In Episode 121 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne Katzeff dive into Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7, touching on theme development, block themes, Figma workflows, Playground blueprints, and upcoming WordPress 6.9 features. They discuss enhancements to data views, grid layouts, the new accordion block, command palette improvements, block-level commenting for collaboration, accessibility updates, and the ongoing evolution of global styles and admin redesign, offering insights for both theme builders and developers.
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special guest: Anne Katzeff
Gutenberg Times Live Q & A: Design Systems and Theme.json
Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub
Gutenberg plugin releases
What’s new in Gutenberg 21.6? (10 September)
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 121st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7, as well as about theme development, block themes, and all this good, good stuff. And I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times, developer advocate, and core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me is Anne Katzeff, a dear friend of mine. She joins me in this episode. She was here before on the show, and she’s a longtime WordPress theme builder, educator and artist, and a longtime friend of mine. He previously connected on WordPress Meetup Co-organizers in Southwest Florida, but that’s ages ago. Anne has been on a podcast before, and it was episode 109 almost a year ago. So glad you’re here, Anne. How are you today?
Anne Katzeff: I’m good, Birgit. Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to see you and reunite. I hope you’re well. I was just thinking, I can’t wait to catch up on all the WordCamp stuff that you and others have been posting. I’ve been immersed in two things recently. Redesigning a client’s very old website.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: When you say very old.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, it was using. It’s still live, although it barely displays correctly because the code is so old. It uses custom templates from a custom theme that has some of the content baked into the code.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh. Oh, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: So it’s really hard to edit. The client has a real hard time doing that, as I do as well. And now I’m rebuilding the site. I’m using a cadence theme, and it’s a whole new area for me. I’m seeing the pros and cons of that system. And I’m also redesigning my own website. I don’t even want to tell you how long that’s been since I designed it. It’s built on Bootstrap. I do have a WordPress blog, so I have to update the bootstrap part and the WordPress part.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. So you have the design and the styling is in Bootstrap, and you kind of massage it into the WordPress, so.
Anne Katzeff: Exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Seamless. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: And, you know, people ask me, why don’t you do the whole thing in WordPress for me? I do occasionally build bootstrap sites, so this is a way. It’s kind of an excuse for me to keep current in what’s happening in Bootstrap. So I’m using new tools like figma for my prototyping, and once I get that finished and we’re nearing that point I’ll start rebuilding and bootstrap, and probably I’ll use the 2025 WordPress default theme for the blog part. So with both of these projects I’m using these new tools and riding a learning curve and it’s all good. It’s challenging and stimulating and integrating the new with the familiar. So it’s like my mind is like uhh.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but it could be. It’s a great exercise. You have to kind of see okay, how far can I still rely on what I’m doing? And oh this cool new stuff is also good. So I know that Jonathan Bosinger, he’s a co-worker of mine and he was one of the educators on the Learn team and he has started live streaming and this last livestream he’s trying to. He got a Figma design from a designer and now wants to create a block theme about it and finds that there are no like you know in the old days where you had a Photoshop to WordPress kind of. Yeah, yeah. He kind of had hope that there is a from figma to WordPress kind of thing and there is but you need to be very deliberate on how you set up Figma exactly to make this work. So.
Anne Katzeff: God, I was just thinking about all that. That’s so interesting. Yeah. You have to have they call it auto layout and of course I don’t, and I’m not going to redo all my stuff in Figma just to pray that whatever plugin I use will work. But that’s what they recommend the so. Oh well it wasn’t what I had planned. I wasn’t going to do an automated thing but. But now this kind of validates a reason why I can’t. It’s not quite there yet. Yeah, there are curious things in Figma and there are amazing things in Figma.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s like any new tool. Yeah, yeah. It has your tradeoffs and you need to kind of unlearn a lot of things before you can learn. Yeah. So the VIP theme builders or designers, they actually have a process where they go from Figma to theme JSON because they’ll have websites where they like you do. There’s a component that’s not WordPress and there’s a component that’s WordPress, or they have customers that have multiple different brandings for different things but they’re also, they’re all in Figma but then you can do themes and then that theme, you can use a plugin that you can then export your design decisions on the, on fonts and on colors and other things to migrate to theme JSON and then immediately kind of start up a block theme. I’m going to find that, dear listeners, I’m also going to find the link for you, not only for Anne. Thank you. We had David Bowman on the live Q and A maybe two years ago where he kind of demonstrated that all. So we will share those in the show notes and kind of see how that, I don’t know how that kind of works with you and how you approach figma, but it might be a good way to see if that works for you.
Anne Katzeff: That would be fascinating as well. I mean, I am using variables for some of my styles. I’m limiting it because again, of the learning curve. But I’ve got so far the color palette and very basic typography assigned to, you know, text in the six head levels to match up with a bootstrap scenario. And I’m thinking ahead even beyond that. Well, how will I translate that into a WordPress theme? So it’s. I like the complication. I don’t mind it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, the complexity is really intriguing because all of a sudden you kind of have these, all these pieces that fit together very well and you feel like, oh, this is genius.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, I actually, I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but I saw, I watched a YouTube video. Maybe I’ll find it and I’ll send you a note about it. But he explained the Figma variables really well, and he has maybe an hour and a half tutorial that I’ve yet to just scratch the surface.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I know that Justin Tadlock, who is our theme guru, I would call him, he is working on a design system where he combines the color palette and the fonts with semantic kind of. So he’s not saying, okay, this is the main color, this is the background color, foreground color. But he’s saying, okay, this is a text color and has a separate design system that’s built into theme that he builds into theme JSON. So he can actually switch out a theme if the theme actually follows the same standards in there. He just can change colors and then the theme looks totally different.
Anne Katzeff: Exactly. That’s kind of the idea behind the variables.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, exactly.
Anne Katzeff: Definitely try to be semantic.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Michelle Hunt did a good funnel from Atomic Design to the Design system at WordCamp US and the video is online. And she also had a similar custom color setting design system in Theme JSON actually built into. Yeah, so I’m, of course I’m going to share all that, but with you and our listeners.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah. We can’t anticipate everything that comes up in these conversations, can we? No, we don’t have all the links right here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But at least I know where I can look. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m writing a blog post and I’m still a little bit stuck in that. But on how to use Playground to build a theme demo where you can have content, like to showcase your theme and then create a Playground blueprint to share with your clients or your customers so they can test WordPress with the theme and some content in there.
Anne Katzeff: So great idea.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So they know how the patterns look or the color scheme or how the front page can look. And because sometimes you have this problem that you have a theme and you see that there was a front page, but when you install the theme, it doesn’t look like that. Yeah, so, yeah, so that’s kind of part where theme builders or even agencies can really make some great showcase for their product. And I’m using Playground, but there is actually importer. So you can put all the content into your local site and then export it and then import it into Playground with the blueprint. Kind of have the XML file on GitHub and it kind of puts it in and you can do all the settings here. What’s the front page like? A blog post or a block theme? Or is it a page? Or is it. Which one is the news page then? And so you can build that all out. And now I’m kind of. The missing piece is still navigation. So the navigation, if you just build the pages, it automatically builds the page layout or the page list layout. But if you do a custom navigation work, it doesn’t get imported yet because somehow the parser doesn’t know that those links need to be transferred to the new site. So it didn’t work. Right. But I’m working on it and I know that the Playground people are really busy on doing stuff, doing this and fixing things. So that’s what I’m working on. And I’m.
Anne Katzeff: So it sounds like you’re using it also as a prototyping tool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You could, you could. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Is it like the concept, like a live link that you can share with a client and they can view it? Yeah, okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. You could also do the prototype thing with. Well, you can share. You can. Yeah, you can share it with a client and every client who kept the link gets the same site. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: So is it stored in GitHub?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s stored in memory on browser. On the browser, it’s Playground is a tool that runs WordPress. In the browser. You don’t need a server, you don’t need a database. You just need the playground.WordPress.net and then you have a WordPress site. And then with blueprints that are configuration files in JSON written in JSON, you can say, okay, which plugin do I want to install? Which. What’s the landing page? Which theme do I want to have in there? And do I want to have additional content in there? Yeah. So you can use it to showcase your plugin or your theme. And we use it for. For all kinds of different things as well. And on the team, we use it to test PRs from a good look and track that are not merged yet, that are not yet in a. In a version of that. So you can just kind of isolate the whole thing and just test this particular thing. That’s really cool. And I’m going to have a talk at a WordCamp about using Playground, GitHub and the great block theme. Okay. To change themes without touching code. So making changes to the themes through the editor. So if you need a new template or need to change a template, change or add colors and all this kind of things, but then at the end you export it to GitHub and it creates the PR that then one of your developer is going to merge with the theme where all the other developing things are happening.
Anne Katzeff:
That sounds really cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Well, clearly I haven’t used Blueprint very much.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or Playground.
Anne Katzeff: Or Playground. Sorry.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but I get what you said before. Yeah. I like the complexity. So. Okay, let’s see how complicated and easy we can make it. Yeah. Well, I think we could now head into Gutenberg 21.6.
WordPress 6.9
So WordPress 6.9 is coming. Let’s talk a little bit about WordPress 6.9. We will have other shows about that, of course, but just to get the timing right, we are about four weeks away from Beta 1, and Beta 1 is pretty much feature freeze, and it will all have in there 15 Gutenberg releases from 20.5 when WordPress 6.8 came out, 20.4 was the last one. So 20.5 until 21.9, it’s pretty much 15. But there was a period of Gutenberg releases for about four, four months when not a whole lot of features came in. But that is going to be offset that in the last two or three releases. There will be a ton of things in there. So we will change our cadence from having two Gutenberg plugins in a show to one and do another. I hope we can go back to every other week instead of every month recording.
Gutenberg 21.6
What we are talking about today is about Gutenberg 21.6 before I go in there. So release is going to be December 2nd, so everything you need and beta one is October 21st and in between are release candidates and release candidate one, I think is November 2nd or something like that. So by that time we hopefully have all the developer notes in there and Source of Truth will come out there at the same time or a week later. So just so you can prepare a plan or not. I’m a planning person, so I always need to know the dates. I always have. Most of the time I have a plan. So when something changes, I know what to change. Yeah. So. Well, let’s head into the Gutenberg 21.6.
Enhancements
It has a few enhancements and we start with the Data Views enhancement. And one of them is. Seems to be a minor thing, but there is a card layout in the components for the Data Forms where you can support combined fields and show the description in there. And that’s fairly new. So there’s also a storybook documentation out for those plugin developers who all kind of want to try out the new Data Views and the Data Forms. Data form is really where people then can enter stuff, filtering and all that. That’s all in Data Forms. And then there’s also in the Data Views we have the grid layout is now a little bit more flexible. You can have it without a title and then you have the actions are available on Hover, which is quite nice.
Anne Katzeff: But yeah, I like that. That’s a wonderful enhancement. And of course it got me into another path of both grids and thinking about using the grid layout for the post template. So I started to play around with that. Got lost in that for about an hour. So far I don’t really see an advantage for using the grid over the default grouping with columns, but I’ll play around with it a bit more.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there is actually a more interactive way of using the grid layout in the Gutenberg experiments. So that might be. So when you use the Gutenberg plugin, there’s one menu item under Gutenberg that says Experiments, and there are probably 10 different experiments, amongst them the new blocks that are in there, but they will come out of experiments hopefully soon. There’s also the data view usage for posts. Because right now it’s only a site editor with pages where you can use the data views but also use them for posts. And there are a ton of experiments and one of them is interactive grid layout where you can drag and drop things.
Anne Katzeff: Oh really?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Use it. Yeah. For different kind of content as well. So you have pictures in there, you can have a cover in there and you can have just text in there and each grid and then you can also stretch it out over two rows.
Anne Katzeff: Oh yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or two columns or two rows kind of thing. And. And it. Oh, cool. Kind of merges all that. So it’s really cool. But it hasn’t gotten any updates for a while. It’s still an experiment because of our other priorities. But it’s definitely. You see what’s coming. That’s one thing. Also to kind of okay, how can we. How can this be improved? Yeah, and kind of. Yeah, let the developers know. That’s the. Yeah, I like the grid layout too.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do some interesting things with it.
Anne Katzeff: Definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. There were updates to the core data packages but they are so developer oriented and so technical that if you’re interested that just check out the changelog of 21.6. But 21.6 has one new thing and that’s. Well, it was actually in 21.5, but that’s the accordion block and I cannot talk often about it. Often enough about it. I’m really happy that the accordion block made it into Gutenberg. Now it’s still under experiments, so you need to switch it on. I think it’s the second. The second from the top on that page. I had a plan to create a post about all the experiments that I Gutenberg. But yeah, that kind of fell to the website.
Anne Katzeff: Well, it’s constantly changing I would think.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing, but it’s also kind of. Oh yeah, well, let’s do the other cool stuff too. Yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the new accordion features and I checked about. Of course, you know, I had to look at that. I still think the UI needs some tweaks. Although of course I. I think the add button is a no brainer. That’s a really good addition. So I was looking at the accordion from a user point of view. Not on the front end, but the back end. And those pan. What do they call them? Panes. They’re tucked right next to each other. I think just from a UI point of view it would be nice to add a little bit of space between them. Because I had trouble acclimating to how does this actually work and what’s going on. I hit this plus sign and then it opens up. So just a little bit more tweaking on that, I think would be.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that’s also something to think about with block style variations, where you can actually put that in a style.
Anne Katzeff: Sure.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then I did some discovery on that because I wanted to figure out how many different designs can I come up with? My AI can come up with that. I can put a variation. How many did you discover? Right now, I did it all by hand and kind of do the discovery because I had the whole same thing. But I had too much white space. I did a background into the panel.
Anne Katzeff: That’s a good idea. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then I had a white space there. And so I needed to reduce the margin to get rid of that white space. But, yeah, I think that’s the design decisions. It’s so new that you’re. There are not all the supports are there. I think you can have some dimension support there with spacing and margins. So you can definitely see that in the side. In the inspector controls and the sidebar of the block. You just need to make sure that you select the right block, because there are four blocks. One is the accordion, that’s the wrapper, and then you have the header, and then you have the panel, and then you have the content. Yeah, there’s a. A lot of moving parts that if you create a style variation for that, people can just, with one click.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Change the design of things. Yeah. Kind of make it either an FAQ or pricing or whatever to do that. So style variations are really a cool feature. Yeah. So the next thing is. Well, the query loop block had a. Had a broken placeholder and it’s fixed now.
Anne Katzeff: And that’s on small screens, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s from plus on mobile, pretty much the next one is. Or Core Commands. So Commands is the command palette where you do Control K and then you get a little. Like on a Mac, you get little things and you can say Open Site Editor or add a page or something like that. And now you can now return to the dashboard. Yeah. Because you’re five levels deep in the Site Editor and now you want to go back to your post. You just open up Control K and say return to Dashboard or just type in Dashboard. And then it kind of gets you to. To that place. It also has some permission checks, so if you are not allowed to go there, you’re not you’re not going to go there. So that was kind of missing before. It was kind of. Yeah. Wherever you go, you go.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, so it was like a back door.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Access to.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wow. But it’s all, all in the admin. There’s nothing on the front end, but it’s. I think it will. So the command palette has those in. In 28. So in the next one there will be additional commands. So command palette, you can register commands with code. So plugin can say, okay, if, if that’s a team, a team plugin with team members, you could say add a team or yeah. Update theme or something like that. And then because it’s just a one liner kind of thing, you could also then tap it into the Abilities API. That’s kind of the next step. It’s not going to be in 6.9 for sure, but it is something that you can kind of daisy chain some workflows or tab into an AI ability kind of API that then lets you also do some AI stuff there. So it’s kind of that interface that you will be in in the future more often if you so choose to. But I think that’s a really interesting development there because now, right now you always have to remember, okay, which menu is it in and where do I go and what’s the name of it? Yeah, is it template parts? Is it pattern? Is it templates? Is it pages? Yeah, what’s.
Anne Katzeff: I tend to click on my little picture icon to get back to the previous screens.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I tend to do because I don’t know how often.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, how often do you do it?
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now you can just do Control K and I like that. Then you’re back there and you don’t have to do 15 plus things. Yeah. So no, I really am quite. I like the command palette anyway. But now it has so much perspective in the future.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah.
New APIs
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next thing is about global styles and we talked about. No, we didn’t talk about it. So you can now, in the theme JSON file, you can now have support for form elements like the inputs, all the inputs on your site, or the dropdowns and selects. So if you create forms and you can style them through the theme JSON file, you don’t have to do custom CSS for that anymore. Many, many theme builders ask for this too because it’s, well, what’s a website without a contact form? Yeah, what’s a website without a get me your quote or something like that? You need some forms and then you want to style it. You don’t want to kind of have another CSS file in there. If you have those tools for theme JSON and oh yeah, the developer blog, what’s New for Developers in September Edition that came out about two weeks ago had some code examples on how you can put that in your theme JSON. Yeah, how. How you phase it and all that. Yeah. So it’s okay. It’s really cool. It shows you how to. So you get into the elements section of your theme JSON and then you have text input and then you can do borders, colors, typography, or select and have the different colors for text and background, for instance. That’s the example in the developer blog.
Anne Katzeff: So more and more we can do things in theme JSON that will allow us to use additional CSS or custom CSS less and less.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, that’s one thing. And you could actually write CSS in a custom.
Anne Katzeff: That’s true.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it’s. It’s such a habit to go to additional CSS and just fix something. Yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Or I have very little. Well, actually this comes up later in the changelog, so I won’t get too deep into it, but I have very little in my additional CSS these days.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s good.
Anne Katzeff: It’s just those few instances where I just can’t do it in theme JSON.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s still not particularly all covered there. Yeah.
Bug Fixes
So now we come to the bug fixes. And one was the randomization of the gallery block doesn’t work when the lightbox is enabled. But you had a question there.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that randomization. I didn’t know about that bug. But in the projects that I’ve been working on, I noticed the lack of navigation in the. The light box. So I know that that’s deep in the works now. And look, I. I just recently went to the PR and it looks like a lot of progress has been made. I think they’re about to say this is a done deal, or maybe they already have. So that’s really good because otherwise you would do all the things you needed to do to enlarge the image, but you couldn’t get to the next image in the gallery. Well, that’s not really a light box, is it?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, everybody Lightbox, I think they’re around for 15 years now, so everybody has a different idea. But yeah, it was.
Anne Katzeff: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was definitely missing navigation to. To just kind of use it as a slider that you can Slide exactly. Forward and backwards without having to. You click on the X and then you’re at the gallery and then you have to click on the next pictures and then go it up. So it was a little tedious. After the third one, everybody escaped. Yeah, that. Yeah. And PR that Anne is talking about is the 62906. If you want to go on. On the GitHub and check it out. 62906. And yeah, they’re pretty far with it. It’s some nice previous and next. And you get some. Yeah, I tested it too. Yeah. With Playground you cannot do Gutenberg and then the PR and then you can play around with it. And that was quite nicely done. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people have given input not only from the developers or from the contributor, but also from other developers and from the accessibility. Because that was. I think the first part was the accessibility part was. It didn’t kind of pan out. So they. They did some interesting.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, were the arrows too small or something?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Errors too small? No area label, no announcement. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that need to happen for accessibility there.
Anne Katzeff: I’m deep into accessibility these days. I mean, with this client’s site being redesigned, her brand colors don’t cut it for accessibility. And I don’t know how, but I somehow convinced her to tweak the web colors to meet the accessibility requirements. I think I was so happy.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, my God. Yeah, so it’s.
Anne Katzeff: It’s a big thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You don’t want to get them. Get them into trouble or. Yeah. Have a. The user less optimal experience.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think we talked about it. A plated science and classes to the experimental form block. That’s part of the getting the element section into the theme JSON part. There is an experimental form block though. So if you have the Gutenberg plugin installed and go to experiments, One of the 15 choices there is form block. So you can actually create a form from those blocks in your editor. But most people actually have a separate plugin for their forms. I’m not sure how expanded that’s going to be used. Yeah, that’s pretty much. We are through the bug fixes and then there’s one fix. So much. So the zoom out. We had this in 6.8. There was a problem that when you have the show template, you couldn’t show the template when you were in zoom out, and now they actually put it out. It didn’t work. You just didn’t get it to it. And now they actually took the. They now fixed it that the zoom out is disabled when the show template is toggled off. You need both. You need to in zoom out because when the show template is off, the renderer doesn’t see the main section of the page because that’s all the content anyway. But zoom out needs to have that main section. So it’s all kind of. Wasn’t consistently kind of working. So now they finally fixed it. Anything else? No, I think we’re through with 21.6. Except there’s some block library. Image block.
Code Quality
Anne Katzeff: Oh, yeah. And that got me thinking how useful it would be to have live updating with the alt text. Because if I change the alt text in the media library for an image, it doesn’t automatically sync to where it’s being used in a page or a post. Oh, I have to. I have to click on the image and the page or the post and replace it with the same image with the revised alt text. So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if that was all synced together? And then that got me down another path. So maybe you have the answer to this question. So I noticed for, well, quite a long time, I’ve been noticing that when you’re in the image library and you click on an image, the fields differ depending on your media library mode. If it’s list and you click on an image, you get a different set of metadata or fields versus a grid. And I think it’s. With the grid. Yeah. There’s no alt text option from a list mode, but there is from a grid mode. And so why. Do you know why those fields differ?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I have no idea.
Anne Katzeff: I don’t know either. Ladies and gentlemen.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Well, it’s interesting that you actually notice that. Yeah, I. Yeah, I always have my media library on grid, so I’m not.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, me too.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t. I don’t see the difference, but you’re right. Yeah. I know that the contributors are working on the media library for the admin redesign and I think it would be good to talk to them about it because they also will have a grid view and a list view, because the data views actually support that. Yeah. So to make sure that definitely needs to be consistent, you know that all.
Anne Katzeff: The fields are available here, maybe in the outreach channel. I’ll put it out there and see if anyone.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Or we wait until 6.9. After 6.9. Yeah. Because I think. Yeah, that’s where it’s not. 4619. We are. We are all hoping for. For the data views coming into 6.9. But I’m. The data views will be in there, but I don’t think that the admin design will come in for 6.9. That’s just not enough time. Right. It’s now only four weeks. Okay, so you have question. Oh, you have another question in there?
Anne Katzeff: Do I know?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Okay.
Create Block Theme
Birgit Pauli-Haack: About the Create Block theme and style editing.
Anne Katzeff: Create block theme. Oh, right. Create block theme. So it’s interesting. I haven’t looked at it in a month or so. It’s good to sometimes look at it with fresh eyes. And it looks like there used to be two paths to editing the styles and it looks like those have been eliminated. You were once able to edit via this path, Appearance editor, Design styles. When you get to design and you click on styles, there’s no longer the option to edit them from that point. And then the other way would be from a page or a post. I no longer see the cbt, the Create Block theme wrench. I see it only when on the side. Templates, template parts, sync patterns. And another interesting thing, I mean this is all. It’s a lot of information here, but let me try to slow down. So both of those previous paths gave access to that full featured. What I call the full featured Create Block Theme panel. It had all the things that you can do with the Create Block theme plugin. Now the other thing I noticed is if you click on a page as if you’re editing it like a normal person would edit. You know, regular person, not normal, but regular person, the wrench is no longer there. However, if I go through the full site editor path and click on a page, the wrench appears that way. So it’s just this inconsistency, and I’m a pretty well versed user and it was a little confusing. It’s like, well, why can I get to the full feature panel this way and not that way?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So one is that the page post editor, when you go from WP admin posts and pages goes in a slightly different editor mode than go into the appearance and editor. When I first listened to you, I thought you might. It wouldn’t be related to the create block theme because with the site editor we also have two different path to access styles. Yeah. One is through editor and then styles. There’s no design anymore. It only says styles. It’s with the navigation styles, templates and patterns. When you click on styles there, you have access to the same thing that comes if you are in the edit mode on a. On A template or on a page. You also on the right hand side there’s a styles interface. Both are now kind of pretty much on par with the features. So before a couple of months ago or maybe even longer, there was a discrepancy between what you could do on the right hand side in the styles and if you come from the left hand side. But that is pretty much eliminated. The only difference now is only how the style book looks, but it’s really marginally. Yeah, but we have one thing that comes with the next plugin release that we’re going to talk about is the additional CSS you will only access on the right hand sidebar and not on the left hand side. And that has been fixed now. So you get to the additional CSS from both sides. But the Create block theme has changed. So the great Block theme theme plugin only works in the site editor. So if you come from the pages or from the posts on the WP admin, you don’t have access to it.
Anne Katzeff: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you only have it in the Site editor. And I think that makes sense because that’s. It does what you do with that. Yeah, because that’s the place where you actually would edit a theme component. So it also had changed the right hand side sidebar. When you click on save the changes to the theme, you get additional checkboxes. What exactly do you want in your theme? So that definitely was an improvement there because it also included some localization from text and you could also kind of eliminate the navigation IDs and all that.
Anne Katzeff: And I brought another issue up with the team several months ago, which is the cbt, which I’m calling it CBT Create Block Theme Plugin. That’s my shorthand, the page for it from the administration sidebar. When you go to it directly from the sidebar, those options differ from the full site editor pathway to it. In my mind, all of that should be the same. You should have the same access to the same features.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, on that settings page, the only thing that you get from there is actually what you want to do. Do you want a greater theme? Do you want to create a from scratch, do you want to clone it? Or do you want a child theme? All the other features are actually in the site editor.
Anne Katzeff: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Need to be connected with the site editor. So I don’t think there’s a whole lot of benefit from it to put it in a settings page that you. That has no connection to any of the other features that are in there.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, I, I hear you. I understand that I just like consistency.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: I think it’s less confusing when you have the same. That’s a full page devoted to it. Why don’t I have access to everything that I can do with it? That’s my logic.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Because you need the editor too. The settings page doesn’t have access to the editor.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, I totally understand that. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s like when. Why, why don’t you have the font or dimensions in a settings page? Yeah. Because it’s not the editor that has that sidebar. Yeah. Okay.
Anne Katzeff: Fair enough. All right. This is why it’s good to talk.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. But I, I hear you. With all the questions that we have there. The inconsistency is definitely something inconsistent. User interfaces overall, the whole site editor. I think there have been great strides made in the last four months to make this all more consistent. Have all the support for all the blocks like the border and fonts and dimensions that every block. Who has. Who needs it, actually has it. Because there are really some inconsistencies that some. Why does the heading not have a font size or something like that? Yeah. When everybody else, every other block has it. But that’s. It takes a. A lot of perseverance to get through I don’t know, 60 blocks and kind of make them all consistent that have been built in the last three years.
Gutenberg 21.7
Let’s get into 21.7. The release is going to be on Wednesday, tomorrow, September 24th. We are recording this on September 23rd. So the listeners. When you, when you listen to it, it will already be out because we are not publishing it until Sunday, our episode. So let’s get into it. We are doing that from the talking through the changelog from the release candidate one that was published last week. So just to. If there are changes on what we didn’t have in there from the final release next tomorrow. Okay.
Enhancements
This release has quite a few additional updates on the block comment thing. So that’s part of the Gutenberg phase three collaboration phase. Where you have one is from the collaboration phase one is synchronized editing where multiple people are working on the same post at the same time, which is a bit scary, but it works in Google Docs. But we are not there yet. But what already is in the works and has been for a while is the block level commenting. So you can. You’re in your block editor and you click on. And anybody else who has access to it can go in there and say, okay, in this paragraph, change a comma, an acronym, a wording kind of thing, put it in a comment and then you can resolve it in a comment. So the comments show up in the right hand side in the sidebar and each block that has a comment has a little icon that there are comments in there.
Anne Katzeff: Oh wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then you can add a comment by going to the block settings, block options drop down where you also have the grouping and the before and after. There’s also now comment on the block, and then you can start commenting on it, and then it shows up in the sidebar and then other people who are also come back tomorrow or something like that can answer that or you can also resolve it. So there are quite a few improvements on that. So first is that we only talk about two of them. One is to render the comment content. So it’s rendered in the comment the content completely. So it doesn’t. And it’s still. It’s a HTML kind of thing. So you can put in links in there without having all the HTML. Yeah. Kind of anchor links there. That’s one thing. And the other one is that the user text area auto size up until now you couldn’t. You could write in it, but it kind of would go underneath the box. You had to manually kind of increase it, but now it’s auto sized. That’s really cool. Yeah, yeah. So. And I know you are a single site producer so you probably might not have a whole lot of use case for that. But I can see, I can see.
Anne Katzeff: The use for it for sure.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Would you kind of work with your clients on that or rather with another coworker like a developer or something?
Anne Katzeff: I think to educate my clients about the feature and then they could work together on content. It’s a nice collaboration tool but with any page or post only one person can edit at a time. So there’s that which is a useful barrier, unlike a simultaneous thing. So I can definitely share that with people, let them know about it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So there’s now the ability to reopen resolved comments to see enable inline comments for published posts. Yeah, so if you. Up until now when it was published, all the comments would go away. You wouldn’t see them. So there was a lot of thought going into that how it’s actually used from the previous versions.
Anne Katzeff: You know, actually my brother uses WordPress. He’s a writer and he works with a rather large company. So I’ll let him know about this upcoming feature because I don’t know how they manage the editing of content and it would be good if they could do it right there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s kind of. It could eliminate one step. So when you work with a team on a, on a content you normally go into, or we go with the developer blog and other blogs, we go into Google Docs, write the draft, have all the communication in there, including the comments there and then once all the things are resolved, you copy paste it over to WordPress and that sometimes gets you into trouble. And that copy paste step and the reformatting that is necessary kind of could be eliminated with something like that. Yeah, absolutely.
Anne Katzeff: Exactly. Back in the day when I used, when I was a print Designer, we used InDesign. There is a plugin, so to speak, for InDesign where content writers could do all their magic, all their writing right in. It’s. I think it’s. It’s not in vision, I’m not remembering, but it doesn’t matter. Same concept.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: What I really like about it as a designer, they had no access to the styling, they couldn’t change the colors, size. Yeah, I really like that. You know, the head is. Just leave the head alone. It’s 24 pixels or.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Print design points.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get this. Yeah. That is actually coming also to WordPress with the write mode. It’s kind of a content only mode that you can have patterns in content only and you can only change wording on that. But the rest of it is. Even the, the structure of the pattern is locked. So there is a design mode and a write mode. It also streamlines kind of the process because you’re not distracting by all the design features you could do. Yeah, so I really like that. But that. That’s coming.
Anne Katzeff: Same idea.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s also. Yeah. So yeah, in 21.7 there’s also quite a few updates to the data form, especially data forms, also data views. But it has to be kind of to make the form handling kind of bringing up to par to what actually other forms are doing. So the form component has quite a few additional updates in there. So it’s the radio control, be it the Boolean field types with a toggle, you know, being. Having a URL field that can be in the field control, having a phone field. So it kind of is a build out of what you actually expect when you do forms. But it’s all in the data view. So it will be in the admin section, not on the front end. So think about when you have a post or page where you have a quick edit. Yeah. Where you can change a few things. That is the form that this is working on. Yeah. Or what the people are working on is kind of. Okay. In the admin we have a user putting data in what can. What controls do we have available for that? Not on the front end or something.
Anne Katzeff: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or in the edit in the block editor. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Okay, so this is just for quick view.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it has a better panel for that. The whole data views has. I think Matthias talked about that in one of his blog posts on the Make Core blog about the different building blocks of the new admin design. And one of them was the infrastructure and what’s on the panel. So thinking about what are the rooms in the house. You have a kitchen that is differently furniture than the living room and you need the different tools in there. And the form is. Is in a tool you can actually create a form that is then triggered through a modal. Yeah. Or you can add. Open up another panel on the right hand side kind of the data. So those are decisions that the developer is gonna. Is going to make. So plugin developers for most of our plugin developers or core developers. And then you have different tools available for different use cases. Yeah. And. But you always need a form. Right. If a user is going to change something. So depending on how much space you need, quick is only Quick edit is just a very limited. Yeah, yeah yeah. This is going to be a little bit more comfortable to do. Yeah it’s really interesting to. To see it all come to together and how. How granular the whole development process is. Yeah. So the next ones are kind of navigation pieces. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: I noticed the changing add page to create page and it seems like such a small thing, but it’s, you know, it’s significant. I like that one. That’s a good change.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it reminds me, I did some. Some support in. In the forums of WordPress forums and there was one person who had trouble distinguishing between creating a pattern. Yeah. Adding a pattern.
Anne Katzeff: Oh yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s it for. For mere mortals, I would say. Yeah, it’s the same. Yeah. I add a page. Yeah. Let me put the count. Or. But the pattern is you create a pattern that you can reuse or. Or you add an existing pattern to the page.
Anne Katzeff: Exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s kind of that. Yeah. And this is pretty much similar to add a page or create a page. So add a page would be a page link that you add from your existing page and create a page as okay, I want that link, but I don’t have the page yet. And now you get a button that says create the page. And of course in the write mode it’s going to be hidden.
Anne Katzeff: And you were asking me to check on the status with the navigation block and I don’t see anything that’s changed. If you edit the navigate via the navigation area. So you go appearance, design, navigation, the UI seems to be the same as it has been for months, which is in my opinion, ugly and confusing. But if you edit via the design area. So if you just stop at appearance design and click on the navigation there, the. It’s so much more aesthetically pleasing. It just makes for a more enjoyable experience. It’s attractive and intuitive. So I know this has been on their plate for a while and when I say them, I mean all these wonderful WordPress team developers. Maybe a good place to start improving this UX is to somehow merge what we’re seeing in the design UI with the navigation UI.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, I get you. Yeah. I. When I was creating my theme demo, I had the same. I couldn’t do anything with the. Well, I saw the dark side of the site editor. It’s the dark side menu and on the right hand side. So when I go into a template header and just click on the navigation, it opens up the sidebar on the right hand side and there you can add blocks or add another page link and it’s, it’s very pleasing to kind of add to that. That part. You don’t have on the right hand side or on the left hand side in the dark area of navigation or all you can do is I think click on edit and then you go somewhere. But it’s the isolated navigation and it’s kind of plucked on top of the. This.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah, exactly. It’s just this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: You don’t see very nondescript piece of navigation plopped the top of the screen.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: On top of the content design it. You can’t, you can’t. You don’t see it in context. Yeah, so exactly. It’s definitely something to think about in, in the. In the next few versions to come. Yeah, yeah. And there was this big or that issue that Matthias wrote about. What other new blocks do we need?
Anne Katzeff: Oh, yes, yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And Justin Tadlock kind of reversed his stance on what needs to be in Core and he wrote of the Gutenberg Times on why we need new blocks, and that is so theme developers can actually prepare for that out of the box. They don’t have to check. Is an accordion available from. I don’t know, the other 15 plugins that have accordions and how to style it. There is one in Core and that’s what my theme is styling the same with a table of contents block. Or there will be. So they are working on grading the table of content ready for coming out of the experimental stage, which it has been for I think three years now. Yeah. So. But there were no resources to kind of attribute to the table of content block.
Anne Katzeff: So would this be something you could use in a blog post to identify the sections of the blog post itself and they would be anchor links to that section. Oh, nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s a table of content block. Yeah. And if you.
Anne Katzeff: I know a use of that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Several of my own blog posts.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And if you don’t have Gutenberg installed, the plugin installed, you don’t have that block. Yeah. Because it’s. It’s only available in Gutenberg and it’s not yet in Core. But there’s a big push to hopefully get it into Core. The implementation had some accessibility issues and then some usability issues, but there was kind of. The first version was in there, but then every so. And then the other contributors tried to change it, but then they couldn’t follow through on this because. Yeah. And now maybe this time is the right time. And then there is a new block. It’s called the terms query block. It’s like the query block for post, but it also is for terms. So that’s the categories and the tags. So you can list them in a rolling block in a post. So I need to see it, how it works to kind of find a good use case for it. But we probably have that. It’s already in Gutenberg and it has an order by. And with a single drop down and. And these kinds of things. So.
Anne Katzeff: So it’s almost like integrating. Could you integrate that on the same page as a. A category?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. With the descriptions and all that. Because it has the tone blocks in there. Yeah. So you can kind of. So if you. For instance, if you have a parent category and you have a blog post in that category, you can say, okay, I want. Underneath every single post, I want a list of all the categories for that parent category or the children category. So people can navigate a little bit deeper into my content forest.
Anne Katzeff: I bet that would impact SEO positively, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, yeah, if you don’t have too many. Too many categories and too many terms. Yeah, because that definitely. If you have too many terms, you get into the duplicate content issues when multiple terms of the same content in there, but that’s a different story. So. But it gives you more flexibility on how you can link deeper. That definitely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then we mentioned that before that in Site Editor always show the additional CSS button is now finally available in and it will come to 6.9 is what we talked about before that you did we talk about it. Well, with the Site editor you have a place where you can add additional CSS for your site. That what you, you know also from the customizer from classic themes where you had additional CSS. CSS that wasn’t in the theme. It was on the right hand side on the styles. Yeah, you could add that. But when you were on the left hand side of the styles you didn’t have a way to add the additional CSS.
Anne Katzeff: See now this really. This threw me for a loop because I never noticed that, and I can’t reconstruct the sequence of events from. I have a tutorial site using the 2024 theme and it has just a little bit of additional CSS in it. So yesterday when I noticed this and I explored and I saw my additional CSS field disappear when I deleted its contents and I was like, oh, that’s not good. And it really threw me for a loop because I always have a backup. So I uploaded my theme backup and thinking it would be in theme JSON and reinstate itself, but it wasn’t reinstated. So then I had to look at my revision history and find the spot where I was before I deleted really unsettled me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I imagine. I imagine. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: So now if you’re saying the additional CSS in the right sidebar is the same as what shows up in the. Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So if you said okay, there must be another way to get to the additional css.
Anne Katzeff: Exactly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Clone to the right hand side. But that, that is such a. Yeah, it kind of really threw quite a few people. Oh yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: So but why didn’t it show up in my theme JSON? That’s what I was.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s not, it’s not routed through theme JSON. It’s user content. So it’s in the database and when it, when that renders, it renders the last item before the in the head with the styles. That’s the last thing that is going to pull in. So it overrides everything else what you had in theme JSON in the default. So that’s why it kind of doesn’t show up in theme JSON because it’s a different level of customization. Yeah, it’s the last defense, so to speak is the user oriented stuff. I’m glad you pointed this point in pulled in last. Yeah. You will see it so if you go to View Source, you see your additional CSS, the last style tag before you start with the content tags. All that.
Anne Katzeff: Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All it takes. Okay.
Anne Katzeff: Thank you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re welcome.
Anne Katzeff: I can breathe now.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it shows you that it’s really hard to kind of keep it all straight when you have multiple places where you can change styles. Because the same thing will happen when you change. So you could change your. This appearance of a block for the whole site in the styles styles and then you go further down this typography layout and then you have blocks there. You change how each block, how a block appears every time you use it. But there’s also a place when you have a paragraph on one page and you change the look and feel of that paragraph through the right hand side with the. With the tools there.
Anne Katzeff: Sure.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s two places. And the other places theme JSON also kind of controls how a block looks. Yeah. So if something is not right, you have to look at multiple places to find the place where you can change it or where you can. Where it actually was controlled. So that’s why the additional CSS is just another place to look and to kind of control this. But I think to eliminate the cognitive load, I think learning how to put custom CSS in the theme JSON is probably a good additional skill set to have kind of take away think about not doing the additional CSS right because the advantage is also it only will be loaded. So the additional CSS is always loaded on each page even if the block or whatever you have is not on the page. But if you do it in theme JSON, it will only pulled in when that particular element or block is actually on page. So it’s actually a performance issues as well. But not a whole lot of people put a whole lot of in additional CSS. So I think it’s negligent. But just a cognitive load that kind of eliminate another place to.
Anne Katzeff: Right. And that ties into a whole other subject. Not for now, not for today. But CSS specificity, that’s a whole other thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Gets very complicated.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Volumes of books have been written about that. So the command palette is getting another update with 21.7 that is made the navigation commands available on all screens. So you can now go into your Tools menu on WP admin, hit Control K and say go to Site Editor. Then you can kind of jump like that. You don’t have to be in the editor to use the command palette. We talked about it before, but it’s getting more and more in there. Oh, there is a nice template API change that it reads really non-ecstatic. This kind of allows template duplication plus the concept of active templates. That’s something I would ask anybody who does works with template to test out. Because what it helps you is that you can have multiple single post templates on your site and only one is active. So if you have a plugin that kind of adds templates to your site. So through the template hierarchy that WordPress has, there are certain templates need to have a certain slug to be pulled automatically. So the single post or the archive pages or that. But if you want to test out different kinds of templates, right now what you do is use patterns for a certain template and you’re not adding them to templates, but you’re adding them to patterns.
Anne Katzeff: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But if you can do, okay, I have a single post template. Oh, and I also want to know how it looks without the featured image to add another single post template and then you can activate each one of them. And that makes it for a much clearer proposition on what templates do and what patterns do. And that also when you have a plugin that adds a template, because plugins now can suggest. Oh, push templates into the template editor. Yeah. Like woocommerce. Yeah. Is going to do that.
Anne Katzeff: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or when you have a theme, a team plugin or a business directory plugin, you can get the templates into your template editor. So you can modify them. Yeah. As a user, but you already have a team member custom post type template, so the plugin would overwrite it. But if you can have multiple template duplication, deplete duplication or multiple, not only two, but more, you can just. With the activation flag, you can say which one is the one that’s going to be rendered on front page. Does it make sense?
Anne Katzeff: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, cool. So. And I’m totally excited about that. Yeah, I can’t.
Anne Katzeff: This is. It’ll take me down so many different paths. I won’t get any work done for a month. I’ll be busy exploring and testing. That’s all good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But Ela Vandorp, one of the Goodmoor developers, has been working on that for so long. Yeah. And when you go to the PR, it has, I don’t know, 150 comments or something like that. Yeah. But it’s. It finally made it into the Gutenberg plugin release. Yeah. Now we can test it before it goes into WordPress core in a month. So go and test it, please. Okay, everybody here on the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast needs to test this. And Aki Hamano, he’s a contributor from Japan.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, sure. Yeah.
New API
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. He has a few things that really he contributed quite a lot to Gutenberg in the last year and he introduced a new function called Use Commands. So you can register more than one command for the command palette, which is good, especially when you kind of think about kind of getting the abilities API kind of connected with the commands palette. So yeah, for developers it’s definitely something to check out how you can add additional commands to the command palette for your users. Your agencies probably can change some of the workflow hiccups that some of the clients have. Yeah. If you can add a command to it and you teach them to control K and you something, that’s definitely good.
Bug Fixes
A lot of bug fixes, bug fixes, data form fixes. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything I wanted to point out except the global styles bug fix was. Is that the border radius presets kind of had a little bug in there that it generated the wrong variable name in pattern code. And that is definitely fixed. It works. Thank goodness it works good for them. In the block library accordion now has a block gap support. I think that’s what you are kind of thinking about.
Anne Katzeff: Oh sure. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That is now in 21.7 and then you also have a term list drop down.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, there was a limit. What is. What is the new limit?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it’s now 100.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, I was just thinking yeah, 100 would be good and I would never get to 100 but someone might.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It takes 10 to 100. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: So okay, that’s quite a limit. 10.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, you shouldn’t use too many terms because each term creates another page. A page that needs to be indexed and doesn’t have a unique thing there.
Anne Katzeff: Content only pattern patterns.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely something to test. Is kind of added content in.
Anne Katzeff: So the purple icon was taken away.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think so, yeah. Well, in the right mode. Yeah. It’s kind of that mode where you only can change certain things and not do design. So unsync patterns are actually content only by default. So when you add them to the page you only kind of change content if. If it’s in the write mode. Yeah. So you don’t get distracted by certain things like edit. Yeah. If you want the pattern to be. It’s unsynced so it doesn’t propagate the design over every usage. But you still want to have a consistent layout. And then editors who use that in on the page shouldn’t change the composition of the pattern, only the content that’s.
Experiments
And then there’s a pattern content only experiment that makes the template parts section blocks. Yeah, that was one thing that came out of section styles that’s in 6.6. IIn WordPress 6.6 is that you have patterns that are actually sections and you could style them through JSON files. And then you only get in the style section of the right hand side. You get, I don’t know, two or three styles and every. The pattern changes its look and feel according to their styles. But it was hard to figure out what makes a pattern a section and whatnot. So it ended up that every group block was actually a section. So the styles would apply to other group box as well that were not meant to do. But there was no way to say okay, only for section styles. I want these. So this call for action or call for call for action block or book kind of things. So it was a little confusing for the users to apply that and some of the features. So in zoom mode when you added a pattern you had a little, little drop, kind of a. A fluid drop that would. You could toggle through. Not toggle, browse through. All the styles that are. Can be attached to that pattern. Oh yeah. And those also needed to be sections. But it wasn’t clear what does one pattern distinguish. The other pattern is a section. And now they are trying to do that in an experiment and see how far it gets with also the styling part. I don’t know if all that makes sense what I’m saying, but.
Anne Katzeff: No, no, I understand.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think that was it for 21.7 that I kind of saw. Yes, that’s it. Yeah. So now we’re coming to. I think we’re really out of time today with our. With our episode here.
What’s in Active Development or Discussed
So I wanted to talk about tabs, we need to kind of have it in front of us. Yeah. So it. They are not. So one of the new blocks that are. Is worked on is the tabs block. Okay. And the other one is the modal block or the pop up block is kind of when you. So you have a trigger, you have a block for a trigger and then when a user clicks on it, then a modal comes up and you can fill out something. That’s also in an HTML standard, but there’s no blocks there. And it definitely is a common use case for certain things. And those things are. And the same as tabs. So you have not as an Accordion where you have one header and then the panel opens and then the next header is. You have multiple tabs on top and then the panel changes. That is also in the works. I hope it makes it.
Anne Katzeff: Oh, nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Makes it to the 6.9, but I’m not quite sure it actually goes there because I haven’t seen anything in the last week that kind of contributes to that. But I’m also. I might have been out of the loop there because there are so many things that going on at the same time. And I’m. I’m waiting. I know that Anne McCarthy, she’s working on the kind of what’s the state of the development now? But I hope that it comes out next week or something like that and then we have it for the next episode.
Anne Katzeff: Good timing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So WordPress 6.9 comes with really a lot of good features and also quality of life changes for. For the editor and for the flow of things. So I’m really excited about that. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: And wasn’t there a reduction in the number of releases that was decided to condense?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. So in January there were initiatives when Automattic said, okay, we are going to stop contributing for a while. And then the core committers then decided, okay, if it’s not that we have one more release, that was 6.8 and that would be the only release in 2025. And then in May, Automattic decided to contribute again and kind of push everything further and then said, okay, then we can also have one more release this year.
Anne Katzeff: Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s 6.9. And that’s what we are building up to. That’s also why there are so many and Gutenberg releases kind of put together into one of the. Into the major WordPress release. Normally it was kind of between 7 and 10, but now we have 15.
Anne Katzeff: Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so yeah, yeah, but that was a good question. Yeah. Not everybody kind of know they stopped, but did we start again contributing to Core? You know. Yes, we did. Yeah.
Anne Katzeff: Excellent. Well, I look forward to the next release.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We do, yeah. So we are at the end of the show. Thank you so much for going through that with me, Ann. It was great to talk to you again.
Anne Katzeff: I know. It was great to talk with you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. As always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 121, 121. And if you have questions, suggestions or news you want us to include next time, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and the show notes will have all the contact information for Anne and it will be on, as I said, Gutenbergtimes.com.
So thank you, everybody.
Anne Katzeff: Thank you for thank you, Birgit.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you, Anne, for your time. And I hope you have a wonderful time in fall. Take care. Bye bye.
Anne Katzeff: Bye. Bye.