Gutenberg Changelog 118 – WordCamp Europe, WordPress New AI Team, the Pride Photo Drive, Gutenberg 20.9 and 21.0 

Gutenberg Changelog 118 with Anne McCarthy and Birgit Pauli-Haack

Hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack, with special guest Anne McCarthy, this episode dives into recent happenings in the WordPress ecosystem, including updates from WordCamp Europe, the launch of the new WordPress AI Team, the Pride Photo Drive initiative, and the latest Gutenberg releases (20.9 and 21.0).

WordCamp Europe Recap

The community celebrated new milestones, including all workshops being recorded and promptly published to WordPress TV, making it easier for everyone to catch up. Notable sessions covered digital freedom, block development, and innovative ways to extend WordPress without custom blocks. There was also a special mention of the WordPress Campus Connect pilot at the University of Pisa, enabling students to earn credits through WordPress contributions.

WordPress AI Team Launch

WordPress has officially formed a core AI Team, supported by both Automattic and Google contributors, focusing on foundational tools and integrations to bring AI capabilities to the platform. The team is working on projects like the AI Services plugin, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the WP Feature API, each designed to provide standardized and extensible AI solutions for the WordPress ecosystem.

Pride Photo Drive

Anne McCarthy introduced the Pride Photo Drive: an open photo submission event to boost LGBTQ+ representation in the WordPress Photo Directory. The initiative encourages everyone (not just the LGBTQ+ community) to contribute, with fun incentives and cash prizes, emphasizing the importance of diverse, high-quality imagery for web creators.

Gutenberg 20.9 & 21.0 Releases

The latest Gutenberg plugin releases bring a host of improvements and enhancements:

  • A shift towards more modern and maintainable codebase (SASS modules),
  • Usability changes to block settings and tool panels,
  • Continued iteration on “content-only” editing for simpler, safer user experiences,
  • Accessibility improvements and bug fixes suggested by new and long-time contributors,
  • Ongoing expansion of the Interactivity API for richer client-side experiences.

Community & Contribution

Anne and Birgit emphasize the power of direct community feedback—how user suggestions shape features and workflows. There’s an open call for more engagement, hallway hangouts, and broad collaboration beyond just in-person events.

This episode is packed with optimism and opportunities for WordPress users and contributors of all backgrounds to get involved—whether that’s through new tech like AI, creative community projects, or by shaping the future of Gutenberg.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special Guest: Anne McCarthy

Celebrating Pride Month

WordPress AI Team

WordCamp Europe Recordings

Gutenberg Releases

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 118th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordCamp Europe and the WordPress new AI team, and Pride Photo Drive and the Gutenberg 20.9 and 21.0 releases. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times, a developer advocate at Automattic, and core contributor to the WordPress open source project. With me today, relatively fresh back from the sabbatical, is Anne McCarthy. Thank you, Anne. Welcome back and I’m thrilled you’re on the show. How are you today?

Anne McCarthy: Thank you for having me. It is incredible to be back from sabbatical and also to be back to contributing with sponsorship, which is amazing. I was trying to do it coming back without it and to have to have that change so quickly. Coming back from sabbatical has been so energizing combined with Pride Month, so I can’t complain. I’m just excited to get into stuff and excited to be back in this space talking about this important work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wonderful. Yeah, no, we’re all back contributing. It will be. We still have to kind of figure that out. I know that every team is kind of trying to get unplugged from what they were doing as part so they can contribute back. So the last time you were on the show, it was in November last year. Episode 111. So, so much has changed for the project and for you. What are you now working on at Automattic and respectively for WordPress? Yeah.

Anne McCarthy: So my job title has shifted a bit as well, to align with some of the changes that have happened. So we. I am now an architecture wrangler is the title I’m rolling with right now. And essentially the core of my job is the same. I’m looking across Automattic the community to find shared patterns, to accelerate work, to do work and to connect work. And so trying to make sure we’re moving in the same direction in the project. So working on things like roadmaps, breaking down work, helping for the future, teams get into contributing and figuring out important projects they can work on and providing support there, as well as collecting user feedback across different places and how it impacts things. So if we hear something, for example, from like an enterprise client, I recently did this. A couple weeks ago, there was a bug that came out from an enterprise client. I said, hey, who else has dealt with this? Aaron Jordan used to in publishing. What do you think? Hey, can we get someone to work on this? What are you all seeing? What feedback are you seeing? Here’s the feedback I’m seeing. So I’m still doing the same kind of work. Cool thing is now instead of working with about 100 engineers, I’m working with about 300, about 50 different teams. So internally there’s a lot more spread. But I’m really excited because it can really help influence and move faster on some of the stuff we do in the core project. So instead of things being a bit divorced and separated, especially from customer feedback and customer needs, we can now, you know, using Automattic spread of customers, use that to bring things that are foundational for all WordPress, because we cover so many different use cases between themes and plugins and hosting and enterprise and bloggers and all sorts of stuff. So I’m really excited to see increased collaboration there, including with the broader Five for the future groups, and encourage everyone to get involved, to share that feedback and join in the fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s wonderful. Yeah, it sounds exciting. It also sounds like a lot of work, but, yeah.

Anne McCarthy: It’S good work. It’s good work because you get to kind of see things at the root, which is fine.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And you can also kind of see it happening when it’s fixed or something like that, or come together in a. In a very creative way. Yeah.

Announcements

So you also are the instigator of the Pride Photo Drive. Tell us about it.

Pride Photo Drive

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, so it’s inspired by what I’ve seen with other photo directories. And something that I think is really near and dear to me is representation really matters. And so if you can find things that actually resonate, whether with your culture, part of your identity, or where you live, it makes it easier when you’re creating websites. Like, websites are inherently quite visual. And so having really good photos that represent queer people is really awesome. And so, of course, you can’t have faces in this. But the whole point of the photo drive is to inspire some folks to contribute photos, increase representation in the photo directory, and honestly, just have some fun. Like, I think there is something fun about going out and having a reason to take a photo that I think, at least I enjoy someone who takes a lot of photos. There are some cash prizes for winners, both in terms of most submitted photos, and we’ll have some folks select the top photos. But honestly, like, you don’t need to be a part of the LGBTQ community to participate. It’s for everyone. And it’s just mainly to ensure when folks go and look for something that represents them, there’s a higher chance of finding high quality work for that. So I hope to see more kind of initiatives like that. And so if anyone wants to talk about doing more drives, I’m happy to share what I’ve done. It’s been very. It’s been pretty simple. So more people can do this for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And we have a link to the call for photos on the LGBTDPress.com and there are also the rules and how you actually can upload it to WordPress photo directory. And I’m really excited about that. I, yeah. Was last year, not this year I missed it, but last year was at the Christopher Street Day here in Munich and that was kind of. Wow. I didn’t realize how big that was. Yeah. And it was about 600,000 people on the road and 60,000 people in the parade and yeah, totally took over the. The downtown. But I probably have a few pictures made there that I can upload there. Yeah. So yeah, but it was a good point for you to say no photos or no faces or people out there. People, yes, but no faces. Yeah. So that’s cool. Yeah. So, yeah. 

WordPress New AI Team

And the second piece of announcement that we have is that WordPress has now an AI team. AI stands for artificial intelligence. There are two, three links actually that I can share with you. One is the welcome to the core AI team blog post, then the announcement and the hallway hangout and recap for the first hangout. 

So the mission I understood it is to build foundational building blocks for AI integration in WordPress and the timing is ideal because of the rapid evolution of AI. Some people at WordCamp EU said, okay, are we not a little bit late or something like that? No, you can’t. Yeah, it’s just the right time because now the emerging standards are there, and WordPress could be an ideal platform for AI driven web apps. There are immediate plans to integrate LMMs directly into WordPress, but there are canonical plugins that are on the roadmap and packages that are abstracting the AI provider like AI Services or. And the core integration would be more like. Yeah, a little. A second step. And we know that everything is kind of in place. It has the full support from WordPress leadership, including Matt and Mary. And because they recognize the importance of the open web and ensure it’s central in the evolving landscape.

So what are the current initiatives? One is the AI services plugin from Felix Arntz. He’s on the team. But the team are right now James LePage from Automattic, Felix Arntz from Google as well as Pascal Bichler from Google and then Jeff Paul from TenUp. And all four have already some experience with AI in the space. And so there are three plugins that are being worked on. One is the AI services plugin Felix already publish that, and I’ll share links in the show Notes so you can look it up. And it’s an abstraction layer for multiple AI providers to enable plugin authors to unify the API for AI interactions. So you need your OpenAI API key or your CLAUDE API key or whatever you use, but then it helps you to include those services into whatever you want to do on the website. The other, the second one is the called MCP WP. MCP means Model Context Protocol. Those are servers to enable WordPress advanced AI integration with command line or plugins. So plugins say, okay, my plugin can do that with WordPress and you register those services and the AI can discover those on the site. I know that Jonathan Brassinger as well as Ryan Welcher have done some live streams on that and I can share some of that, the latest ones for on the show notes with the videos, so you can kind of follow along with that. 

And the last plugin is the WP feature API. That’s a plugin coming from Automattic, and it structures WordPress features for better AI integration. It’s kind of pretty much it’s a standardized way to register resources for AI. That’s pretty much what I can say there. It exposes the server and client side functionality in WordPress so LMMs can tap into it if they have the right credentials. Yes. So that’s kind of what I know about it. I read quite a bit about AI agents and MCP and it’s all still a little murky, but I think that’s with any of the new services and new technologies that are kind of coming out that we all need to figure out the smallest use case to figure it all out. Jamie Marsland has interviewed James LePage about the new AI team. And it’s a video, it’s called Very Clicky. It’s called WordPress AI fights back, fight Back Begins. So but it’s really insightful and Jamie asked some great questions in it. Any thoughts from you?

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, that was such a good rundown. One of the big questions I’ve heard from people and I’ve been getting pings about is like, how do I join? How do I join? The team is creating a handbook at its early stages. You can join the core AI Slack channel. That’s the best place they’re holding meetings and they’re pulling together that context. So please get involved. The idea is to create a shared group of tooling that then plugin authors can reuse. It’s meant to provide a shared base. So for the MCP thing, the way I’ve been kind of thinking of it is like rather than rewriting every AI integration from scratch, you can reuse this to Talk, to have WordPress talk to LLMs. So like those sorts of things are kind of the current focus to provide tooling for people who want to use AI with WordPress, including with plugin authors and stuff like that. So that’s the current perspective. And if that appeals to you, you have ideas there, you have personal experience. Trying to make that work like that definitely is a great place to give feedback. And these are the early stages. So it’s a great time to get involved. But yeah, that to me is the biggest takeaway to do a great job covering everything. And I love that each team member has direct experience building stuff in line with that mission and value. I’m really excited about the canonical plugins and what we can do and packages that we can do to move this work forward and iterate following a similar model as the performance team.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Fabian Kagy and I were on a podcast with Nathan Wrigley on the WP Builds podcast and we talked a little bit. We talked about a lot of things, but we also talked a little bit about the 10up plugin classify, especially because the latest release actually included an open source way to have LMMs on your server. So every time you ask the AI something, it doesn’t go out to a central server, it stays on your site.

Well, you need of course a server with a little bit more oomph. But yeah, for those that want to use it for their internal communications or documentation, it’s definitely a great way to do this. And that’s why TenUp is also part of the team, and I share that also in the Show Notes, of course, both the podcast and the plugin. 

So other news the what’s New for developer edition June 2025 is available now. Justin Tadlock collected lots of information speaking about being back to contributing, lots of information relevant to plugin authors, theme builders and agency freelancers, the freelance developers for Core, Gutenberg and Playground. And it’s pretty much the best post to catch up on the last two months of updates on WordPress. So check it out with the link on the show notes or you go to developer.WordPress.org news or blog. Either way, Both of them get you to the developer blog.

Community Contributions – WordCamp Europe

All right, so now that brings us to WordCamp Europe, first time. In contrast to previous WordCamps, all workshops have been recorded and all recordings have been already submitted to WordPress TV. That I only saw. That’s so cool. I only saw this on smaller WordCamps like in Karlsruhe or in Leipzig where there’s only one track or one or two tracks in only one day. But having two days with three tracks, everything already on WordPress TV, that’s a phenomenal achievement. 

So I have a few favorites I want to kind of suggest to you. One is of course, the fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Matt Mullerweg. They discussed, among other things, a lot of other things, but the. The WordPress Campus Connect project that’s being rolled out as the official program from the WordPress Foundation. And also Mary announced a pilot project with the University of Pisa in Italy where 5,000 students have 150 mandatory contribution hours and those will equate to six credits for college. So that’s going to be a phenomenal place.

Anne McCarthy: I’m so excited for that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Getting the young folks involved in WordPress evolved in open source and also bringing them together with mentors in the technical fields. Yeah. So I’m really excited about that. It’s also more focused on the translations because that’s the humanities department there. But yeah, yeah, everything helps. Anything helps. Yeah.

Anne McCarthy: So I got my start in college so I would have loved. This would have been amazing. I was working on a WordPress multi site in college and if I could have had this as a chance to get to know the WordPress community rather than learning about it four years after. I think it would have been amazing to have this kind of opportunity and access and experience of open source early on. So I’m very, I agree with you. I’m very excited about that program.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I also had about. Took me about four years to kind of get into the community here. So yeah, it’s always something, something. Another great talk was by Noel Tock. The title was WordPress Without Borders, the Fight for Digital Freedom. And he not only shared his about his own charity work in the Ukraine, about rescuing dogs and bringing them back to their owners, but also about other charities who helped with finding kids, providing a roof over the head for people that were bombed out and other hardships. And he made us realize the True Impact of WordPress because all the agencies use WordPress, not all the agencies, but over 50% of them use WordPress for the website to fundraise and to connect with the communities. 

So sorry my voice kind of gave out but that has partly to do with something like that. But I also got a gift from WordCamp Europe at home to suffer. There’s another cold that I’m fighting. That’s why I’m also sound so horsy. So sorry for that. Check it out. The block related talks were Ryan Welch’s workshop for the Block Development Cookbook and Milana Cap’s workshop around the Interactivity API. And that last one is really I didn’t see the first one, but the last one I saw and I learned more about the source and the namespace and how you can interact from one block to the next and exchange data. So that’s a really eye opener. Ellen Bauer talked about how block themes speed up stores and sites in WooCommerce and Robert O’ Rourke asks and provides answers to do you really need a custom block? And he walks you through how you can extend the block editor own blocks without writing your own custom blocks. But really, all the many great talks about the WordCamp Europe are online and there are many for content creators, developers, entrepreneurs, educators, contributors as well. So check out the WordPress TV space with all the recordings. 

What’s Released – Gutenberg 20.9

And that brings us to Gutenberg releases. We start out with Gutenberg 20.9. So 20.9 was released on May 28th. We were a little late, but I was traveling and so do you want to start us off?

Enhancements

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I totally can. In terms of enhancements, the base styles have been updated to a modern Saas module system, and this was basically an obstacle to the Gutenberg project overall, migrating to the dart SaaS format in the future. So I love this kind of proactive unblocking that’s happening, kind of moving away from some of the legacy import statements. Great work by Aki per usual, but one of those just kind of foundational pieces to work on and make sure we have up to date just to unblock future things. 

This one, I actually was involved in this one previously, but a revert was done for how the edit site link works. When you’re viewing your site, you’re using a block theme and you see edit site. There’s been a debate; does it open the current template you’re looking at or does it open just the site editor and the homepage? And this has gone back and forth since the dawn of time. So this is a revert that previously had it update. Basically whenever you hit edit site, it would bring you just to the general homepage of your site editor. Now it brings you to the current template. We got a bunch of feedback and this is where I love the WordPress project and love the feedback that we get straight from folks. Whenever that was implemented in 6.8, people came back and said, hang on, what’s going on? This is different. This isn’t interrupting my workflow. This now takes three clicks for me to get to the current template I was looking at rather than bringing me there. I see the argument on both sides. There’s definitely. I think Rich shared a great video of himself with. If you set a homepage or set a page as your homepage, what the experience of that looks like and how it can be confusing for end users, I have a feeling this is something that will continue to be a conversation and something that hopefully in the overarching issue there was a discussion around having more granularity. So maybe edit site has a little drop down menu, kind of like an ad post thing where you can see it says like edit template, edit homepage, edit, whatever. Like having edit styles, like having something with more granularity. We’ll see where that ends up. But this is. As of now, this experience has changed. Thanks to feedback. Do you want to jump into…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The only thing that I wanted to say about that was that there are actually at least one plugin out there who actually tried to implement a dropdown with and kind of. So you can check it out. I’m going to do some research and share it in the show notes. Yeah, so and with the block library we had a few changes that I wanted to talk about. One is that the search settings. So for the search block there were a lot of settings in the toolbar, and it seems that most end users are kind of now trained to open up the sidebar for the settings. So developers have now moved some of the settings into the inspector to the right hand side in the sidebar so they’re all together. I think that’s just for. It’s also for consistency of the interface. So I like that. And then there were. For the first and the pre-formatted blocks, there were transformers missing and they were added. So people do not have to copy paste things and not delete a block and then add another block and copy paste the content and they just can transform them from paragraph to verse and back and forth. Yeah. And now Anne, we’re coming to a topic that you know a lot about. One is developers are enhancing content only editing experience. So what does that mean?

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, this is. The names on this are rough. So right now there’s this idea of write mode. We need a new name because basically what it does and this is something to zoom back out. Whenever I ran the outreach program, one of the things we repeatedly found is that dropping people straight into the site editor is pretty overwhelming. There’s a lot of options open, there’s a lot of tools open and it’s like, how do we add a simplified layer on top? That’s what write mode is intending to do. 

So you can imagine a way to toggle between a simplified site editing version and then like boom, all the tools you want and having a way to switch in between those modes as you you’d like. The underpinning technology used for that is content only. And what that does is it basically allows you to only edit the content. So it’s a lot of fancy names. But this is. I’m trying to like set the scene. And so there are some updates I think across both releases we’re covering that improves different blocks and how they work with this option because out of the box, not every block works with it and something has to be done manually to basically add support for it. Now there’s questions around specific blocks, like how much should be exposed, what should it look like, what should the experience be? I actually did some user testing at work campus last year with random people and recorded them going through this. And so there’s a lot to be figured out there. At the core it’s making way and taking steps towards a simplified site editing experience that folks can toggle on. You can imagine the first time in the site editor, maybe you have that experience and then if you run into something where you want to do more, you can have a quick way to just switch into like show me all the tools. Kind of like the idea of when you’re editing a presentation and like a slide slides for something and you want to go into the overall view of everything, you can do that. Otherwise you can just add text, move things around and have some like simplified experience. So that’s the context for that. This covers the details block, the code block, the read more block, the post block. There’s a lot of blocks that were changed for this and we’ll continue to see this. I think over the future releases we’ll see iteration on this area. So stay tuned.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome, awesome.

Anne McCarthy: Does that help explain it?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely helped me, yeah. And it also helped me to understand why there all of a sudden were different things in the sidebar. Because the different icons on there, they’re just identifying the places where you can edit the content but not, you’re not Having anything else in there. There are no display options or settings or something like that. So now I understand that. I also understand why plugin authors or agency for instance, are quite excited about that because they can curate the interface for their clients and kind of keep them out of the design and out of the have some more guardrails for them. And I think that’s because you can implement that through a plugin as well. So yeah, you can tap into the block JSON and say put this into content only mode because it’s not a default thing. So yeah, I like it. 

The two components had some changes. One is that the color. The color picker now has visual cues when you copy value. That’s definitely great. The interaction there. So you don’t have to wonder, did I copy it or did I not copy it? And then the snack bar, that’s the term that developers use for the notifications that are on bottom on your screen that come up when you do something. So if you have to, if you save your post, you get the little note. Click here to view it. And now this is also now available to open the links in new tabs, especially when you are a plugin author for your whatever plugin you do. You can also use the snack arx component. And then now you have the options to open links in a new tab, which is controversial, but yeah, just having the option in the components should be fine. It’s controversial because you take over the freedom of the user to decide if they want it into a new tab or new window or just right there because all of a sudden they don’t have the choice anymore.

Anne McCarthy: I think that I’m curious how that bland with. With folks. Yeah, that one I was surprised to see a bit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But yeah, yeah, I think that was it for Gutenberg 20.9. 

Gutenberg 21.0

Gutenberg 21 was just released this week. And do you want to take that next step there?

Enhancements

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, let’s dive into it. One of the main enhancements that I love to see is a refactor, the settings panel to use Tools panel. So across a bunch of different blocks to zoom back out, there’s different ways in which we display settings. And that can cause those little inconsistencies really add up, especially when you’re looking, you’re trying to do something in one block and you do something in a different one and it looks slightly different or appears slightly differently. So the more we can have really smart, intuitive defaults where for any block, whenever you want to change something in one block, it’s the same in another the better and especially just experience wise and using the latest components. It’s a really important thing to continue to iterate on. And so across a number of different blocks the Tools panel was implemented and there’s a lot of benefits. I don’t know if you want to talk about the benefits of it just because it’d be good to hear your perspective on this too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I would because I was trying to figure out what is actually that the user gets out of it and. Or the developers that use the blocks or extend those blocks. You get more control for the display. It’s every time the same thing. That’s what you mentioned. But it’s also an easier mechanism for injecting additional settings into an existing group. I’m not quite sure if that’s exposed for the third party to. For the extensibility, but that will definitely enable it. And then there is a visual parity between the styles that are already in the Tools panel and those who don’t. Yeah. So it’s really. It’s all the comments block. It’s. There’s a tracking issue 67813 where you can kind of see all the progress on this project and also the list of the blocks that are handled with that. Yeah. 

So another change is that the separator has now. Well, we talked about earlier. Well in the last  episode about that. That the separator now has an additional. You can have now a div instead of an HR so you can style it more. And with this release that HTML element option is much more visible. It’s now kind of moved up in the advanced section and it’s not hidden anymore. So you can just toggle that and can change the options there. I really like that there was another block about that. I think the same thing happens with a button block. They also move the HTML element section up so you can change through between the element of a button or the element of a link, an anchor. So that’s why I’m kind of hesitating about moving forward there. In the video Block has now an additional option to set a track as default and the track is actually the caption track. So you can select the default language there. And that’s really helpful for anybody who has videos on the website and is not an English speaker or doesn’t have the audience of any English speaker. So they could set the default but they had to really specifically do it. And if there’s not one uploaded, it was a little janky, so buggy for things. So I think that was it on the enhancements.

Bug Fixes

Anne McCarthy: Yeah. Now we can jump into bug fixes if you want to. I can start with that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Anne McCarthy: One of the first bug fixes which I do want to call out is from, I’m pretty sure a new contributor. Yep, first-time contributor, which is always really cool to see. Super awesome. McCool I think is the name. Apologies if I’m mispronouncing that, but this work basically fixed an issue where the pull quotes site element couldn’t be styled or overridden by theme JSON due to basically conflicting CSS specificity. And so this is a nice win for blocking developers because they can now customize citation styles as they’d like. And it was some nice collaboration with Aki again to basically resolve this by reducing the specificity of the class selector so that theme JSON styles can actually work. I love when that actually works out. So yeah, keep the feedback coming, especially block theme authors around limitations you run into like this. It’s always really helpful to start to continue to fix these sorts of things. So I was excited to see that bug fix there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely. It’s also, if you want to read up about it and see how such a collaboration between veteran contributors and new contributors actually happens. It’s a great example where a lot of people have some opinions, but then you move forward and you get a nice PR merged that helps a lot of people. So it’s definitely a great way to contribute. I don’t think I see any other bug fixes that I would want to talk about. 

Accessibility

So there’s one on the component that’s more on accessibility thing, that the toolbar now adjusts the colors for dark mode support. And that’s really cool because now you can also have the toolbar on the block in dark mode. For a lot of people that are around in dark mode, it’s really cool. 

Documentation

And then there is one documentation issue I need to look at that, but it is that the block schema now also has a roll field and the role field is important for.

Anne McCarthy: It looks like it was added before in 6.7. Like the roll field was stabilized but it wasn’t exposed in the schema. Which, you know, might be good to follow up on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it happens with 6.7 it was. Yeah. And that’s for the content mode.

Anne McCarthy: Yeah, that’s right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that’s it. I think we’re through that. We have Gutenberg 20.9 and 21 and we are at the last bit of our show. 

What’s in Active Development or Released

And that is what’s in active development or discussed. And with a few more talks on flagship WordCamps, the interactivity becomes more and more popular, and the team worked in the last few months with the WordPress team together to implement additional features, and those are now with the start of contributing again backported to the Gutenberg repo. There are many issues and you can follow along on the tracking issue. Backport WooCommerce Interactivity API improvements. That’s tracking issue 70372. It’s like a phone number. Yeah, there are actually quite a few issues in there. I’m really excited about that because there is a new feature that’s the interactivity router that lets you organize your pages better or the links between blocks. And also what was the other one?

Anne McCarthy: I know there’s some client side navigation work that’s been done too, which I’m really excited about. I’ve been using that in the Block Museum for a while now and it just makes it super quick to switch between pages and to have it be pulled in and hopefully stabilize soon. It’d be really, really neat to have as an option. I have loved having it on the Block Museum.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, yeah, that was also something, that was an experiment I think in Gutenberg for the, for the query block. Yeah, yes, yes. So, okay, so now we’re kind of moving forward on that and I’m quite excited about that, and I hope you dear listeners are too. All right, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about on the show?

Anne McCarthy: But nothing on my mind. I mean I would love this is a selfish ask, but as I get back into the project, mainly coming back from sabbatical, I would love to know what sort of hallway hangouts or conversations folks want to have. I’m really keen on making sure we continue to have a lot of those community wide conversations, not just at WordCamps because not everyone can join those. And like that’s some inspiration I took from the COVID times is to continue the conversation. So if folks have ideas or suggestions, I’m Nzazu and WordPress at org Slack, my site Snowmad Blog, you can contact me there. I’m not on X or any of the social media so you cannot find me. But yeah, I, I just am. I’m very curious to see what’s on people’s minds, what feels like hot topics to discuss and what feels important to hear more about and how we can facilitate sharing that knowledge and inviting more folks into the work. That’s the only other thing I’d love to add.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. Yes. And as always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast this is episode 118. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and this is the end of this show. 

Thank you all for listening, and thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy, busy schedule to be on the show with me. And thank you all for listening. And until the next time, bye. 

Anne McCarthy: Bye.

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