterns from the. From the database and put it all in the theme. But of course all the sync patterns will become normal patterns because in a theme you don’t have sync patterns. So it’s kind of that in between problem that sync patterns are not yet available for themes but you actually want them in your site. So it confuses people quite a bit. And that’s a discussion on how not to confuse people, which is actually a pretty good goal.

Ellen Bauer: It’s tough.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally tough. Yeah. 

Gutenberg 20.7

So, and that brings us to the Gutenberg releases we have Gutenberg 20.7 came out with 22 contributors. Two of them were first timers. 

Enhancements

And I’ll start with the format library. The format library is the library that controls the dropdown on the block toolbar with different formatting options. And now you can also set the alpha value for the highlight. So you could actually highlight some words in a paragraph and click on the format drop down, and then highlight that and it would give you a color theme. But now you can also set the alpha value for the highlight manually. That format features are now also available for the details block. Now you can highlight stuff in the details blocks in the summary or in the expansion thing.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I think there was some kind of hard coded things in there that you couldn’t do that. And now you can do all the formatting in the details block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, what was hard coded was the allow list in the details block. So they removed that. So now the formatting, all the formatting is available for the details block.

Ellen Bauer: The next one was the navigation in the site view. Now it automatically the default is that it expanded. And before it was not expanded, you had to have an extra click to. To open the sub menus. And in the PR there’s a before and after. And it’s really an improvement because you can see right away the entire menu. I love the site view.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, the it’s actually a list called List.

Ellen Bauer: View, the list view and also in the, the like in the page editor in the template on both sides, it’s. It’s now automatic by default expanded. Is that correct?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, right. Right now the navigation block, when you try to edit it, it has a nice sidebar as well. And it’s also there expanded. 

So next item I want to talk about is the table block. Table block doesn’t get a whole lot of love from Gutenberg developers, but it’s actually pretty cool. And what’s mostly cool about it is when you have a markdown table from GitHub or from any other. So even if you work with AIs, I had a list of posts with views, and all that and the AI created that, but I told them to give me a markdown table so when I do, I can copy paste it into a post. And that was really cool because it now also preserves the column alignment in the pasting. Before you had to just fiddle around with it quite a bit on certain things where it wouldn’t come over. But that’s actually a really good feature to be that it possible that you can paste markdown tables. Not only markdown that we knew, but you can also mark down tables and it’s pulling it into a table block. I think that was it for 20.7. Yep. Okay, that brings us to 20.8. 

Gutenberg 20.8

And 20.8 hasn’t been released yet when we record the show, but the release candidate was out and that’s what our changelog is about. 

Enhancements

So the Create block package can now also have a text domain flag when you start out your scaffolding. So it will be repeated throughout the plugin your text domain for the translation as well. And you don’t have to manually put this all in.

Ellen Bauer: I think the next one was that the text is now customizable for the next and previous button text, which wasn’t possible before to customize the text. That was an improvement.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. There are now two new properties for the component available where you can customize it by code when you use them in your plugins, and that’s for the guide component. The guide is what pops up but nobody reads is the guide that comes up with the block editor. If you first time install a site and go into the editor. That’s the guide. Yeah. You can use it also for your plugins, and you can use it also for your theme. If you want to add text in there you to guide your users to certain things and then also makes those buttons are now customizable.

Ellen Bauer: The next one was search functionality for page templates. When you want to change the page template or swap them out. There wasn’t a way to understand correctly to like a proper or easy way to search for your templates if you have a lot of them. And now that’s improved. Is that correct, Birgit?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s also for the pattern selection search.

Ellen Bauer: Oh, the same.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s both. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: I think that is really, really helpful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The testing instructions starts out, make sure you have at least 15 templates in there.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That cannot be applied to a page.

Ellen Bauer: Which can quickly happen. And that’s cool to have custom templates, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But that’s…

Ellen Bauer: You need a lot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You definitely need a search component in there. Yes.

Ellen Bauer: To roll through them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The next one mentions the reverse of the split view for the meta boxes that were in 28. It was released in Gutenberg, but it then was backported to the 6.8.1 release. So this is definitely already out and it’s also in the WordPress versions. Yeah, the widget editor. I don’t. I didn’t even know we had a widget editor.

New API

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I was just saying I didn’t quite understand that one, to be honest.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. In the classic theme you have the widget menu and that is for a long time already a block based interface. So you need to lock the widget saving or the update button and all that. So now you can lock some of the functionality because not everybody should be able to do stuff there. Yeah. 

Bug Fixes

And then there are some fixes on the block editor. Now that was actually always a pet peeve of mine that when you get invalid blocks that you can’t at least edit the HTML because you don’t know what needs to be fixed. And now you can edit the HTML for invalid blocks.

Ellen Bauer: I do like that a lot too because sometimes it happens and you have that code there and you like want to get in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The last time I think I had.

Ellen Bauer: It with the no you can chat.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Pack with Jetpack AI features. Yeah. Somehow when I mark two paragraphs and then the first paragraph becomes invalid when I hit on the AI feature and it was only because there’s one of the HTML wasn’t closed well enough. I need to figure that out. But do a bug report. But yeah, it would have been really helpful to. To just manipulate the HTML of that. The next one is that PR or update will prevent spacer block to have a negative width when it’s used in a row block. That offsets all kinds of different things and that can definitely ruins your design. You can have a spacer block with a negative margin or negative width. That’s no problem. Yeah, but it doesn’t.

Ellen Bauer: But not inside a roadblock.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, because that.

Ellen Bauer: So now it’s chooses to design the browser detects. Hey, I’m a spacer block inside a row block and the negative margin option is not available any longer. That is cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s a quality fix on that. Some of the block HTML now get box sizing property so that the overflow into the next block or into the next design element can be prevented. That’s definitely a good fix because some people are kind of getting really elaborate on those designs. And then how do you handle that? 

Documentation

We already mentioned the create block and the text domain flag. So that’s now in the create block readme. The block bindings API has a post meta limitation. This new update prevents protected post meta that are prefixed with underscore that cannot be used for block bindings. And the post meta also has to be available in the REST API. Those are the two limitations and they were not yet mentioned in the documentation. And also block bindings are only available for four blocks. So that’s the heading block, the paragraph block, the image block and the button block. All other blocks cannot yet handle block bindings. So those are all three limitations there. And now it’s in the documentation with working on those block style articles I found that the latest register block style parameter that came in with 6.6 called style underscore data hasn’t been documented which has been done now because that’s. That’s the most. That’s a great way to use it in a plugin to use the style underscore data because only the styled underscore data for the register block style function also puts the styles into the global styles for content creators to modify them. All the others you can do it on the page by page level. It’s in the styles but you cannot change them globally for a site. Yeah, that’s interesting. That was an interesting find there. So. Yeah, those are our Gutenberg releases. Wow, that’s. That’s cool. We are done with that. The release is either Friday May 9th for 20.8 or even today. We are recording this on May 8th. Well, we come to the end of things. So Ellen, I wish you safe travels to Europe.

Ellen Bauer: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: When are you flying in? I don’t want to stalk you.

Ellen Bauer: Saturday night and arriving Sunday early morning and then heading actually to Berlin for a team meetup first. Then heading to Sweden for another meetup and then kind of taking a little family holiday break before arriving freshly rested in Basel.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And with all the updates from the team. Freshly rested. So.

Ellen Bauer: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You get the latest from WooCommerce for. From Ellen Bower at WordCamp Europe.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, it’s going to be an exciting trip. I’m looking forward to coming to Europe. Should be fun. Is there any good weather I’ve seen the weather.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s like quite coldish beginning of June. It’s normally pretty warm during the day. Yeah. Especially in that area that’s always a little bit ahead towards summer than the rest of Germany.

Ellen Bauer: The warmer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, because it’s a little.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I know that’s. I didn’t bring any warm clothes though.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I would get rid of.

Ellen Bauer: I think I have to buy one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I’m. We are actually heading out for vacation at the end of June. So we have team meetup at the end of June. And then afterwards, right away, I’m going to be in Norway for our family vacation. So I don’t know when we have the next, I think between WordCamp Europe and end of June, we will have another Gutenberg Changelog episode. And until then, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com forward slash podcast. This is episode 117. 117. And if you have questions or suggestions, as you know, we are gonna discuss them on the next episode or in a post on Gutenberg Times or both. And if you have any news that you want to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com or ping me on Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon. And that’s all. All the ends are open. So thank you for coming, Ellan, and thank you to our listeners. And this is goodbye for me until the next time.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, take care, everyone. And yeah, please reach out to us. There’s any questions also for my side.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right.

Ellen Bauer: Thank you for having me, Birgit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, you’re welcome. 

Ellen Bauer: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It is.

Ellen Bauer: Bye Bye.

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