Gutenberg Changelog #77 – Gutenberg 14.7, what’s new for Block Themes, an upcoming Live Q&A in January

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Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #77 - Gutenberg 14.7, what’s new for Block Themes, an upcoming Live Q&A in January
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Daisy Olsen and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Gutenberg 14.7, what’s new for Block Themes, an upcoming Live Q&A in January and much more.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Announcements

Community Contributions

What’s released

What’s worked on

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello

and welcome to our 77th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 14.7, what’s next for Block Themes and an upcoming Live Q&A in January and so much more. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate and core contributor on the WordPress Open-Source Project. Today we are recording the last show of 2022, and we are all in for a special treat. I’m thrilled to welcome Daisy Olsen to the show, a master educator on Block Themes, fellow developer advocate, and first-time release lead of the latest Gutenberg plugin release 14.7. Good morning, Daisy. Thank you for making the time and join me on the show. How are you?

Daisy Olsen: I’m doing really well. Thanks so much for having me today.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re so welcome. It’s a special pleasure for me. So, for the last year, you have been working on various educational material around the Block Themes. Your workshop at Word Camp Europe was standing room only. And then you gave an updated version three months later on Word Camp US. You also worked with a training team on online workshops. If someone knows about Block Theme, it’s you. So, what are some of the most asked questions you hear from participants about Block Themes, or what are they’re most struggling with when building Block Themes?

Daisy Olsen: So, I think that people come from a lot of different places in their development career or path. I’m not sure if I have any specific most asked questions at the top of my mind. But I do think that the move to more low-code or even no-code options for creating themes is a paradigm shift and it’s going to take some time for everyone to get used to it. Given how quickly the number of block themes has increased, I heard like 250 or more potentially in the theme directory there’s certainly some energy building. I would say that one thing that I’ve heard in general is that there’s sometimes some worry around how existing theme functionality will work as we move towards a block theme first ideal. And the short answer is that the old waste will still work. We’re not replacing the PHP-based theme engine. We’re expanding on it and making it much easier for developers, and users alike to participate in the theme creation process. But change can be hard, and this is a process that will happen over time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you for that. What I see that it’s also what the last bit, that it’s actually not a replacement, it’s actually an expansion of the existing theme hierarchy framework is a little hard to hear overall. This is the new things doing things what happens with the old and I think that’s part of the problem that we have, and we are all working on it. And I know that Matias also said that, there’s nothing’s going to go away or get obsolete. It’s just that the user no code, creating a theme with the site editor is actually kind of expanding the user base of it and not shrinking it. And if the pie gets bigger, I think we all really profit from that.

Daisy Olsen: I would just add that as we think about the way that WordPress themes are created as an expansion. It will open up the opportunity for people to come in with a different skill set that maybe would not have been able to create theming in the WordPress, they mentioned the way that it has existed. And one of my very favorite things about WordPress theming is that you can take a theme created for version 1.2 and install it today and it’ll still work. You can’t go the other direction because new features have been at a new functionality. But you can take something as old as so many years ago and still basically use it today. I don’t know that anybody is going to do that necessarily. But the fact that backwards compatibility is such a big part of the culture of WordPress is a huge comfort if you’re thinking about the future.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally and that’s also what made WordPress so big is almost a 20-year backwards compatibility. And I’m really amazed, and every release party that I participate on beta releases or release candidate releases when we upgrade 4.0 something themes to the new theme, the upgrade is just seamless. Everybody who worked on the core releases has made sure that older versions upgrade to the new versions and the same happens with the classic themes that the workers will always work for classic themes. It’s not, sometimes things change, but it’s also, there’s a lot of effort also in the developer. Good work developer could not develop, a community where the effort is to make part of the block theme features available for classic themes. An example was that all the block-based template parts that can be used for classic themes, and they had that came with 6.1. Do you have seen a lot of adoption of those or what people are doing with them?

Daisy Olsen: We have more to do to encourage people to adopt those gradual adoption pathways, but the fact that they exist is really a great thing that we’re not expecting. The project is not expecting people to go in headfirst and change everything that they know and all of their workflows and everything. But there are ways that you can take legacy code because the truth is that not every client is going to be ready for a full redesign and some never are. But the pathways that we have to take legacy code and expand it to adopt some of these new features is really powerful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s not a really good business case to make to say, “Okay, now I start using the new thing for new client project.” Unless when you have a tested and proven workflow to get new clients online very easily for the last six or seven years, you are not going to change your workflow as the same available or agency freelancer to change that from today, from tomorrow. So, it definitely takes some time to adjust to that. We have seen this with other new features in WordPress they take about two to three years. All right. But I digress or we digress a little bit, but I think we always kind of need to talk out about a few things. 

Announcements

But we are ready for our announcements. And as I mentioned in the intro, we have a great good work time live Q&A planned. It’s in preparation for working with Asia. The title is layouts, layouts, layouts, and Layouts of fundamental part of how Block Themes work. And it allows you to define the width of your post content, arrange the blocks horizontally, as well as vertically. And left or right aligned and inside container blocks. And in terms of block styling, layout is a complex feature because it affects not only the container but also the child blocks in ways that go beyond the cascading style sheets inheritance.

In the show, we will have Isabel Bryson, Andrew Serong, Justin Tadlock, and we will discuss the opportunities and challenges for this layout feature and for site builders. Both or all three of them, and I’m two but only minimally available for your questions to answer them. And Isabel Bryson will also give us a little demo of the various layout scenarios, which is kind of flex and fluid and constrained. And there’s certainly some more development being done in the few, in the couple of weeks that are until we have that, it’s going to happen on January 11 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. That’s 10:00 UTC, 2200 UTC. And it’s a little bit of a different timeframe than other because Isabel and Andrew are in Australia. So, we have a little Pacific, an Asia Pacific kind of timeframe there. And Isabel is also a speaker at Word Camp Asia, so it’s going to be a great show. 

Daisy Olsen: All right. Sounds great. Another thing that has come up recently is that the WordPress support forums are now including, rather than the WYSIWYG formatter or text format block. We have the embedded block editor. So, we’re going to see the ability to add blocks and support forms. So, it’s going to be interesting to see how that is received for by the user base and if it helps to move the support questions forward in a way. But anytime we see the Gutenberg project, the block editor as we know it outside of WordPress. Outside of the WordPress administrative area, it’s really neat because it shows how the power of this contained thing that can be dropped into another environment and used in a different way, so…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We have in the show notes where we have the post from Alvaro Gameiro, I’m just checking the name, Alvaro Gomez. I had all letters write, and right now it’s in testing, but it won’t be in testing for long, so if you follow the post, there’s also a link for the test site, so you can try it out and see how you feel about it and also share your feedback on the make blog support post in the comments. We also have new posts on the new developer block. So, for five years I have now the trouble that is block and blog with the pronunciation so that the new developer blog is two new articles: One is Leveraging theme.json and the Per-Block Styles for More Performance Themes by Justin Tadlock.

And he outlines how using the theme.json two style, all your elements, the blocks, the individual blocks, as well as some of the elements centrally through the theme.Json file saves you quite a bit on CSS file length. And also code I’m a fan of Anders Noren themes and he has done some great work on the block themes and he just released his theme Oaknut, which gives you a kind of link tree way to create your page and has, he says a really small CSS file, and it comes in less than 150 lines and 120 of those are lines for the custom block styles that he includes in the theme.

So, he does not style the main thing and all the other styles that come with WordPress theme classic theme. So, I think that’s also another reason to maybe use the theme.json funnel for classic themes, which is possible. Any comments on that, Daisy?

Daisy Olsen: Just that it’s exciting to see that our CSS starts to get smaller and by moving things into theme.json we are paving the pathway to make more performant sites because we’ll be able to build up more tooling to only use the CSS in line when we need it. And that hasn’t always been the case. So, trying to keep things small and concise where possible is going to take things a long way. So, I think we’ll see a lot more improvement. And it’s great to see people trying to push the boundaries of small, can you make your custom CSS and still get a really beautiful design out there? That can be distributed out to a lot of people. Anders puts his themes out to the community through the theme directory quite often, and I think that he’s right on the front edge of where things will be in a couple of years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And as Anders also opened up his GitHub repost for the theme, so you can actually learn from his coding and kind of inspect them a little bit closer if you want to. So, the second post on the developer blog is a PHP developer’s guide to getting started with Block Development by Michael Burridge, and he practically gives you a roadmap of what you need to learn or what you need as tooling and also some shortcuts and tips. If you are new to modern JavaScript development, it’s all in one place so you don’t have to chase other sources. You might need to read up a few things, but also have some great links for you to study more.

Daisy Olsen: I love the approach of moving into trying to help PHP developers because so many of us are coming from that side of things as WordPress-focused developers. And sometimes the JavaScript is especially modern. JavaScript is, it’s kind of daunting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you start researching yourself if you don’t know where to focus. So having a curated guide is really valuable and cuts down a lot of the time that you would need to do your own research. Still and he says it in his post as well. There are some hurdles or learning curves to overcome, especially with react. But there’s also some great abstraction in Gutenberg that you can get quite a long way adopting the blocks without actually touching JavaScript. What comes to mind is block styles, block patterns with new locking features. I can see that a few agencies might say, “Okay, we are not creating new blocks because now with the block patterns.” We can style them and we can lock them down for our users to use, and we don’t have to create new JavaScript for that. That’s also a great approach is to kind of think about when do I actually have to start developing for my own custom blocks.

A while ago, must have been maybe a year and a half ago, Victor Ramirez and I, we had a little live Q&A on that approach to kind of see what an agency approach could be in a gradual adopting, here’s the word again, gradual adopting the new things. When do you really need a developer where designers and content creators actually can go a long way. So, I’ll put the link to that video and all the resources there into the show notes, so you can look up about it as well. So, the training team published two-part courses talking about block themes. It’s the developers Guide to block themes, part one and part two. So that is definitely a great resource if you want to go from Zero to Hero and get all the latest features in there. And of course, the links are in the show notes developer’s guide to. But they’re all published on learn.wordpress.org. That’s a fabulous site. And I know that some of your events that you did on online education Daisy are also available through the site.

Daisy Olsen: I have some workshops published there, and also, I will occasionally run online workshops through the Learn WordPress Meetup group, which is also part of the training team’s efforts.

Community Contributions

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. All right. We’re coming to Community Contributions and then we are for the release. I just wanted to give a shout-out to Jean-Baptist Audras address from the Whodunit Agency and is also outgoing team rep of the WordPress court team. And he tweeted that his agency released two new plug-ins mini micro plugins with creating accessible content. One is called Lang Attribute for the Block Editor. When you change in your writing the language that you can add a Lang attribute to your paragraph tag or whatever block that is, which makes you then also compact or compliant with accessibility standards for language of parts. 

And then, the second plugin is the abbreviation button for the block editor. Which helps you provide definitions for abbreviations using the tag the HTML tag, <abbr> element. And it’s quite neat because then you get a little, if there is an abbreviation, you get a little on the front end, a little squiggly line or something like that where you can point to it with your mouse and then get the long content for the abbreviation, which is actually quite neat.

He also tweeted that worth noting that indicating language changes in content is mandatory for the WCAG or CWE compliance. And there is currently no way to do this in the block editor except for adding the code manually, editing the code manually. And this features, he says, continues this feature should be implemented natively into Gutenberg. And I just did a little digging and there has been an open issue and it’s actually goes back to the accessibility audit and there has been some movement, but not we need some developer to kind of get it on it and fix it or put it into a core. All right.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 14.7

Daisy Olsen: So, let’s move on to the Changelog for Gutenberg 14.7. Gutenberg 14.7 was released this week with 165 merch PRs by 48 contributors, nine of which were first timers. And it’s packed with quite a few features, some of which are pretty experimental. And you would need to enable them through the experiment settings. And namely, that is a tabbed sidebar that splits out your block control settings between appearance, tools, styles, and other settings. Hopefully the hope there is to make it a little easier to navigate big improvements to the navigation block media selection from the inserter and more controls for the inner blocks of flex layout blocks. Other core blocks receive some small refinements that make the overall experience more consistent. There are also 19 bug fixes for accessibility improvements and quite a few documentation and code quality updates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And congratulations, Daisy, for your first Gutenberg plug-in release. How was that experience?

Daisy Olsen: It was exciting and I learned a lot about how the release post comes together quite a bit that goes into it and I hope that I have another opportunity to go through this process again. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I found it when I did. So, mine was actually 13.7 yours were 14.7 so it’s kind of a bookend kind of there. And I really learned quite a bit how the whole thing comes together and about PRs and about all the processes that there are quite a few automations happening and how to handle between release candidate and stable, how to handle updates that need to get into the release. Everybody who wants to be should start reading about the release process and see if you want to volunteer for that. That definitely needs some technology background on that. That’s not something for a fly-by contributor of course, but you get help from others. 

Enhancements

All right let’s dive into the changelog as mentioned, the block library, some standard core blocks got some refinements. The first one is that the heading block now has a class name of WP/block/heading, which means that you can target any heading with your CSS, and now that that’s in place. And it’s kind of a prototype of getting other blocks, also having a specific class name so you can target again, that was some in and out from the team that it was in there at the beginning and then they were moved around a bit and now they’re coming back. 

I see how that’s kind of going to work out the navigation block, I think we’re going to talk about the navigation a little later in quite some detail because it has a revamp and it’s in the experiment. We’re going to talk about that a little later. The template part block has now you now see in the site editor the colorized template parts, what is ahead of, or what’s a reusable block when you go down the list view on the left-hand side, you see some color coding there. Your eyes and your brain can better disseminate the different pieces of your page.

Daisy Olsen: I really like that. I find visual cues to be very helpful. Things like if I were on a staging site, I might change the theme on it to be some obnoxious color on the admin side. I know that I’m in staging, but this is a small improvement just to give you a visual cue of what is a bigger piece of your list view rather than the individual blocks that are within the content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And your reusable block, I don’t know if you said it, but the reusable blocks also have this colorized outline. The page list block hasn’t been touched for a while, but it gets on refinements that it actually expands in the list view, and you can change the starting page. If you are on a page that’s kind of the beginning of a set of other pages here, like a hierarchy, you can add links to the subpages in the page list block that you can add to the side of your page. So, you can outline the subpages as well. That was still missing. It was available in the other editor, in the menus, but the list block now has that, too. And the table block now, there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the table block. But now, it supports the colspan attribute so you can merge cells from the same column into one place in the table HTML and you have some listed tables if you want to. But that was definitely important when you copy-paste tables from another page or another text editor into the block editor that you keep the colspan attribute aligned so the columns and rows align correctly.

Daisy Olsen: I’d say that, just in general, anytime we improve the ability to paste content in from another place is a good thing. Because the truth is that we don’t always start our writing within WordPress or we’re using something that was collaborated on some other location. So, trying to keep things aligned with how they might exist in other places is super helpful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Really. Well, really, we use Google Docs quite a bit, or I use Google Docs quite a bit. And from the beginning of the block editor, I was so amazed how seamless the copy and paste works from Google Docs to block editor, if you are sparse with your design on Google Docs. The layout you have to do on the other side, but it brought over the headings, the list, the indented list, and all that. It’s a really good place. But now, we can also do the tables, yes.

Daisy Olsen: Another thing that I use is to pull in markdown, and I love that it just magically turns into HTML.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are actually markdown shortcuts that you can use on the block editor, yeah. That’s really cool. I need to do more markdown. When you paste markdown into GitHub, it kind of ceases that code and you cannot… It was weird. But post it into WordPress, and you can all read it. So, there was quite a few changes to the components, mostly adding a new opt-in for background color and for opt-in props. So, you can actually use that component.

The global styles component got a new on-change action. So, when the color to the color palette, so when you click on the color palette on the… So, on the right-hand side, you see the color palettes and you see, every time you change the color, the little circle next to the property takes on the color. But when you click on it, it always went back to the default setting of the color palette.

Now, when you click on it, you see the color that was in there before also in that little window in the color palette. So, if you just want to change the view of a color, then you don’t have to navigate to the color again and then change the views. You really see, okay, this was before and this is… So, it’s a really good improvement for changing colors. And yeah, I really love it. That’s why I pointed it out.

The others are more like code quality improvements there. And then, now, the block editor gets the insert of the block editor. It gets a new media tap. So, now, you will be able to add pictures right from the inserter instead of going to go to the media library selected, come back to the editor. It’s now very seamless, which means that there are additional tabs. There’s one additional tab. And it gets a little crowded. So, you have the blocks, then you have the patterns, then the media tab. And your reusable block are still there, but they are replaced by an icon. And that’s the icon that you see on other reusable block references. So, I really like it. You get also some preview to the pictures. And so, it’s tested out. It’s quite amazing.

Daisy Olsen: And then at the bottom of the area, you still get an option to load up the old media library modal overlay. So, if you prefer that, it’s still there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, good point. Because the media library view gives you a lot more pictures to look at to select from. Because the other pictures in that view, you see one at a time in a little preview and you have to scroll through them. But if it’s just an image that you uploaded the last week or the last two weeks, depending on how much content you provide, it’s a really neat shortcut.

Daisy Olsen: So, the layouts control has been added to flex layout blocks, notably the row and the stack, so that you can fit. What is it? Fit, flex, and contain. Basically, those are not the right words. I wish I have to cover.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Fluid.

Daisy Olsen: Yes. So, it gives you more control over how those two group block types will display the blocks or how the inner blocks or child blocks will be structured.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You also get now a minimum height block support under dimensions for the container block. Container block is like a group block or the cover block. Because it’s hard to fill something when it’s in it, it doesn’t have a maximum height thing or minimum height to put an image that fills up the whole block. So, that’s also something in there. And you can also resize the children or inner blocks. Resizing children is really hard. That’s why I try to find a different. Because the parent-child relationship, that’s more like a developer thing. It’s not for, yeah… But, yeah, that’s a great addition to that. Scrolling down to the experiments. And then, there’s a whole lot of things for the navigation block.

Experiments

Daisy Olsen: So, there’s a new experiment flag that you can enable or opt into by going to Gutenberg experiments and checking the box. And what this is going to add is, in the sidebar controls for your blocks, where you would normally set your appearance settings or any other settings that are part of that block, it’s going to split out the appearance items from everything else. So, there will be a new tab interface in that sidebar, so that you can minimize the amount of scrolling that you need to do. So, it’s an experiment. And feedback, obviously, welcome. I don’t know how much it’ll change, but it’s a cool idea. I like anything that we can do to make the interface less overwhelming will be beneficial. But that is a new experiment. And I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The navigation block also uses that space in the sidebar to actually have an off-canvas editor. That’s how it’s used now that, in the sidebar, so you get a list of your pages or the menu items that are in the navigation block. So, you have a little bit more space to edit them and rearrange them and, also, add new pages to it, because the little place that you had in the navigation block, if it’s in the header, you have overlapping issues with links and setting block tube settings. And it was a total chaos, I would say. Yeah, if you really wanted to get in there.

And it was hard to actually add sub menus. And this feature makes it really, really easy to create sub menus. And it’s almost like a mini-version of the old menu navigator from the WP admin, the old menu settings there. And you can add and remove pages or links quite easily now, in addition to the being able to add other blocks to the navigation bar, like a search block or a site logo block like that. So, yeah, test out the new navigation block, because it’s a test that has gotten quite a few revamps from the original features, and if you like it better.

So, the experimental settings that you see now in that menu item, one is the zoomed-out view where you can see all your template ports and all your themes all in one place in thumbnails. And then, the off-canvas navigation editor. And then, there’s also a… I haven’t tried it yet, but I heard about it yesterday on the hallway hangout for the FSE project. There is a global styles color randomizer. So, if you are not very good in color combinations, you can select one color, or the randomizer gives you a full palette for your styles. It’s a really interesting thing. It’s more a gimmick, but it’s like the dual tone or the gradient.

But the people who want to work with colors, it’s definitely an improvement. And then, the fourth one is the block inspector tabs would be with the settings and the appearance controls changed. So, for experience, it’s been a while that we had four experiments happening in the block editor. I think it was the early days of full-site editing, had quite a few experiments. But that was back in 2020, early 2020. And now, two years later, almost three years later, we have new experiments, also.

Daisy Olsen: I think that’s a great thing because it shows we’re feeling confident with what’s not experimental anymore enough to go out into new territory again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sometimes, it’s also hard to isolate a feature into a separate place that it’s turned on and off. But yeah, it definitely has… But you need testers. So, if you are in the get the new version, check it out and let your feedback be known. It’s really important that those things are tested very early and feedback comes in, even if it’s not testing or if you don’t find a bug, but you say something is quirky or, “I don’t understand things, yet,” it’s very, very helpful when you let the team know. The document there were… Do you have anything else that you wanted to add to that?

Daisy Olsen: No, all good.

Documentation

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There are a few documentation edits happening there. And I only want to point out that the storybook site that’s online or that you also can get locally with the Gutenberg thing has now a link to the component folder on GitHub. When you look at a component with all the isolated, with all the features or features, attributes, on and off switches, different color scheme, you can test it on the storybook site. But when you want to check out the component, you get a direct link to the place in the Gutenberg report for the source code, so you can really double-check certain things. So, it’s a really good tool when you get down to the component level on whatever you want to build and use the storyboard to test your code.

What is Active Development or Discussed

So, this was the Gutenberg 14.7 change log. Well, thank you for going over it with me, Daisy. We are now in the section what’s in active development. And I have a few things there. One of them is that the team is working on making style variations theme-agnostic. What I understood with that is that you can use theme style variations that you selected even with a different theme.

Daisy Olsen: There are a few parts of it, the way that I’ve seen it in the design panels. And one is the other installed themes that may not be active on your site. The variations will be available, also, to be able to edit them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool.

Daisy Olsen: Which is very cool. And then, to be able to import and export style variations from other places is another piece of it. So, I think that just a general expansion of the way that we can work with style variations is going to be really interesting. But, yes, theme agnostic is a great way to put it, because really, with the right base for how those style variations are created, particularly in terms of how things are named for color palettes and such, you should be able to take a style variation and put it onto any site that’s using a theme.JSON. So, I think that it’s been a really great thing with the way that 2023 default theme was created. And it spearheaded this idea that we should be able to use these in more than one way. But this is one piece of making it easier to switch themes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And even if that’s not a one-on-one good fit, you definitely get 80% there when you switch a theme to use the same styles that you had and then adopt what is missing. Because, you mentioned in the sentences, if the color scheme is not standardized from one style variation to the other, it might be a little bit wonky at first, but you can certainly adjust it. And I also can see one feature that could be used someplace else or in some other way is to just import style variations from other places. Like, if a theme developer has a website where have additional style variations that he doesn’t want to package with his or her theme, it certainly would make it available, just download it and add it to it. I can also see the 2023 theme as a community-wide effort. And there were 38 style variations that were submitted to be included, and 10 of those were selected. But now, there might come a way where you can actually add some of the others into your site, at least.

All right. So, Joen Asmussen, he’s on the design team and one of the early design leads on Gutenberg, has started quite a while ago, every two weeks, posting on the design team’s make blog his design shares. And the one from last week had a few things in there that I want to point out. So, wordpress.org is in a huge site overhaul. And in the post, you see the markups of the dev hub, which is the developer site, and the job site. And there’s some great visuals. Sorry, I can’t show them to you in the podcast. But, of course, I share the link in the show notes. But you see the updates of the dev hub pages as well as the jobs pages on the org, on how they are designed and worked on right now by the meta team. Have you seen those designs?

Daisy Olsen: Some of them. I haven’t seen the post, but I saw some of the designs other places, the meta team.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The design process is quite a long one. There’s a second round of feedback now through the docs team because they are the owner of the sites. So, maybe I should find that as well and put it in the show notes. Another one is that the design team created the designs for a future style block. No, style book, not a block, style book. The name is still not final, but what it is, is actually a neat feature where you can see on a screen for each block how it’ll appear on your site. That’s not new. You had this with any of the themes that you got a page where you can look through how my heading’s going to be looking at. But now it’s for every block. And you can now, also, on the right-hand side, see when you check a different style variation, see how the blocks change with that.

And that is a fabulous feature. It really makes that coming up with new things or checking out new things like a new style variation, or so. It comes really handy. There is no surprise. There is no, “Oh, Don, we didn’t look at it beforehand, but there are two things wrong with the table block,” or something like that. You see it before you do it. And then, you can do some fixes, if you want to. But you see how the site really works, not only on the front page but with every block that you put in there.

And when I tested it, what I also saw is that it also includes the third-party blocks. So, if you have from JetBag or from Jost or from Coblocks, all those blocks will also show up in that and you see how they will change with a change of the style variations, which is, I find that particularly important because many of those block suites came out in the early days of the block editor, and some of them have not been updated. And you will see it there, too, and see which ones are actually a little bit that needs some more TLC there.

Daisy Olsen: I think of this as like a unit testing feature. But rolled in, instead of having to be imported, it’s available. Once it gets in, it would be available all the time. So, you can always double-check how things are looking without importing content or some of the other ways that we’ve had to do this kind of unit testing in the past.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The feature is merged into the code base. And it’ll be released in the 14.8 release. But it’s also available, it’s already available in the Gutenberg Nightly version, if you want to download that and get an early look at it. I really loved it. And then the last one from that post is the… Is it in any post? There is a video in the design post on the reorganization of the editor.

It’s also coming or slated for 14.8, is that the editor screens receive some reorganization that it’s better positioned for the future enhancements like the browse mode. And the poster design post has a short video for the new way of things. So, it’s more like an organized version. Right now, when you click on the appearance editor link in the WP admin, where you get your right into the editor of your homepage, which is a little bit confusing, now, when you click on it, you get the menu on the left-hand side.

And what you see in the canvas is actually just a view. There’s an edit button where you can start the editing, but you are not going to edit by accident. Or, you can then navigate to the other template parts much easier instead of getting out of the canvas. There are all these little things where little annoying things are taken care of. And I’m looking forward to that. Some of the UI experiments, new UI is already in the experiments, but that gives them a new home, so to speak. Any comments on that?

Daisy Olsen: No, I look forward to seeing more about what’s coming.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really cool. I think there’s so much more coming. And I’m looking forward to 6.2 because some of it is definitely slated. We don’t have any plans yet on the 6.2 release cycle. That’s a very shortening… It’s a nice shortening of things. Instead of release cycle, you say recycle. Well, the state of the word is coming up. And I’m sure we hear a little bit about what’s coming in 2023, a review of 2022. It’s on December 15th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern 1800 DTC. I always need to check my calculations on the time zones. That’s just a shout-out for don’t miss it. It will be recorded, of course, for anybody who has no time at 1:00 p.m. or in the evening. So, Daisy, is there anything? How can people reach you if they wanted to connect with you? And what is in store on the online meetup?

Daisy Olsen: Let’s see. So, nothing scheduled for online meetup, as we’re coming into the holiday season. If you’d like to get in touch with me, I am Daisy O, the letter “O,” on mixed Slack. And also, that’s my WordPress profile. Most other places, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, I’m DaisyOlsen, all one word.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So, so we’re coming to the end of the show, and I will thank you very much for spending the time with me here and going through the change log. Good work on all the good educational pieces that you do. And if you have any questions, still listening about block themes, you can contact me. But I will point you to Daisy, in shortcut, unless we find, of course, already material online. She also has one post in the developer blog. What is that about?

Daisy Olsen: It was about the various ways you can use the home template and post template options and theming.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. As always, the show notes will be published on the gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 77. And if you have questions and suggestions or news that you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. Yes, that’s an email address. No slack, no Twitter. Well, of course, you can always follow us on @gutenbergtimes on Twitter. We also have pinned on the profile page our place on Mastodon. If you have left Twitter, just go there. It’s a public page. You can still see it and link it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Daisy. Wishing everyone wonderful holidays and a happy new year. And I’ll see you on the other side until 2023. Goodbye.

Daisy Olsen: Thanks so much for having me, Birgit. And happy holidays to everyone.

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