In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Mark Uraine discuss the upcoming Gutenberg Times Live Q & A, Full Site Editing, Gutenberg 9.4, and the Customizer.
- Music: Homer Gaines
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Pauli Systems
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Show Notes
- Next Live Q & A:
Case Study: The Making of Open-Source Story by Yoast with Blocks - Review on Apple Podcasts by fk-lux (Fränk Klein) from Luxembourg
- Leave Your Review
- Open source: Better solutions and a more inclusive society by the Yoast
- 20 WordPress Plugins, drafted at the Mega Meetup
Full-Site Editing
- Genesis announced Open Beta for the first block-based Genesis Theme
- What I Learned Building a Full-Site Editing Theme by Fränk Klein
- A Primer on Full Site Editing for WordPress Theme Developers by Rich Tabor
WordPress 5.6 RC 1
- WordPress 5.6 Field Guide
- New createBlocksFromInnerBlocksTemplate Block API
- Changes to Toolbar components in WordPress 5.6
- Editor styling changes in WordPress 5.6
- Reusable Blocks extracted into a separate package
- Block Supports In WordPress 5.6
- Block API version 2
Gutenberg 9.4
- What’s new in Gutenberg? (18 November)
- Gutenberg 9.4 Introduces Button Width Selector and Typography Controls for List Block
In active development and discussed?
Blocks in the Customizer
Dark Mode in Twenty-Twenty-One
- Twenty Twenty-One Dark Mode update – Call for testing by Caroline Poena Y
- Link to Twenty-Twenty-one: https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentyone
- Link to Themes Team Content Unit Test. https://github.com/WPTT/theme-unit-test
- How to test dark-mode for Twenty-Twenty-one
G2 Components
Bonus Link
Keeping up with Gutenberg – Block-editor related team updates – all on one page: June – November 2020
Transcript
Sponsored by Pauli Systems
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 33rd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. Today’s episode, we will talk about the next Gutenberg Times live Q&A, Full Site Editing, Gutenberg 9.4, and the customizer. I’m Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at Gutenberg Times, and I’m here with my co-host, Mark Uraine, designer at Automattic and core contributor to WordPress. Hey, Mark, how are you doing today?
Mark Uraine: Hey, Birgit. I’ve actually been pretty excited lately. My two main projects that I’ve been focusing on have picked up some momentum this week. Those being the Query Block, which has been a big exercise in figuring out how to design settings and keep them concise enough, but descriptive enough to help users, and then also bringing blocks into the customizer. So, this first bit of it is kind of via the widgets areas in the customizer and kind of allowing Gutenberg Blocks to be used in that setting. They’ve both been picking up a lot of momentum. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback and collecting ideas from people and collaborating with developers and continually producing design iteration. So, very, very busy this week, which I actually really like, but how have you been doing?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well those two are quite interesting projects and very fundamental for what’s coming next at Gutenberg. So, yeah, I need someone really good at it.
Well, I have been doing a lot of reading this week. Among other things, I really enjoyed the Open Source Story by the Yoast team, and we’ll come back to that, but I also was at the Mega Meetup with 100 people in the meetup, 8 meetups, kind of organizers come together and on Wednesday night and we talked about plugin draft, was like sports draft, but we were doing plugin drafts and it was quite great fun. Was a little long, but I really enjoyed it. Seeing all my friends that I normally used to see at the WordCamp. The host was David Bisset. He’s one of the prolific WordCamp organizers, and WordCamp Miami was actually the last WordCamp I went to before we got in lockdown for COVID-19. So, it was quite interesting to hear Southwest Florida.
Mark Uraine: How far did that meet expand? Were there meetups all over the globe or meetups all over the nation?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I think it was mainly Florida and I think Atlanta people were there too, but they came from all over. We had people from Israel, from Europe.
Mark Uraine: Oh, how fun.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it was really cool. Yeah. And there was a lot of chatting going on.
Mark Uraine: I bet.
Announcements
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, we are at the announcements. I have one announcement. Speaking of the Open Source Story by the Yoast team, I was so enlightened by that. It’s a wonderful and broad article about open source and why contributing to WordPress pays off for a plugin company like theirs, and the article itself is also marketable.
It was completed on the Gutenberg Blocks with a lot of interaction and different content, because it provides a lot of information, but it was very engaging. So, I asked Yoast chief technology officer, Omar Reiss, and the Block team lead from Yoast, Willemien Hallebeek, if they would share more details about how this other story came together and give us a behind the scenes walkthrough on our Gutenberg Live Q&A.
Mark Uraine: That’s great. Yeah, there was so much information in that post. It was just packed with all sorts of good stuff. I do remember I was glancing through it and from a design perspective, knowing that it was built in Gutenberg, I was longing to see more use of the spacer block in there just because it was so dense with information that I wanted to breathe every once in a while, but you just kept going through good stuff to good stuff.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Videos over multi column blocks, a quiz. I saw, really, quite a few things in there.
Live Q&A
So, the live Q&A will happen December 10 at 2:30 Eastern time, 1930 UTC. Sorry, kind of got that English a little bit mixed up, and for the first time I also invited as a co-host of the show Anne McCarthy.
Mark Uraine: All right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and she’s a developer relations wrangler at Automattic and on loan to the WordPress project. And she and I, we have been communicating on Slack quite often, and I thought we need to have her come in and also cover a little bit broader things and yeah. So, it’s going to be an awesome conversation, December 10.
Mark Uraine: And Birgit, you and Anne are going to be great together. So, that’s going to be a really fun show to listen into and watch.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m totally excited. Thrilled about it.
Mark Uraine: So, that brings us also to a new podcast review we have, Birgit, on iTunes there by fk-lux, which is Frank Klein from Luxembourg, and Frank leads the review, “A must for every WordPress user. The Gutenberg Changelog is the one WordPress podcast that I listened to religiously. There’s so much going on in Gutenberg, but Birgit and Mark make it easy to keep up. Changelogs aren’t a fun read, but the Gutenberg Changelog is a fun listen. In addition, I enjoy the curation of resources that is part of the podcast. I’ve found some great articles and plugins through recommendations in the podcast.”
Wow. Thanks, Frank. What do you think about that, Birgit?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, Mark. I’m totally over the moon about this review. This is wonderful. Yeah, say, I’m kind of blushing. If we weren’t on radio, I would be blushing. So, thank you, Frank.
Mark Uraine: Yes. Thank you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s really good.
Dear listeners, as you can hear, we love reviews and if you get a moment next week, or the week after next week, you can write us a review too and we will read it here on the podcast and it helps with letting people know about it, because the more reviews there are, the higher the show bubbles up in any of the directories. So, you would really do us a great favor to do that.
Mark Uraine: And the community. By raising our podcast a little higher, we reach more people and can help inform others in the community about the changes happening to WordPress through Gutenberg. And so, all of that is very important, so that we’re all together on this journey.
Community Contributions
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Speaking about community contributions, Full Site Editing has gotten a lot of attention now around the community. So, we all have for you three different articles that you probably want to read if you’re interested in that.
First, Genesis announced the open beta for the first block-based Genesis theme. So, if you are Genesis sharp, or freelancer using Genesis themes, that’s definitely something to check out. Then Frank Klein published about his experience on building a simple one column block-based blog theme and has a few pointers for developers on how to look at that. Also, he shared what tripped him up a bit and is certainly helpful for the Gutenberg team to follow up on that.
Mark Uraine: Very good feedback.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then Rich Tabor has a primer on Full Site Editing for WordPress theme developers. All three of them are from different areas or point-of-views. Full Site Editing is the talk of the town, so to speak.
Mark Uraine: It’s like coming quicker. It’s right there on the horizon and where we thought it would, we’d never get here. We’re getting here pretty quickly now and it’s coming together behind everything in the plugin.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I think it’s now time for me, I have been talking, reading a lot about it in between. We have some videos where the team walked us through the first stages, but I think I need to catch up on how this all comes together now, especially with the global styles and the navigation block and all that stuff.
WordPress 5.6 RC 1
Mark Uraine: All right. So, Birgit, that brings us to what’s released. WordPress 5.6 RC1, Release Candidate One, was released November 17th this week.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yay.
Mark Uraine: Yeah, that’s fantastic. That was the deadline for the developer notes, and it was also a string freeze on everything. So, any typos are now permanent. Do you not change them.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Otherwise the translators wouldn’t be able to translate your typos.
Mark Uraine: Right. Right. Like that’s possible. Anyways, typos can’t be. Okay. So, we talked about block editor changes for content creators in our last show, but today, I’ll list out, there’s about six changes for developers that were highlighted in a recent post on Make Core. This week, the Gutenberg team released a flood of dev notes for WordPress 5.6. And so, those include, number one, new create blocks from inner blocks template block API. Wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a mouth full.
Mark Uraine: Yeah. Yeah. Can we say block anymore in that single title? The second one is called Changes to Toolbar Components in WordPress 5.6. That’s a good one. Third one, Editor Styling Changes in WordPress 5.6. Fourth one is Reusable Blocks Extracted into a Separate Package.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s quite interesting because it now allows you to use reusable block also in the widget screen, and also in the site editor if you need it to. Otherwise, there would all be just bundled with the editor. So, that was an interesting relationship to learn about. Sorry.
Mark Uraine: No, I think that’s a good point. I remember Justin Tadlock from WP Tavern asking about that early on like, “Well, are we going to get reusable blocks in the widget screen, too?” And there you go, Justin. All right. So, a number five, Block Supports in WordPress 5.6. And the last one that I have on this list is a Block API version two.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. We’ve touched upon that, I think, in the last episode as well, maybe we were kind of fudging it a bit, how that is. So, now we have a whole blog post about the Block API version two.
Mark Uraine: That’s right. Yeah. And the WordPress 5.6 field guide was posted just this week by Michele Butcher-Jones, and this includes all of those change items there for the block editor and many other things in there as well.
Gutenberg 9.4
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. Yeah. Take the time and read it before 5.6 comes out, which brings us to what also was released was Gutenberg 9.4, which is over 131 items on the change log. This is past 5.6. So, this is just in the Gutenberg plugin. The features and enhancements, none of it makes it into 5.6.
I think, though there was a list of two items that back ported as a regression back fix for something that will be in 5.6, but nothing that normal users would see. Yeah.
Features
So, it has five new features. The first one I really had to read up about it, but it’s the keyboard input N9 format. There is actually an HTML tag called KBD, which when you define some keyboard inputs, you can mock them up with this tag and they look almost like keys in your flow text. And so, you need it for documentation and tutorials, and the big problem was that when the content came over through copy paste, it would always convert them through code.
To code blocks instead of its own KBD file and that has been rectified now. In Gutenberg 9.4, we also have transformations for block variations.
Mark Uraine: Wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which is really cool.
Mark Uraine: It is. You’ll find those, if you’re looking for those on the navigation block, there’s now a dropdown in the block description that is specifically for transformation. So, you can transform that navigation block from a horizontal block to a vertical navigation block, but that’s kind of where you’ll find them in the block description area.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I’m pretty sure that that’s right now just for the navigation block. I don’t know, would this apply to normal post editor blocks.
Mark Uraine: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There’s also out now a width selector for the button blocks, which that’s really cool. So, you can have a 25% or 50% or full width for that section where the button is and make that user definable. And that’s really cool. Otherwise, you needed to put in empty spaces left and right to make it work. Yeah, the list block now got some font size support. In the last version, the list block received text color controls, and now there’s a font size support. Like the rest of the blocks. I think that the team is now catching up with all those text blocks that they get all the font size as well as the color support. Yeah. And then the last part of the feature listings is that the social links now have the ability with the different sizes of the icons. So, it can be 24 or 32 or 64, the buttons for the profile links. It’s really cool.
Enhancements
That brings us to the 14 enhancements. There is now a unified inserter search UI, which was very much needed because each screen had a different search UI for the inserter would slightly work differently. So, that has been unified, and also the custom select menu styles for clearer display of the choices and the current choices highlighted by the check mark, those are the menu styles in the sidebar when you have different styles for a block and you want to change some. It’s the same for the text styles or for image style. So, you have a clearer indication, what is the active one and what are the other choices? Yes.
Mark Uraine: That’s great. Just on that one real quick, that custom select menu styles, it’s good to see this get in because I was struggling the other day with one of the themes that I had on and the large and the huge under font size were just overlapping each other and you couldn’t select, because they kind of visually represent the actual size of the text when you make those selections. So, it was really hard to kind of select which ones. It’s great to see this get in.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You want to get some polish on quite a few for UI problems that you saw so that’s really good. One of them was also polish up the link interface, but that is, I think, was actually Tammie. When I first saw it, I was really excited about it. And then I found out it was only about the menu builder in the navigation block, but nevertheless, now there’s actually a choice to create a page, and yeah, it all looks much nicer and not so crowded.
So, the code and the pre-formatted blocks now also have the feature that if they are empty and you hit backspace, that you delete them. That is consistent behavior with the paragraph block, but none of the other blocks actually have that behavior. So, I’m glad that that is caught up. The file block, it moved the URL button to the block toolbar. So, it’s not all the way to the right of the file blocks, but it’s really there where the other tool controls are in the file block.
Mark Uraine: That makes sense.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the next feature is, I was really excited about that you now can add a header by typing the slash. Well, we know about the slash commands. Slash and then block, and you can now add an H1 or an H2 or an H3, with /H2 was /H3. That’s another way of adding headings while you’re typing and you don’t have to switch controls to get them in there.
Mark Uraine: That is. I liked that one too. Whereas before you could only add a heading block, and then you had to go through and select the size, but now you can actually just type the size and it gives it to you. So, great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah and while you always could do markdown, but not a whole lot of people know about markdown. When you do two hashes, you get a heading, heading two if you’re three hashes or a pound signs.
Mark Uraine: A pound. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: A pound sign. Yeah. If you do three pound signs it’s H3 in the empty line. So, yeah, that’s great.
And then there were additional polishes of the shortcut block, the search block. I also like that there is now a wider canvas for themes of the editor if the themes don’t provide a custom width. So, it was one of the early on kind of, “Well, what is all this empty white space next to my text? Can that not fill it up?” And I think, that is now, I think something about 700, 728 or so, width on the editor itself. Yep.
APIs
Mark Uraine: Excellent. Then we had five new APIs in this change log. First one is create block, adding support for external templates installed from NPM.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s huge. Yeah.
Mark Uraine: That is. Looking at a little note here, says something about making it easier to use the lazy-import package. Yeah, and then there’s even a lazy import API here allowing local paths as an option when importing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, about the external templates. We saw Fabian Kagy on a live editing or live coding. It’s on the Gutenberg Times YouTube channel, there is an event with Greg Ziolkowski and Fabian Kagy where they talk about how external intemperance will make it into the grid block scaffolding tool. If you’re interested in that, just catch it on the YouTube channel and there is a transcript on the Gutenberg Times as well.
Mark Uraine: Good point. Yeah, this particular PR continues the work started by Fabian. So, another one is the WPE and the adding support for custom WP_home port. So, it checks for whether a custom port has been set for WP home and the WPM B json file, and there are about 19 bug fixes with this release.
Bug Fixes
Many of which are focused on the UI within Gutenberg. A lot of just little bugs popping up through the UI and needing some tweaking. So, whether it’s the query blocks toolbar or the arrow navigations for the horizontal errors on blocks, the fixing the alignment when theme styles are disabled padding for text only buttons, a lot of this stuff and there were 19 of them though, really. So, that’s great.
Experiments
The experiments category, this release, are 33 experiments, really that seems quite a bit more than I remember the last couple of releases being, 33. So, obviously there’s a lot of work going into this right now, starting off with some Full Site Editing blocks. The post excerpt block allows editing for generated excerpts.
So, when you’re in a query block or something, you throw in your post excerpt block, that kind of gets repeated on each one of your list items, you can edit it. You can edit it right in that block, your excerpt, adding wide and full alignment.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I edit all the blocks that are, because the block excerpt block is also in the query block, right?
Mark Uraine: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, can I….
Mark Uraine: Well, if you edit one, it will only edit that one. It won’t edit it for all of the list items, but just for that particular list. Good question.
Adding wide and full alignment options to the post site title blocks, cool. And another one under Full Site Editing blocks is the query block, which we just talked about a little bit, updating the order of settings and filters in the sidebar. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier on the introduction of the show. Spending time with settings is pretty much my life on that query block, trying to figure that out. So, the site editor also saw some improvements in the experiments refactoring the menu creation code. So, how the menu’s created, polished the template and navigation. The template navigation menu, that’s the black sidebar that appears in the Full Site Editing instance on the side. Whereas before it was very rudimentary and it was really just kind of getting a thing in place. It’s starting to see some improvements now and it’s making a lot more readable, a lot more understandable.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s coming along, really.
Mark Uraine: It is.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Uraine: I’m really happy with the improvements I’ve seen there. There was also global styles improvements, updating styles to rely on CSS variables for colors and gradients, adding support for line height at the global level. And then also allowing that line height to be disabled by the theme Json file, of course, because Birgit, when we add a feature, we need to add a way to turn it off.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yes. Absolutely. And that’s how WordPress jives.
Mark Uraine: I love that. So, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I like that… Go ahead.
Mark Uraine: Oh, I was just going to continue with a few of these others, like navigation block, fixing the color support declaration, popover season added sticky boundary element prop. And then there’s some block support, like adding font style and weight options with combined UI. Yeah. Really good experimentation happening. I love it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Definitely time to switch them on and try them out. If you actually, we probably said it before, but if you use a block-based theme together with Gutenberg, it will switch off the customizer and the widgets screen, and get you into the site editor, which is a separate screen from the block editor. So, it’s all the different technology terms that we will have to reconcile here.
Performance/Documentation
Continuing on the changelog, there were three performance items, or items that increase performance on the editor, and then six documentation items. And I’m pointing out one, which is the updated theme.json documentation. Then all the new properties have been added. That’s where, in the future, themes will set the support for either colors or for the right and left alignment, define the colors or the color palette and all this it’s now in one file, the theme.json file, which is really cool.
And that’s also the documentation for the block supports style properties has also been updated. So, if you are trying to get a block-based theme going, that’s definitely some pages to look up to. And then there were about 20 typos and tweaks on the documentation. Yeah.
Mark Uraine: Birgit, are you recruiting more people again?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well that is not documentation that I’m responsible for.
Mark Uraine: Right. Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We don’t fix typos. We are multicultural from all kinds of different languages.
Mark Uraine: I love it when I see 21 PRs for typos and tweaks in documentation, because honestly, I naturally just assume that’s either one or a couple new contributors reaching out, or kind of branching out into contributing into WordPress. A lot of times typos and tweaks to documentation or someone’s first contribution to the project. And so, when I see that many like that, I kind of get excited, oh, maybe, maybe there’s some new people coming in.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that. Yeah. That’s actually how I got to be a contributor as well, is that I updated the documentation page early on, and I think in 2018, and I wrote about it on a blog, my No Code contributions to the Gutenberg repository. Yeah. And so, I’ll share the link in the show notes. People can read up about it, especially if you’re trying to, and with just changing documentation, you go through the process of a PR without having all the messy stuff with end-to-end testing and all that to go through, but you can set up your local system and then make it work with a remote system, and that’s really an adventure. If you haven’t done that yet. That really makes me feel really high and accomplished. I like it.
Mark Uraine: It’s really cool. Yeah. It is a big accomplishment to set up a local environment to test out things and contribute. It’s no small feat, and when people do overcome that and create something, it’s great.
Code Quality
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, there were also 21 code quality changes in the version and we are going to glance over them a bit, and one was the navigation component has updated styles to reference grid spacing helper functionality, and the gallery block is also using the API version two. And then we are right through the build tools, 19 updates to build tooling sections.
Build Tooling
Mark Uraine: End-to-end tests. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: There were kind of, yeah, probably about 10 end-to-end tests that have been changed or added. And that is really an update libraries and all that.
Mark Uraine: Yeah. Each one of these contains a word that I don’t understand.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I understand WSOD.
Mark Uraine: Do you?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Widescreen of Death.
Mark Uraine: Oh, yes.
Various
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then number six items that didn’t fit anywhere, and they are now in our various section, and one of them is updating the Gutenberg FSE theme function. So, it can be filtered in for plugins and themes. Yeah, there are quite a few things that, as a theme developer, you probably need to consider when you build a theme that is used now in WordPress space. Yeah, you have people that use the classic editor, then you have the people that use the block editor, and then you have the people that use block-based themes. So, it’s quite mental load there, cognitive load as people say.
Mark Uraine: Is it possible to use a block-based theme while having the classic editor plugin active?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you don’t want to control it. I don’t know.
Mark Uraine: All right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you don’t want to edit it, that’s a good testing case.
Mark Uraine: Right. Just while we’re talking about all these scenarios, that could potentially be one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not it will come to your instance in the near future.
Mark Uraine: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: When a star 5.7 due? Something March?
Mark Uraine: Probably. Yeah. Early next year. First quarter, probably.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: First quarter. Yeah. I think I saw the aim dates for the 5.7 and 5.8 and nine for the 2020 releases. Nothing. It starts in the beginning of March again.
Mark Uraine: Okay. Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but if you look back, then eight weeks beforehand is beta one. So, that starts in January.
Mark Uraine: It’s two months. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Mark Uraine: January.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, and nobody works in December. Anyway, I’m digressing. I’m sorry, but we are at the end of the 9.4 changelog and not the show. We have still one segment we want to talk about or discuss here, but that was the release of 9.4.
Active Development and Discussion
We mentioned that there is a big discussion going on, managing blocks in the customizer. There’s a GitHub discussion. And then Andrei Draganescu hosted a Hallway Hangout this week and on Wednesday. Mark, you were there. Do you want to tell us about it?
Mark Uraine: Yeah, I’d love to talk about it actually. This is something that we’ve been really focused on lately, and we’ve kind of reached this somewhat of a fork in the road, but it’s a three-pronged fork because we have three different directions we can really go with this. If we’re looking at bringing blocks into the customizer, what happens when you click into widgets or a particular widget area?
One of the ideas might be that the widget screen, the widget editor, kind of takes over the whole customizer so that you could get a full screen and edit your widgets in their widget areas, but the other idea is keeping the widgets and the blocks in that narrow side panel of the customizer, where normally all the editing happens for the customizer anyways. And then as you edit those, allow the preview screen of your website to update in real time. That’s the other option.
And then the third option, which I know a few people are very pro, because some of the long-term customizer developers who really know that piece, they’re promoting the concept of editing blocks and widgets directly in the preview of customizer, which is kind of adding the Full Site Editing element to the customizer, and I know that’s kind of been a long-term goal of the customizer.
So, these three are the pathways that we’re trying to discern, which to go down right now. And one might be more of an MVP that could potentially lead into another one like that Full Site Editing sort of experience. But if we did do one, this one seems less likely, the one where we just open up the whole block editor and it takes over the customizer. That one seems less likely, because it kind of breaks the intended purpose of the customizer, which is to kind of see the real-time editing or preview of your edits.
And if that happened, then what would we do with the WP admin widget screen? It’d be the same thing in both the customizer and in the widget screen. So, we’re kind of at a stop with that direction, and now, it feels honestly, Birgit, like the split screen solution might be the best way to go right now, because it’s kind of how everybody uses a customizer anyways. It’ll also help us improve the mobile web side of Gutenberg and everything, because we’ll need to dial that in better and we’ll see. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting. Did Andrei also show off some ideas when you were kind of talking about the different screens? Is that in the video that people can watch?
Mark Uraine: Yeah. Yeah. So, there is a video and it’s posted on the Make Core. There’s a blog post about the hangout. And so, please chime in there. You’re welcome to leave comments on that post or on the GitHub issue, which is actually where a lot of the prototypes are shared as well. In both places they’re at. So, you listeners can get a good view of kind of the different directions that we’re discussing right now.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And Andrei did a very nice job summarizing that hangout on the Make Blog. So, we will share that URL in the show notes, but here’s a question for you, Mark. In the long run, will the customizer go away?
Mark Uraine: Yeah, honestly, that was a question that I got so many times in 2019, while all this Full Site Editing was being discussed. So, it turns out, I don’t believe it’s going to go away. At least not anytime soon. It’s going to be around for a very, very long time, and this has to do with themes and theme developers. Right now, the majority of themes are all classic, what I’m calling classic themes. They’re not block-based themes. That’s something that’s just, block-based themes are new and they’re just starting to be explored and built now. So, in the terms of having a classic theme installed on your site, you’re still going to have the customizer. You’re still going to have the widget screen. All that needs to be available to you as a user of WordPress, but there is something that’s interesting, that’s already implemented with Gutenberg is that if you have a block-based theme, it does hide the customizer and the widget screen from your menu in WP Admin. So, you actually don’t access those, because most of the features and everything those really can do will be capable of being done in the Full Site Editing experience that the block-based theme will allow you to use.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s good. Okay. Yeah. I understand it better now. Yeah. Thanks.
Mark Uraine: Yeah. Yeah. So, I don’t know if that’s frightening for people or if that’s exciting for people. Probably a little of both. I think it is for me, hopefully.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: A little of both. Yeah. It’s constant change is happening here. Yeah. Speaking of themes. So, the 5.6 will come with a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-One. We talked about it here, but currently, now Caroline Poena has posted a request for testing the dark mode for Twenty Twenty-One. And we will have links to the update on that, the blog update, the GitHub repository, and also where you can get some content unit testing going. Grab to, yeah, to fill up your theme so you don’t have to come up with all the content to just test it, but test it out, make the theme have a dark background and then see how it performs with your content. Yeah.
Mark Uraine: Yeah. That’s a good call for testing dark mode.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Gutenberg Integration + Typography
Mark Uraine: Then there’s also one other thing here is that John Q, Q as he’s known in the community, has posted Gutenberg Integration plus Typography Tools roadmap. So, after months of research, developing, sharing, he outlines on his G2 components blog, the roadmap to bring the G2 design system to Gutenberg and how to start an integration with the typography tools for the site editor sidebar. He spent a lot of time on this, Birgit, and I know I’ve seen a lot of his work come by here and there, as he talks about it and shares what he’s doing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s fascinating. He’s now doing daily twitches.
Mark Uraine: Yeah. Wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The twitches.
Mark Uraine: Are they daily? The twitches? Wow. Fantastic.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think it was just last week or so, but yeah, it’s really, he found pleasure in it after Helen started doing some buck scrubs live streaming in Twitch, but yeah, I’m totally fascinated by this G2 component project that Q is working on, as he did a lot of research into accessibility and on interfaces and how to change those interfaces when you have a change color palette. He even has demonstrated a feature where you upload your logo, the logo of a company, and then it grabs all the colors and then adjusts the color palette for it. It’s fascinating. That’s just magic. Yeah.
Mark Uraine: Welcome to the future.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, I really like ending with that. Do you think full-site editing is mind blowing? Wow. Look at what did I get soon after that.
So, and this is at the end, Mark. This is the end of our show today. We had, again, fully packed with total different things, but not as long as the other two. So, you get a little break there. I just wanted to remind everyone, December 10, 2:30 Eastern, 1930 UTC, the case study of Yoast’s Open Source Story as Gutenberg Times live Q&A.
And as always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 33, and if you have questions, or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. We wish Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours in the United States. And that’s it. Thanks for listening.
Mark Uraine: Thank you, everybody. And enjoy, yeah, these upcoming holidays. Be safe out there and hopefully everybody just gets some opportunity for some downtime and some good family bonding time out there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And for all the others who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, because they’re different parts of the world, have a great week!
Mark Uraine: Yes. For sure.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You take care. And if you don’t find anybody from the United States in the Slack or something, that’s it. Thanksgiving is Thursday. Nobody works on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So, you all take a break from the States, I hope. All right. Let’s get out of here.
Mark Uraine: Bye-bye.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Bye-bye, until the next time.