Gutenberg Changelog 119 – WordPress 6.8.2 and 6.9, Gutenberg 21.1, 21.2, and 21.3 Releases

Gutenberg Changelog 119 with Tammie Lister and Birgit Pauli-Haack
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog 119 - WordPress 6.8.2 and 6.9, Gutenberg 21.1, 21.2, and 21.3 Releases
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Birgit Pauli-Haack and guest Tammie Lister discuss the latest WordPress and Gutenberg updates, including WordPress 6.8.2 and 6.9, as well as Gutenberg plugin releases 21.1, 21.2, and 21.3. They highlight the renewed excitement around shipping features, the introduction of a core AI team, and significant developments such as Data Views, advanced admin design planning, and ongoing work on collaborative editing. The episode emphasizes the importance of experimenting with new tools, building muscle memory, and encouraging feedback to help shape the evolution of WordPress and Gutenberg.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

WordPress 6.9 Planning Proposal and Call for Volunteers

What’s released

What’s in active development or discussed

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:00:12]: Well, welcome to our 119th episode of the Good Merck Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about WordPress 6.8.2, WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg plugin releases 21.1, 2 and 3. And then we have two couple of things that are still in the works that need your feedback and discussions. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate and core contributor for WordPress. Tammie is joining me today and I’m so happy to be able to catch up with my dear friend. Tammie was the design lead on the Gutenberg Project Phase one and still contributes a ton to the project. She sponsored two days a week by a range of awesome companies and individuals, and she’s also a co-founder of Guildenberg, a company focused on empowering and supporting product makers and also creates products herself. Welcome Tammie to our show. How are you today?

Tammie Lister [00:01:10]: I’m great. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:01:12]: Oh, I’m good, I’m good. Yeah. I’m still on Vacation Brain. It’s my second week back and it’s the first episode so I don’t know if I speak Norwegian, German, English or any other language.

Tammie Lister [00:01:24]: So I think you just need to hold on to that Vacation Brain. It’s important right it for a while.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:01:31]: Well, it’s holding on to me actually quite a bit. So when you were last on the show it was January, that’s half a year ago. So a lot has happened since. Anything that stands out for you that you’re excited about, that you’re working on.

Tammie Lister [00:01:48]: And that you, yeah, tiny really not significant thing called the core AI team that been released and also just everyone focusing together for 6.9. I feel the most significant thing I think is just the force that everyone is rejuvenated with working in this in the direction of features and the excitement everyone has about shipping. I don’t know about you, but there’s generally like a, a shipping is in the air. That’s what it feels like at the moment. People want to ship things and make things and then explore the things. And I think we’re going to find as we kind of go through the change log. That’s what caught me as I was, I was reading it, people are using these features and then going oops, I need this. Oops, I need this. And that is what makes everything better as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:02:37]: Yes, I agree with you. There’s a lot of creativity in the air. There’s a lot of excitement about what’s coming next. With the AI, but also just with how to work with the Gutenberg editor. Now that’s really at a total different level. Yeah, I totally get it. Okay, so let’s get started. 

Announcements

WordPress 6.9 well, the good news is there will be a second major release in 2025. Since the end of May, Automattic has said they’re contributing again to the open source project. And so some of the contributors are back, but there are also new ideas in there that are coming. So the core committers met in a quarterly meeting earlier. You’re one of the core committers, so you were at the meeting, but I know Cheltenham rules there.

Tammie Lister [00:03:23]: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:03:24]: And then out came a proposal that Jeff Paul published on the make blog with a planning proposal as well as the call for volunteers. So Beta 1 is scheduled for October 21st. If the release team that comes together kind of follows the plan and then the release candidate, which is very important for a lot of things, is November 11th, and the final release is then December 2nd in 2025. So from what I hear, and please correct me if I’m wrong or add to it what I’m missing, it’s going to be a little bit more improvements on the design tools. It’s the new admin design. At some point we will see something more in the release and there will also be maybe even just in experimental ways in Gutenberg collaborative editing. There’s some explorations, big explorations in the media library, what else.

Tammie Lister [00:04:22]: So I think a lot of it’s being worked out at the moment and the roadmap post is due. So everything you say, I think it’s to be determined the boundaries of a lot of those things. But the best way that I can frame it is 6.9 will lay a lot of the groundwork for 7.0 as well. So for some of these things that we want, we have to do some infrastructure just like we had to do with Gutenberg in the phases we have to do infrastructure before. So just to suddenly go ta da, here’s an admin redesign that would be a little bit a lot for people. So how that happens in what ways, that happens in what areas, that is something that’s. It’s either I use the word sprinkles, that’s a weird word to use. But either some areas more functional could be in 6.9. I think it’s been worked out at the moment where that is the most useful. But at least friction, I think that’s the best way to. You know, it’s one of those Venn diagrams. How can we get the most feedback without causing the least issues at the same time? There’s been lots of different talks about how that could be done. Everyone will have an opinion and I think that’s just going to shape up over the next kind of few weeks and then we will see from there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:05:31]: Yeah, yeah, I, I like that. You know, the, the. All those expirations and aspirations in the air. We’ll see where that all lands and. Yeah. Will you hear it?

Tammie Lister [00:05:40]: You.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:05:40]: You will hear it at the Gutenberg Changelog first, because a lot of things will happen in the Gutenberg plugins in the following releases. If my calculations are correct, I think 21.8 will be the plugin release that will make all the features into the 6.9 release. Could be also release candidate 20.9 or something like that. But yeah, something like that. So there are a few. We are at three now, so there are five more Gutenberg releases and we will find out what will make it and what will be still in experiments or just the underlying infrastructure. You mentioned it before. AI is in the air. Around WordCamp Europe there was a new core team announced and we talked about it a month ago with Annabella and Anne McCarthy. Vacation Brain. 

Community Contributions

So this week James LePage, one of the team reps, published a post called AI Building Blocks for WordPress. And he outlines first that it’s not going to be primarily in core. It’s more like everything is built as a canonical plugin, like a feature plugin, and to void kind of early login into a space that’s highly not settled and still exploratory, all the standards or something like that. So there are four plugins. One is the PHP AI client SDK. SDK stands for Software Development Kit. So for any that any developer who wants to include AI features can build an appliance for that. Then the Abilities API, you might have heard about it under the name Feature API. That has changed. It’s now Abilities API and that is that you can register features from your plugin that NNI can react on or act on. And then the MCP adapter, that’s Model Content protocol adapter for WordPress. And then the last one is the AI Experiments plugin, which is actually a showcase plugin to reel it all in. Yeah, so that’s kind of that what the post outlines.

Tammie Lister [00:07:57]: Yeah, and I think the Experiments plugin is, as you say, it’s where everyone’s going to come together and use these things and also show people how to use these things and how they could implement them. We’ve had experiments in Gutenberg, we’ve kind of tucked away. We’ve also had experiments in design, we’ve had experiments in theme and I really love this because everyone is trying to work out how on earth they do AI, how on earth they do things where they can be useful in these projects. And one of these things can be maybe you do not know how to very few people do how to do PhPSD or MCP, all these kind of things but you really want to start learning that then being involved in the experiments plugin gives you an opportunity to kind of ride along and start to learn and discover with these teams that are already at that edge and exploring and it’s more on product kind of work in those kind of pieces.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:08:56]: Yeah, for sure. So if you also want to kind of Follow along Experience WordPress developers I know that Jon Bossenger has a live stream on Twitch where he kind of explores the new things and figures out a way to actually implement something. So he has used the Abilities API to create courses in Sensei via an AI client. So if you want to see how that’s going to work, go to the YouTube channel of Jon Bossenger. I definitely will share the link in the show notes about that. I also know that Ryan Welcher on his Twitch streams did quite a few experimentations with that lately. He’s doing his block development cookbook but afterwards he’s going to jump into AI again. But the previous editions definitely had some MCP and abilities API explorations there. That might be interesting for you because when you see an experienced developer kind of explore things and kind of also go detours. Yeah. You get a better way of thinking for yourself and your head around things that work.

Tammie Lister [00:09:59]: Many, many of them are also exploring it like it’s a new thing for everybody even if you are an experienced developer. So being able to sit there and as someone who’s talking through and working through it really helps you kind of feel it’s not just you that maybe.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:10:14]: Doesn’t understand.

Tammie Lister [00:10:17]: We’re all trying to work out where everything goes and how this new world functions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:10:22]: Yeah. You are not alone.

Tammie Lister [00:10:24]: Yes. Which is what’s also exciting. And one of the things that’s also mentioned in the Roadmap is Gutenberg Phase three. A lot of the pieces in there, from the admin redesign to collaborative editing, all of and the Media Lab, which I’m so excited about. Media is one of my little pet things. But being able to have all of that work be looked at as well, is going to be very exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:10:49]: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. 

What’s Released – WordPress 6.8.2

What’s released? Well, just this week came out WordPress 6.8.2 maintenance release with about 15 block editor fixes as well as 20 core tickets. A full list of bugs is in the release candidate announcement. You get from the release post block editor features where some of the bigger problems with the navigation link some fixed the query loop bug that overrode the query inherit attribute. Yeah. So it’s a nice good bug fix maintenance release that makes life a little bit easier and squashes some bugs. 

Gutenberg 21.1

And that brings us to Gutenberg 21.1 release. There were a few enhancements in there. Do you want to take it on and kick it off?

Enhancements

Tammie Lister [00:11:40]: Yeah, I’m going to start with the block library, which is always a good place to start. It’s been around for a while, but it still is really good to kind of refine it. And the big pieces here really. Comments pagination had some unwanted block margin. Little things like this though feel like they’re small but they’re really significant for something that you. You go to time and time again having that unwanted margin and there’s little refinements and to me it shows maturity and that little refinement coming through. And then this navigation block. I actually was part of this piece with the sub indicator. This shows sometimes a small thing can feel. So it’s where the flip submenu. So the submenu indicates whether something has a submenu or not. And it wasn’t showing it, it wasn’t visually indicating. And it seems like something would be a very easy commit. It is not because it has a lot more implications in testing. So it shows in collaboration how we should have more extensive testing helps as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:12:45]: Yeah, yeah, I can see that. And for the bottom margin, if they are unwanted kind of and removed, I can see quite a few theme developers who. Who fixes that on their theme with custom CSS. Now they need to kind of also remove the custom cms.

Tammie Lister [00:13:02]: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:13:02]: To fix that.

Tammie Lister [00:13:03]: So which is good. But it also shows that if you are making these. So. So one of the things I always suggest is have a kind of hacks file or at least a section so you know that you’ve hacked it. So you know you’ve worked around the system, not just kind of hide it within your theme. And it’s really important to notice these releases and check back if you possibly can with and kind of the last one here in the block Library is remove screencast.com embed block variation. So again, if something isn’t getting used as much, been able to take that away.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:13:35]: Yeah, absolutely. And well, they also need to take away the O embed part in Core, not only in Gutenberg there. Yeah, so and then there were some updates on the interactivity API that’s certainly interesting for developers who have actually explored that already. There’s now support for new router regions where you can click on and jump to and it supports also new styles and script models on the client side navigation. And it also starts using TypeScript for some of the helpers and some of the components or things. I call them modules. So you can better test it against and make sure that your code is compliant there. So the next thing is really exciting for me because I’m always. I hear a lot of plugin developers kind of talking about extensibility and now we have one block is actually really easy to extend and allow additional block variations. That’s the social icons block. 

Now you can add any other service that is not maintained by Core easily in a block variation easily. And the PR is 70261 if you want to jump on it has some nice instructions on how to do this. I also know that Justin Tadlock is working on a tutorial for the block developer for the developer blog. Not Block, blog. I’m really excited about it because I’m or it came to a good timing for myself. I’m working on a block theme for the good work times and we have the podcast there, and the podcast needs additional things in there like the podcast name and the description is one thing, but you also need additional social icons where you can subscribe to the blog and to the podcast. So I identified seven of them and of course only one of them is in Core and I need to create the other six of them. I did my first trial on it and it was fairly easy to do. It gets a little bit complicated when you have your own styling to it. But if you’re just going to push it into the Gutenberg interface and let the user style it or change color pretty much, then it’s fairly easy to implement.

Bug Fixes

Tammie Lister [00:16:00]: So I guess we move on to bug fixes now and then. Bug fixes. This is one of my favorite sections really because it means we’re just kind of cleaning up a little bit. So calendar block colors do not change between global styles and theme JSON things like that we spoke about like the theme fixing things, things like that, really, really important. Quality of life changes, and then social links allow icon size to be reset and on a theme. Jason Styles. That’s 70380. That is really, really important as well. Again, a Quality of Life. And you were talking about hacks. There probably has been a hack that you had to put in to kind of work around that as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:16:39]: Yeah. For both of them for the calendar blog as well as for the social links.

Tammie Lister [00:16:42]: Yeah, I can imagine there’s like a not important for the second one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:16:50]: Yeah. Yeah. I also came to accustomed to study the bug fixes because sometimes you run into bugs and say is it still there and. Or is it not? And all of them. Oh, it’s not there anymore. And it’s kind of really.

Tammie Lister [00:17:03]: And then you can just clean up your bug file, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:17:06]: Yeah. And you can clean up your brain with the workarounds. Not only the theme files but also the memory stuff. Yeah. And that is pretty much what I found interesting in the Gutenberg 21.1 there’s a whole changelog with tooling and documentation updates and the release post actually has all the change log in there. So you can read up about that. 

Gutenberg 21.2

And we’re coming to Gutenberg 21.2 and here we see already some changes to the Data Views. It introduces the per page sizes to control the available size of the items per page. So that is something that comes from the admin where you can say it’s kind of getting feature part on the WP admin view you can say okay, I want 50 things on my page. Please do this also on the new Data View. So that’s cool.

Tammie Lister [00:18:04]: Yeah, I love this. This also and the kind of next release shows that Data Views is getting used by people because it shows that we need to improve it. I am someone that has been using Data Views in situations and they are great, but they are quite limiting. And it means the more potential you have, the more easily it is to use for an implement. And it also means more feedback. So that’s what’s happening and how and improvements are happening. So yeah, the more things like this, whenever you see Data Views or API, that’s what gets me very happy. I like the other fixes, but this sets us. It’s moving us forward. And I think sometimes a lot of this can feel hidden because it’s more like the infrastructure in the sense. But Data Views, data Forms and API work, it really just moves us forward.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:18:53]: Yeah. So can you share in what kind of situations you use the Data Views?

Tammie Lister [00:18:59]: I’ve been using a lot of experimental, so one of the big things I’ve been doing is anytime I’m creating a plugin that’s pretty much what I use for my interface at the moment. I am trying to not have the normal the interface we use. I’m trying to use the Data Views from now on because it’s the way we’re going. So it feels a lot more natural to do. It’s easy to do it on the front and you can do it on the back. You can choose how much you have a little bit depending on what you want to do. You may have to do wrappers, all those kinds of different things. So. But again through a lot of it’s through experimentation but through doing experimentation you find the limitations. So there was a ticket that there’s been a few people having a conversation. The limitation on settings for example tangent to Data Views you can’t have a two column necessarily under a particular situation but if you want to do that there needs to be bug fixes. So it’s by using and by finding out we need to use them in particular situations. So again this having per pages and the one after this improving inline all of these kind of things allow you to be able to start to implement in different ways.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:20:11]: Yeah, yeah. And I can also see that there’s. There’s two effects in there with starting now to use the Data Views. One is you get a lot of experiments and practice in it. So experience is kind of you try to adopt it, see how you fail or the system fails and then you can improve upon it. But the muscle memory that you build that you kind of get into the new API really pushes you forward when things then land in core.

Tammie Lister [00:20:39]: And I was lucky enough, I think it was back in November. Goodness me, at Core Dev Days there was an awesome workshop in it and, and that it feels a long time ago now, but it felt kind of like it wasn’t early with Data Views but it kind of felt that it was earlier and. But that version feels very far away from the version that we’re getting to play with now and the version now it’s a lot less grumpy when you implement it. So I would encourage everyone just if you, if you’re gonna make something and you just want to experiment with it, just start playing with it and see about implementing it. There’s some great stuff on the developer blog about using it which is just easy to follow. I think it’s been recently updated. Unless you would know that I think it’s been updated or recently updated.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:21:29]: Yeah, I think one mom did a blog post about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The next one is. Do you want to take the next one too?

Tammie Lister [00:21:38]: Yes. So that’s a block library one. So the block library add open in app toggle. That’s like a one those like tongue twisters open in new tab toggle to navigation block sidebar. Okay, so this one, what I like about this is it shows a consistency of interface and actually it shows it even more so if you and I the nerd that I am, I like reading back into tickets and. And actually it shows that. So when it got implemented, one of the last comments is we need to roll this out places to make sure it’s consistent. So it’s adding a consistency but then it needs to be rolled out to make sure it’s consistent in other places. So the interface that we have is great. But if it’s not consistent. So yeah, that. That’s what it does. It puts it in the relevant place for where you need the information at the right time and then it’s rolling it out. So it’s. It’s a small quality of life thing. But these. That’s the type of thing we need to do with the editor interface at the moment.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:22:41]: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Because you cannot just say oh, I’m in a different context. Why is it not working like that. Yeah, yeah.

Tammie Lister [00:22:49]: And. And thinking we now know where people are looking at the time. Like you can make a best guess. You can be like me kind of. But there is a language that is becoming and the language that is refining and then that means we can take some things away and we can really refine where things go.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:23:05]: Yeah, there was. So the next thing is what the format library that improves the inline image replacement workflow. I have not quite figured out what that does, but I’m just recently discovered the inline image. Again. I kind of was at the early on image block fan and not doing anything in line with images. But I like when you do icons in there or cannot because the whole paragraph works differently when you have an image in there and then you have to fiddle with it.

Tammie Lister [00:23:37]: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:23:37]: And so they. They improve the workflow. I’m not sure if that’s getting there. It’s getting there. Yeah. So if you are using inline images. Yeah. Check it out and see if it really helps you with getting around that.

Tammie Lister [00:23:51]: So in the block editor. So this ticket says allow replacing the post locked modal component 70586 but if you kind of dig into this the too long don’t read is prep for collaborative editing work. So it’s basically providing a filter for that which is such an enticing kind of part of it. So in order to be able to build again like what we were talking about, we want all these things in 6.9 and 7, but we need some infrastructure. We need that extensibility and we need the foundations to be able to do that. You can’t just slap a layer on it and ta da. It just works. So we need all this infrastructure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:24:29]: Yeah. And it’s also a shift in kind of approach of things. We have 20 years was only one person editing a post and now we need to get ready that multiple people adding a post. So all the lock things need to be a little bit moving from a.

Tammie Lister [00:24:44]: Book to an iPad.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:24:49]: This was really a book to an iPad. The iPad is still one person using it.

Tammie Lister [00:24:53]: Well, yeah, but it’s multiple layered.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:24:55]: Yeah, it definitely gets more complex. Yeah. When multiple people do things and when instead of one.

Tammie Lister [00:25:02]: Yeah, that’s a tin can with a bit of string to a zoom. There you go. That’s a random analogy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:25:12]: Yeah, that’s a good analogy. It’s like, it’s like from the caveman to the. Yeah, the Middle Ages. Yeah. Yeah. We have some changes in the components library and there’s now the date calendar and date range calendar components. They seem to have been missing and now they’re here. So you can use them for your interfaces when you do events, something like that, or scheduling things. So you have more components to work with and you don’t have to build them yourself.

Tammie Lister [00:25:46]: But that’s also part of the design system which we need. Right. So part of it is again the first version. It’s best bet. It’s like we think we know, but it when in phase one, when we were building an editor now we needed all these components and all these pieces because we were building an editor, we were making paragraphs and headings. That’s what we were doing. And it’s not that anymore.

It’s a kit that you can build anything you possibly can think of. So therefore it needs all the pieces of an interface kit to be able to extend so the components. And it’s now a question of that. Does it need everything? No, because that’s a lot to maintain. But it’s certainly if something is used frequently and is going to be like really required by the interface frequently, then it needs to have it. So having our own components or at least having something like native is really, really important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:26:44]: Yeah. Especially now when they get to the. The whole new admin is built on components greater now.

Tammie Lister [00:26:52]: And it also means that product makers can use those components a lot easier.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:26:56]: Lovely. Yeah. You don’t have to make decisions about interfaces anymore.

Tammie Lister [00:26:59]: Yes. I was like, I need a calendar, I need it to work, I need an age.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:27:04]: What are the attributes?

Tammie Lister [00:27:07]: Yeah. And then I think often people like is. Oh, it’s always going to look. No, you can style it into your heart’s content. It can be pink with sparkles if you really want. Maybe don’t do that. But you. But that’s the thing of a component. You are getting the bones and the structure and the muscle. You aren’t necessarily getting the makeup.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:27:29]: But it’s a weird analogy day. Yeah. But it’s good. Yeah. Yeah. For the Interactivity API, maybe we kind of need to think about some of the knowledge is there. But the two additional PRs that came into good 20.1 will prioritize the custom. Click event handlers for full page navigation that’s now enabled and then also Preserve media. Preserve media attributes on the initial style sheet after client side navigation. So it’s a client side navigation. It’s a full page navigation that has been more stable on the. With the interactivity API. So router feature that was started last plugin released and now it’s coming. It came in an additional feature there.

Tammie Lister [00:28:21]: And moving on from that and I’m just going to kind of have a note about API. We likely are going to see more APIs because we should. Because that then shows that you can extend. There’s been talk about should menus have something like that with the templates API we’ve seen with site editor sort post types alphabetically within the add template modal. That’s 70562. Again, all of these things before maybe we would have had something that wasn’t an API. But an API is a far better way of doing this. It’s a far more modern approach of doing this and it’s the proper way to do extensibility.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:28:57]: Yeah. And you have to know how you build it first before you can extend this. Yeah. Right.

Tammie Lister [00:29:03]: So you have to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:29:04]: Yeah, you have to know what.

Tammie Lister [00:29:05]: What you’re going to build. And the thing is you can’t particularly to undertake an API because there’s a maintenance burden. And I think this is always something particularly like doing work in extensibility. Yes. You could support everything, but unless you have a time machine, that’s a lot. So really being considerate, particularly once you have an API of just how useful is that? How much of a burden is that going to support is really, really important.

Bug Fixes

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:29:35]: Yeah, absolutely. And we are in the bug fixes again. I like the first one that I want to point out that it’s the image box it preserves now the line breaks when the caption comes from the media library. So there was a disconnect. Yeah, absolutely. Where you have to do it twice. Why is this losing my. My line breaks and now I have to do it again. Yeah. So now it can do it automatically. It’s smart enough. And the same is fixed now with the RSS block. Some of the. Well, WordPress allows you to put markup into the title, but when the RSS block pulls in the title it displayed the raw coding instead of the. Yeah, now it kind of just strips it out and shows a very consistent title display in your RSS block for from other sites.

Tammie Lister [00:30:33]: So this is in bug fixes, but it’s quite important. It’s enable support for showing individual block variations in style book.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:30:41]: Oh yeah, yeah. That’s pretty much my most favorite feature enhancement. I think it’s enhancement but it’s on a bug fix because you were trying to look to click on the style variations and it wouldn’t come so there was expectations enables it in the right.

Tammie Lister [00:31:01]: Section is basically.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:31:06]: What happened was when you wanted to style the button block in your site in the styles, you were only able to style the default one. But when you clicked on the outline, you got back to the default one. You couldn’t style the outline. You had to use a theme JSON or some other JSON file for it or plugin for that. I don’t know how hard the fix was, but it’s there. I think that’s it. 

Gutenberg 21.3

So we’re coming for Gutenberg 21.3. Do you want to start out again because it’s your favorite pieces.

Tammie Lister [00:31:38]: So the first section is Data views under enhancement. So again this really shows the data views are getting used and that’s too long don’t read. I guess this episode is these features are getting used by people and these feature getting therefore improvements and iterations and people working on them. So there’s two particular things to call out or there’s several things at least there’s add the data field type 70657, and then add group by field support to grid layout. So this is about grouping items by fields and allows you to organize amounts of data and extend layouts such as table layout in the future. So it’s setting that groundwork and allowing grouping and it also supports the data Field type. So it’s again setting up for something that you can do now and allowing you. And also it links in with the new calendar component. So it’s that kind of link in with the new components as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:32:36]: Yes. So it had a date type field, date time field type. And now there’s also a date field type that’s just a date here. It’s kind of. You need it for the events calendar in the ticket.

Tammie Lister [00:32:49]: Yeah. It says filtering and editing features will be implemented in the future.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:32:53]: Yes. Yeah. And then for the block library, the cover block now supports a poster image. So users with large video file or slow Internet connection see still an image in there before the video loads. That’s kind of an enhancement for slower connections. Or if you do it locally and you can’t get the video from another place. Yeah, so that’s pretty cool. And then the post content block has now an add name selector, a tag name selector. That’s kind of the part where you identify semantic ways for the. For the cost. Post content. Is it a main content? It’s a section content. It’s an article kind of semantic thing. Missing words here. Tags, tags. HTML. Semantic HTML tags. I think the. The technical term for that is.

Tammie Lister [00:33:44]: Yeah, there was one we haven’t called out, but I’d like to mention about layout. Adding max limit to row span and column in grid, which is a quality life, which I think is really important as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:33:55]: Excellent. Yeah. Oh yeah, here I see it. Yes, it’s absolutely. Yeah. And that also shows that there’s a work to be done on the Grid blog. And that might. Might be. It might not come to 6.9, but it’s definitely coming. It’s better. It’s back on people’s task list. Yeah. Under the bug fixing there was nothing really stand out for me.

Bug Fixes

Tammie Lister [00:34:18]: It just looks like a lot of quality of life and.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:34:20]: Yeah, well, some blocks good bug.

Tammie Lister [00:34:22]: Fixing to me, which is. There’s been a lot of activity in this release which is really good and there’s a big section of quality and documentation, which always makes me happy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:34:33]: Absolutely. So that was it. There was one. Oh, that’s what I was looking for. Yeah. There’s one that says remove public APIs for getting images. That has to do with the list view. That there are images in the. In the list view to identify some of the blocks. When you have a cover block that you see the image of that there was an implementation for that, but that is still experimental and there was a shift in how experiments are actually implemented in Gutenberg so people are not tempted to use experimental public APIs anymore. Yeah. So if you find that confusing. It definitely is, but it’s also for your own good, so to speak. For the good of the maintenance safety. Absolutely. For future safety. But of course, there’s an acknowledgment that there are plenty of experimental things still in Gutenberg that all have been used in production for many years. Yeah, that was it. That was the Gutenberg release. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Now we have what’s in active development or discussed. We can certainly not talk about everything, but we wanted to talk about the update experiment Settings screens to use the data forms. There’s a PR by Fabian who said, okay, so Gutenberg has an experiment screen where you can check the on or off some of the experiments, like for the collaborative editing or for the grid layout for some forms. And he said, well, if we do want other people to use the data views, we probably should rewrite that experiment settings page in a Gutenberg. So I really love that initiative. Yeah.

Tammie Lister [00:36:15]: Experiment should be experimental.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:36:19]: Say that again.

Tammie Lister [00:36:21]: The experiment should be experimental.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:36:23]: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, a few plugin releases before Anne went through and actually gave some section headers in there. So they were not just added to the list and not kind of clustered together.

Tammie Lister [00:36:37]: And that’s where there was a. Like, under certain circumstances the two column can be worked out. So that’s how we find out the limitations.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:36:45]: Right.

Tammie Lister [00:36:45]: Like by using this, all these features again, we have to use them. This is what we’ve learned time and time again. They’re great, they’re amazing, but we need to use them, we need to implement them. Even we can’t put them in a beta and say, oh, just do some usability testing. No, we need to build with them. We need to get our hands dirty and need to see, oh my goodness, you can’t do this. Oh, this doesn’t work with this type of data. That’s what we need to happen. So using it in the plugin makes a lot of sense in a way that doesn’t cause a negative experience. And that page isn’t going to hopefully cause a negative experience.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:37:25]: Well, if you want to learn how to do this, yeah, that’s a kind of an interesting page to look at the code to learn from it and kind of say, maybe you can implement it in your own one page settings page.

Tammie Lister [00:37:38]: It looks so much better when you look at it. You look at and no shade. Because at the time the settings pages were amazing in WordPress. But times have changed and looking at the two columns or the new Iterations. Even the single version is night and day. It really is.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:37:59]: Yeah. When you see the before and after, you see. Really see the difference. Okay, I want to live there. I don’t want to live there anymore. Yes.

Tammie Lister [00:38:07]: I want to be there in that world. World has white space.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:38:14]: Yeah, the road has white space. A couple of days ago I showed my husband, he is also a programmer, but he is a programmer from the early database days. Yeah like a clipper and ebay and all that. And then he sees some of the. And he looked at the screen and said well what’s all the white space there?

Tammie Lister [00:38:43]: That was the thing like back then it costs, it cost bandwidth. Like every line was a cost. I remember when I learned you couldn’t have have large space taken up because it costs. Now it doesn’t. Now I just want all the space because it doesn’t. Well, it does cost, but it doesn’t cost as much now. It almost costs us more to not have it because it costs us like a negative user experience which is weird, wibbly, upside downy world to live in. But that’s what we have. Of course we don’t go too far to the extreme where you can actually implement it or use it because too much white space. Space is weird. But yeah, just be able to breathe in an interface.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:39:21]: Yeah. And. But it’s interesting that these visual DNA is still in. In some people’s minds. Right. That’s what that. What I kind of took away from it said go away, go back to your 90s, go back to your terminal.

Tammie Lister [00:39:37]: Go back to your courier terminal.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:39:39]: No, he says why are you doing command line? Isn’t that so 80s didn’t we call go away with? Okay. So yeah, it’s interesting discussions in Pauli-Haack’s home. So we have a second thing that we wanted to talk about that’s the PR by Luigio Teschio and he is working on exploring template versioning to preserve active plugin and theme templates instead of letting it be overwritten by database. And I don’t know how that’s going to work. Have you looked at that?

Tammie Lister [00:40:18]: I haven’t really looked at it yet, but I’m really curious to follow it. And I think just exploring different ways of doing things is really interesting as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:40:28]: Yeah. So I leave that link in the.

Tammie Lister [00:40:31]: Call for feedback and thoughts on it, which is a really interesting perspective. I think real world use cases is something I was trying to think about and that’s the kind of feedback I would like to give and that’s what I’ll be going back to it with trying to add that type of thinking.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:40:48]: Excellent. Excellent. So, well, I guess we’re at the end of the show. This is it. And as always, dear listeners, thank you so much for being here. And if you want, you can leave us a review on any of your favorite podcast apps. And if you’re on Spotify, the review is you can also leave comments. So we can have a little conversation there as well, if you want to. But the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtime.com/Podcast. This is episode 119. If you have questions or suggestions or news you want to include us, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com so, Tam, is there anything that you want our listeners to take away from it that we haven’t talked about?

Tammie Lister [00:41:35]: I think the big one is if you can start experimenting and exploring things like data views and data forms in your product, because now is the time to do that. And then start giving feedback, because there’s lots to come this year that you’ll be able to end early next year. So being able to, as you mentioned, start that muscle memory and start learning with it is really, really important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack [00:41:57]: Excellent. Yeah, that’s a great way to end this podcast episode. And thank you all for listening. Thank you, Tammie, for being here. And goodbye. And I’ll see you at WordCamp. Yes, thanks for having me. All right, take care. 

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