Gutenberg Changelog #78 -State of the Word, WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg 14.8 and 14.9

Gutenberg Changelog 78 - Hector Prieto and Birgit Pauli-Haack
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Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #78 -State of the Word, WordPress 6.2, Gutenberg 14.8 and 14.9
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Birgit Pauli-Haack and Hector Prieto talked State of the Word, Gutenberg releases 14.8 and 14.9, WordPress 6.2 and beyond. 

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

State of the Word

Gutenberg Times Live Q & A

Gutenberg Times Live Q & A: January 11th at 5 pm ET / 22:00 UTC Layout, Layout, Layout.

Isabel Brison’s talk at WordCamp Asia

WordPress and Gutenberg Releases

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to the 78th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In this first episode of 2023, I wish all our listeners a wonderful, happy, prosperous and healthy new year. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg releases 14.8, 14.9, WordPress 6.2 and beyond. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate, a full-time contributor to WordPress Open Source project. My guest today is Hector Prieto, full-time contributor on the WordPress Core team, coordinating multiple WordPress and Gutenberg releases. And it’s a great pleasure to finally have you on the show, Hector. Having a conversation about Gutenberg and WordPress with you is a wonderful way for me to start this new year. Happy New Year, feliz año nuevo, Hector. How are you today?

Hector Prieto: Happy New Year. Hi, Birgit. I’m excited to join you on the podcast. It’s my pleasure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, the pleasure is really all mine. Where are you right now? Did you have a great holiday break?

Hector Prieto: I’m currently in Alicante in Spain, very close to the Mediterranean Sea. And today we have a lovely sunny winter day with nearly 20 degrees Celsius. I had a few days to recharge and spend time with the family. What about you, did you enjoy your holidays?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, that’s some warm weather there in Alicante. I would love to have that. But here in Florida it’s balmy, too. It’s about 27 degrees, so we are in the air conditioning right now. Yes, my husband and I, we spent the week in Mexico City between Christmas and New Year’s. We saw some great art, powerful murals from the ’50s and ’70s and ’60s. And we had fantastic food and a fabulous New Year’s event. It was great, at a restaurant over the roofs of Mexico City, so we really liked it.

Hector Prieto: Wow, sounds really nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, Hector, as you are the first time on the show, maybe you can share briefly with our listeners your WordPress origin story. When did you come across WordPress the first time and what do you work on now?

Hector Prieto: Well, my first time working with WordPress was around 2015 when I worked at the startup agency building sites. However, it wasn’t until 2020 that I first moved into the contributor space, and here we are. I am currently sponsored by Automattic to work full-time in Core in project management-related duties and supporting the development of WordPress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s wonderful. Well, thank you. So 2015, that’s just about two years before Gutenberg was introduced into the community. Did you, at your agency, have Gutenberg on the radar already, or did you heed the call to learn JavaScript deeply?

Hector Prieto: It wasn’t until 2018 that we started using Gutenberg for the first time, when it was first released in 5.0.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Then the time between learning about WordPress and then starting contributing, that’s about five years. That’s pretty much the time that it took me to really embrace the contributing on WordPress, but I started at the Community Project in 2014. 

Announcements

All right, so there are a few announcements that were happening since the last podcast episode. If you haven’t watched it yet, the recording of Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word is available on WordPress TV. The transcript and answers to the questions that didn’t make it into the recording can be read on the follow-up post, State of the Word Reflections. Josepha Haden Chomphosy kicked off the State of the Word with a reminder on the four freedoms of WordPress, that you are free to run the program, you’re free to study and change the code, you’re free to distribute your code and also redistribute WordPress.

She also recorded a separate WP briefing with her reflections in episode 45, State of the Word Reflections in which she highlights, among other things, learn WordPress, that 12,000 students actually went through the courses and the workshops already since the inception. And she also highlighted the WordPress Playground, which is a tool to run WordPress in the browser. You don’t need a server, you don’t need a database. You can run it in the browser and test plugins and themes. I think that changes how we approach some of the discovery for WordPress. We talked about it on the show here as well, but it’s definitely something that will have so many ramifications in the WordPress space later on when it’s still very raw and very not production ready. It’s just an idea that has already a proof of concept. And then the recap posts from the community are linked in the Gutenberg Weekend Edition 239 from December 17th, and you can check it out from there.

I also have a side note that the Pew Research Center received a shoutout for the politology quiz that they built with blocks and had one million people already taking it. Seth Rubenstein is the lead developer and was a guest on a Gutenberg Times Live Q&A last year. And he gave a great demonstration about their team’s work with the block editor, so as they went for the Gutenberg first approach building the website. The recording is available on the Gutenberg Times YouTube channel, and also we have a post here on the Gutenberg Times website as well. So as always, all these links are in the show notes of the 78th episode. So Hector, do you have any comments on this? What is your most exciting topic from the State of the Word? You had a few takeaways?

Hector Prieto: Yeah, there were a handful of them. I would actually highlight everything, starting with WordPress Playground. It’s such amazing technology and it’s going to open so many doors. But if I had to pick something, maybe for me because it is the thing I’m the closest to, it was a great recap about the progress WordPress made in the site editing front during the last year, to the point nowadays we can create themes directly in the editor just with blocks and patterns. This brings us very close to wrapping phase two and starting exploration around phase three in 2023. So it’s great to see that all these progress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you’re right, you’re right. And it’s been such a long journey as well. I look back at some of the history on the Gutenberg Times and the Gutenberg podcasts, and we first started talking about full-site editing in January of 2020. That was even pre-pandemic, and we had quite a few developers on our live Q&A talking about the first concepts about that. So now, three years later, it’s almost finished and it’s really cool. There are still some things to be done, but I am really excited about the start of phase three of collaboration and I have been constantly trying to unify all the various tools and methods and interfaces to streamline my workflow to produce content for the web. And if I don’t have to use multiple tools to collaborate with people, I will have arrived on internet nirvana. Yeah, it’s a high calling of course, but yeah, we are all in a space where we could maybe make it happen. So I’m really excited about that.

Hector Prieto: Yeah. Also, it’s worth noting that even when we move to phase three and we can call a wrap on phase two, phase two will not be fully finished because there’s always going to be things to do related to site editing improvements, new tools. So I can see contributors working in new features for phase three and also iterating on phase two items. Another big takeaway for me during State of the Word was seeing how much Gutenberg itself has matured. And it’s now been used in more projects such as Tumblr, bbPress, and even in some mobile apps like Day One. Also, let’s not forget how WordCamps have made a comeback after COVID hit and stopped all the in-person events. And we went from one single WordCamp in 2021 to up to 22 in the last year, in 2022. That’s amazing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a nice iteration of the numbers. 22 WordCamps in ’22.

Hector Prieto: Exactly. Especially since the community is what makes WordPress what it is, it’s the most important part of WordPress. So that’s really good to see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Having the first WordPress in-person event in WordCamp Europe, I realized how much I missed interacting with everybody else in the community and seeing new faces and interacting with old friends. I looked up the number of WordCamps that were done in 2019, in-person WordCamps, and there were 148, or 145, something like that. So there is quite a bit of time to go between 22 to 142 or something like that.

But it’s coming back especially because all those WordPress meetups, the local meetups, are all coming back as well. I think there was a note in the State of the Word that out of the 500, 260 have already come back to in-person events. And we know that WordPress meetups are actually the prerequisite to actually have local WordCamp organizers together to organize a WordCamp. So yeah, it’s all coming back and I’m glad that it’s coming back because of the connection that you have in the community. Yeah.

Hector Prieto: As I mentioned earlier, I came to the contributing space in 2020. It was during the pandemic, so actually my first WordCamp was the only WordCamp in 2021. And my second WordCamp was for computer ware in last year. So it was really nice and refreshing for me to meet all the other contributors. It is something special, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, yeah. It was great to meet you, Hector, although we had so many meetings with people on Zoom. Yeah.

Hector Prieto: Fun times.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Hector Prieto: Well, circling back to State of the Word, I would also like to point out that, last but not least, it’s really cool to see how Openverse has grown since joined WordPress about a year and a half ago. And I’m super excited to see that coming, Openverse integration in WordPress that will allow users to directly search and add images from Openverse into their WordPress site without leaving the editor at all. That’s super cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s super cool. And I think it would also be really cool to have that also go back to if somebody uploads an image to WordPress and checks the check mark, also put it into Openverse. I think that part would really make it to a 360 kind of integration. I also love that there’s not only for images, but there is a lot of audio already uploaded to the Openverse that you can use on podcasts or on videos, and add free without having to think about royalties and buying for it and all that. Yeah, so free to the community.

Hector Prieto: There’s so many possibilities there. The future is exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s really exciting. And I’m glad that it’s all happening in conjunction with WordPress. The same with the WordPress photos library, where people can just upload their photos and have it be it in the public domain and make it available to the broader community. It’s really cool.

Hector Prieto: Yeah.

WordPress 6.2

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So between Christmas and New Year’s, Hector, you published the release schedule proposal for 6.2. I think it was something we were all waiting for. Kind of, okay, how do we plan first quarter when we don’t know when the release is coming? So you provided. So if the release team concurs, what’s the plan? When will we see the first Beta?

Hector Prieto: If the proposed plan is approved, the first Beta release will be on February 7th, which is 10 days before the first of our WordCamp Asia takes place.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. In the planning schedule, you also have a call for contributors to volunteer for the release squad. So if you, dear listeners, are inclined to take part in it and you already have a little experience in contributing, throw your hat in the ring by commenting on the release post on the scheduled proposal post. And also throw your hat in the ring also means for those who English is their second language, also means raise your hand, you want to volunteer to be part of it, and then the release team is coming together. When do you expect that you will have a final plan?

Hector Prieto: The call for volunteers is open as we speak. Considering the end of the year vacation people are taking, contributors taking, I think we won’t have anything until end of next week or the following one. We’re leaving some extra time for people to come back from the holidays and chime in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Okay. Yeah, so there are only two more Gutenberg releases before the feature freeze, if I calculate that correctly. We better get started in reviewing all the great new features that are coming in, in a more consolidated way.

Hector Prieto: Definitely. I encourage all of our listeners to start testing and giving feedback. It’s always super helpful. Also, compared to the past releases, the proposed 6.2 schedule both include a fourth Beta release compared to the previous three ones to leave some extra buffer time between WordCamp Asia and release candidate one, which will be on March 7th for a final release on March 28th.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Yeah, so contributor day at WordCamp Asia is definitely going to be part of it and that is really cool to have. Maybe we need to organize some tables that do some testing there. I don’t know how far the work of Asia contributor day team is about that, but having that plan definitely gives us all focus on that contributor day. All right, cool. So to repeat that, final release could be March 28th, so that’s about three months from today. And we will have a 6.2 release, provided everything works out as we anticipate now.

And I have a reminder for our listeners now for next week. The Gutenberg Times Live Q&A, Layout, Layout Layout will be happening on January 11th at 5:00 PM Eastern. That’s 22:00 UTC. And in this show, Isabel Brison, Andrew Serong, Justin Tadlock and I will discuss the opportunities and challenges for all the layout features for site builders. And we will be available for questions and answer them.

And Isabel Brison will also give us a demo of the various layout scenarios to use. She has, with Andrew, been instrumental in building all the features into the site editor and the blocks, and it’s going to be a very interesting show. It’s also going to be a little preview on Isabel Brison’s talk at WordCamp Asia in February 2023. So join us, link us in the show notes, and don’t forget you need to register there and to be… We will have a recording, of course, with the show notes and as well as a transcript, but it’s always good to have your questions answered live by the experts on the panel, and we have some great experts there. 

What’s Released

So, that brings us to the latest Gutenberg releases. First, there’s Gutenberg 14.8. That was released in December 12th. Ryan Welcher was release lead and it had 167 PRs merged by 42 contributors, five of which were first contributors. So welcome to the project, first contributors. So Hector, what’s the most significant enhancement in this release?

Hector Prieto: Well, Gutenberg 14.8, so several changes to the site editor user interface, and introduce something I’m super excited about, which is browse mode. Thanks to this first iteration of browse mode, users can switch between editing and browsing modes in the site editor, making it much easier to navigate through templates and template parts or even add new ones through the sidebar. It’s a feature that has been long awaited and it’s finally here and I’m super excited.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it helps you with where you land when you click on the site editor. You are now not landing into editing your homepage and so now you have a better entrance into the site editor. And I really like that because it gets you better settled into what you’re going to do.

Hector Prieto: It makes for a nicer onboarding and it’s less dangerous, let’s say, because it’s much more difficult to break your design just as soon as you land on the site editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, totally. So the navigation block also had some enhancements, especially with the migration from the old menu. So if you have a location primary, it will now fall back to the navigation menu from the classic menu. That is really helpful on the transition. There are other fallback updates made that it also uses the most recently created menu from the classic theme when you start migrating to a block theme.

Enhancements

So that is definitely a good help for transitioning from a classic theme to a block theme. But also it kind of decreases the mental load that you don’t have to recreate all your menus when you switch out the theme, which is something that was sometimes really critical in the classic menu, in the classic theme space, where everybody had different menu locations. And so I don’t think that it’s completely solved yet, but this is definitely a first step.

Hector Prieto: Yes, it’s a step on the right direction. We all know building menus is one of the most challenging aspects of building your site. And contributors are making a huge step for making the menu building process much easier.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There’s also one that came with 14.8 that is for the query block. The parent block is they removed the color block support just because it was always clashing up against the other blocks that are in the query block for the post template for the title and the excerpt. You could kind of get lost in which color did we do, and where do we do that? So removing it from the wrapper query block is definitely a good choice because it removes some of that confusion of where colors are actually set.

Hector Prieto: Exactly. Contributors have seen a few inconsistencies when adding the color to the wrapper query block, between the title, between the navigation links. So now the colors block supports are all in the inner blocks and there’s no space for confusion.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So what else do we see there? Yeah, I think that was it on the 14.8 release, on the highlights. There are certainly the sidebar tabs for the navigation blocks. There is great work on the experimentation that happened. So right now we have five areas of experimentation in the Gutenberg plugin and there is only two more freeze, two more releases to get them out of experimentation into the production of the Gutenberg plugin. One of them is the sidebar for the navigation block. The other one is the separated settings tab in the sidebar that separates the styles from the features. And then the others, I don’t recall right now. Hang on, I’m going to check them out. I just had it there and then I closed my browser because, I don’t know, sometimes I just randomly close browser tabs, which is a really good way to confuse myself.

Hector Prieto: The type interface is making good progress and it’s something we would likely see out of experimental very soon.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah. And then is the global styles for custom CSS is actually in… We all wait for that, but it’s now in the experimental stage and need to be switched on through experiments menu item on the Gutenberg plugin. And then the other one is the color randomizer utility that lets you mix the current color palette randomly and change it out. That’s kind of a funky way of handling your website to do a randomized color palette, but it certainly is a proof of concept of something bigger. Was there anything else in the 14.8 you want to mention, Hector?

Hector Prieto: Well, there are a few other main highlights that you might have seen, our listeners might have seen in the release post. One of them is super interesting, which is the custom CSS rules for your site. There’s now a tiny CSS text field where you can add your custom CSS directly in the editor. As we all know, with great power comes responsibility. So it’s nice that you can add a custom CSS directly in the editor, but let’s not overuse the important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s definitely a way to… But that was before, so site editors or site users or site owners who used the custom CSS piece found that that was the missing piece to actually sign on to the full site editing, because they couldn’t do those very fast changes like changing a font size somewhere or changing a space somewhere or change the color of a border very easily by just using the developer tools, identifying the marker, the selector, and then just change the color in a custom CSS. Yeah, it opens up the capabilities for that.

You need definitely have file editing capabilities on the server and that sometimes was not available to anybody. But those who used it, they really missed it in the file site editing, in the site editing features, so that is really a good thing. And there is also a… It’s not yet released and it’s not merged yet in, but I know that Carolina Nymark is actually working on custom CSS for single blocks. And I think that’s also a good way to, in the paradigm of getting atomic design going, that that’s probably a better approach than having custom CSS being pulled in for every site page or page with the custom CSS. Rather do it per block.

Either way, it’s kind of a interesting feature that people want to have some control or at least go back to that what they are used to do and figure out how they can change it. Well, that definitely was a changelog of 14.8. I don’t think we’ve forgotten anything. I think we, in the release post by Ryan, it was a reorganized…. Oh, the style book is definitely something that was in 4.8. We haven’t talked about it. So do you want to talk about it, what that does?

Hector Prieto: Oh yeah, definitely. The style book is a super cool new feature, which is extension of the style site editor. The style book in a nutshell gives you an overview of all the available blocks you have in a single place so that you can easily browse all the blocks you have available and play with their design.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: When Gutenberg first came out, there were quite a few initiatives where you could have a unit test for blocks, where I think Rich Tabor actually had a plugin and I also worked with some of our clients back then when that we had a list of all the blocks in a page and then looked at it, how the theme works with it. And that was kind of a block unit testing in design. And with the additional features that come with site editing, it was a hard time to figure out what is a change in color on the paragraph block will have additional ramification throughout the site, or when you change style variations.

So I’m really glad that the style book, that’s a menu item in the site editor. You can go there and then see all the blocks that you have. And you get an access to the style variations of your theme so you can select them and then see how the blocks change. And that is so powerful that you don’t have this save and surprise effect anymore. You really look at it and say, “Oh yeah, I like it.” And you also see where the style variations may not be entirely working for your site because there are some things that are left out. So this is so powerful for the experience with the block editor.

Hector Prieto: For our listeners to picture it in their mind, it’s like having a page with demo content with all the blocks. You have it registered either core blocks or third party blocks. So as soon as you install it, applying that provides blocks, all these third party blocks will appear in the style book. And you will be able to see all of them together, play with the global styles, play with the accelerations, and see how they affect all these first party and third party blocks in a single place as if you have demo content page but automatically generated for you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it really offsets the need for these block unit testings and it’s very, very powerful. Yeah, I so agree. I think we’ve got it all now. Let’s move on to the next release, which was 14.9. And it has at the time of this recording not been released, but it will come out any hour now. For those who use the Gutenberg plugin on their sites, it’s the first Gutenberg release for 2023. 132 PRs by 46 contributors. Again, five new contributors in there. Congrats for your merge of your PR, and welcome to the project. Thank you so much for your contributions, for all of them.

Hector Prieto: It’s refreshing to see all these new contributors, even in these more maintenance oriented releases that happen during holidays. So congratulations to you all, and welcome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: What are the highlights? What did you see, or what’s in the release?

Hector Prieto: There are a few changes. They’re mostly iterative, building on top of past features and enhancements. One of them, one very cool, is a new push to global styles button that appears in the cyber blocks, which allows users to, once they edit the blocks’ style and they like it and they say, “Hey, I like this how this is looking or how this image is looking. I would like all my image blocks to look like this.” It allows them to push those styles to global styles so that they automatically affect all the blocks of that type.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And that’s also why it’s good to have this style book handy so you can actually see if you made a mistake or something like that and said, “Oh no, I didn’t consider this, so let’s do one more time.” Yeah. So that’s a great feature. Yeah, absolutely.

Hector Prieto: Also, for those who like building patterns, now when registering patterns, there’s a new property that allows you to specify in which template a pattern makes sense. Let’s suppose, for example, we are building a 404 pattern. Previously it would be released everywhere, so it would appear everywhere in all kinds of templates. Now you can limit it to only appear on a 404 template, so it doesn’t bring noise to other templates where it doesn’t make sense. So this is going to improve pattern discoverability in general as patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it also improves separation of concerns. As you said, it will not show up on every page where even if it’s not suitable for the pattern. But it also themes can then, or plugin can now create custom post types and that all, and just make those patterns available for certain custom post types. I think that is definitely a missing piece that has now been added to it. Excellent. Yeah, I’m really excited about that.

Hector Prieto: Yes, there’s a minor update following up on Gutenberg 14.5. So we are thinking, we’re looking at two months ago, three months ago, when the list view and the document outline were merged in a single panel. We have seen there are a few improvements that can be made in the design. So now, for example, the word count has been moved to the top of the outline for more clarity.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there was some confusion. Where is it now? Yeah. And then you didn’t see it at first because when you hit on update, you post and then the little notification ball totally covered that piece. So it took a while till that goes away so you see the word count and the time to read and also the block count. There were a few pieces missing. I don’t know why they’re missing, but they probably don’t seem to be very important for content creators to see. And the outline, having the other one on the list here in one it definitely makes sense to have that.

So if you haven’t seen that yet, it was in Gutenberg 14.5. It will come to 6.2, so checking it out through the Gutenberg plugin is definitely worth trying, worth a look so your site owners or the clients are prepared to find it in a different space. What I’m also very excited about is that there is now an option to import widgets from the sidebars into template parts. And that is in the whole idea of transitioning from a classic theme to block themes or make a site be better prepared to move to a site, to full site editing block theme. This is definitely a step forward. Any additional thoughts on that?

Hector Prieto: Oh yeah, absolutely. This is a very important milestone towards block adoption because it allows users to migrate from classic widgets to native blocks. It’s worth noting that it doesn’t work on template focus mode yet, it’s only available for the block inspector. But this is definitely a step on the right direction to increase block adoption.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent, yeah. And George Mamadashvili, who heads… That’s his PR. He also has a nice video on how he demonstrates how it’s going to work. So I hear quite a few people celebrating this piece to make the transition over. Another one is, this is minor thing, but the configurable settings for the fluid typography in the theme JSONs now has a minimum font size, so it can be anchored on the smallest font size. So the fluidity then can increase the font size on a bigger screen. There was a hard coded value of 14 pixels before, with no way to change. And now you can have the minimum font size, like 16 pixels or 18 pixels depending on your site needs. That’s a minor thing, but I think it is something that quite a few designers were missing.

Hector Prieto: Yes, absolutely. It’s a minor improvement, but we’ve seen lots of these minor improvements in the last, I don’t know, four or five Gutenberg releases building on top of free typography. And when you look at them altogether combined, you can see huge improvements on how the feature is becoming more and more powerful by the day.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that was at 14 point… No, one thing is still really important from the release and that is the adding shadow presets support for the theme JSON. So you can do box shadows on your blocks or wrapper blocks, and that is now available for designers of themes. There is no user interface for that yet. But as we said repeatedly here on the podcast, things will be…

Hector Prieto: It will come.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hmm?

Hector Prieto: It will come.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But it’s important to make it work for the theme developers first. Before you have all the added implementation for site owners that want to change it, you first need to know how it’s actually working so you can see where the pieces are that need to be surfaced in a user interface. So there is a new setting object called shadow, and then you can add different palettes to it for natural and crisp and sharp and soft shadows. And the PR has quite a few information about how that’s implemented. It gives you quite a few use cases on how you can do the shadow boxes for the buttons, for cover block, for menu block. If you have a sticky menu, then you can put a little shadow underneath it to see the difference between the page and the menu. So there are quite a few design use cases to try that out.

Hector Prieto: I’m curious to see what designers come up with thanks to this new setting. I can see lots of 3D buttons and shadow buttons and all these cool things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You could even do the outlines of the shadows, kind of, if you have an outline… Yeah, there are some great designs out there right now. So, from the changelog we are on, anything else that you wanted to talk about here that we missed? I know that Tonya Mark has updated the tracking issue for the web fonts API. And what’s merged in this release is the change of architecture to use the Core’s dependencies API with the web fonts API. And there’s a call for testing out there, or it will be out there, and making sure that how you use it. She has an update where she asked how you can help. And that is if you have an idea about naming the API, should it be webfonts, or web fonts, two words, or just the fonts API, which I tend to be the fonts API, but there is a renaming before everything gets into the Core that we’ll be name things right.

And then the other one is a call to test the new architecture and share feedback on your testing reports and using the web fonts API. I’m not quite sure how the planning is because it seems to be still blocked furthermore through additional architectural work. Hector, do you think that that will come with 6.2, or is it now a little late for 6.2?

Hector Prieto: Well, Tony and the other contributors are making their best to have this feature land in 6.2, so I’m pretty positive it can make it in 6.2. And the best way to ensure it can land in that version is to help with testing and with feedback. That will help unlock the architecture redesign and the renaming and everything that’s currently being discussed right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Okay. Yeah, if you all are contributing to things, dear listeners, help getting that over the finish line. It definitely needs some testing. So I think that’s the end of talking about Gutenberg 14.9. We’re coming also up on the hour, so I think we can go to closing things. Are there anything that you want to point out that are on the roadmap for 6.2 that you want to have our listeners know? And if not, how can the listeners get in contact with you, where to best meet you online?

Hector Prieto: Well, you can reach out to me in WordPress Slack. Handle is Prieto. I guess it will be written in the show notes. So please feel free to ping me there or in GitHub or in Track. I’m using the handle everywhere, so that’s easy. I would just like to circle back to the 6.2 planning and reminding everyone the call for volunteers is open. So if you’re interested in participating in the squad, you are more than welcome. We will assist you if it’s your first time. If you’re an assistant contributor, you are also welcome and we can learn from you. So everybody’s welcome, that’s the long story short.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the only thing that I want to remind you is about the next week’s Gutenberg Live Q&A with Isabel Brison, Andrew Serong and Justin Tadlock on Layout, Layout, Layout. January 11th at 5:00 PM Eastern and 20:22 UTC. That’s 10:00 PM on UTC. And as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 78. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. So thank you so much, Hector, for joining me here for the first Changelog podcast in 2023 to spend the time on preparation as well as in the show. Thank you all for listening and goodbye and again, Happy New Year.

Hector Prieto: Thank you for having me and see you soon. Happy New Year, everybody.

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