Gutenberg Changelog #89 – Gutenberg 16.6, default theme and Font Library

Gutenberg Changelog 89 Nadia Maya Ardiani and Birgit Pauli-Haack
Cover Art: Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #89 - Gutenberg 16.6, default theme and Font Library
Loading
/

Nadia Maya Ardiani and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Gutenberg 16.6, the new default theme Twenty-Twenty-Four, the Font Library and other upcoming features.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Nadia Maya Ardiani 

contributor on the training team and WordCamp Asia, and content writer in Hostinger.

Hostinger Experts series:

Community Contributions

Gutenberg 16.6

Documentation updates:

In the works

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, hello and welcome to our 89th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg’s 16.6 and some community contributions as well as features that are still in the works, that we wanted to highlight today. I’m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate, and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project. A special guest today is Nadia Maya Ardiani, contributor on the training team and WordCamp Asia, and that’s where we met for a chat at dinner, a lunch, and we did… Yeah, it was just fabulous to meet Maya and we always found a topic to talk about and to laugh as well. I’m so happy you join me today to review the Gutenberg plugin release and connect about WordPress. So greetings to Indonesia. How are you today?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Thank you, Birgit, for having me. It’s so good to be here, and thank you as well for being the first WordPresser ever to be featured in Hostinger’s WordPress Expert Article Series.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, thank you for having me. Yeah, it was a fun interview.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Because it’s only fitting to start the series with one of the people who have been doing such significant contribution to the platform, and that’s you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. So what else do you contribute to on WordPress?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Okay. So yeah, I’m a contributor on the training team and in the team I’m also a translator coordinator for Indonesian locale. And yeah, I love contributing for the training team because I enjoy sharing complex information in a more accessible way, making the knowledge more accessible for a wider audience, which is also related to my day job as a content writer in Hostinger. And yeah, in my day job, I write WordPress tutorials in the form of WordPress website articles and script for YouTube videos. And I also write about WordPress community activities like Word camps and about WordPress journeys of awesome WordPress community members, that’s like you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you. Thank you. I know that another interview was with Michelle Frechette on the Experts Series. Yeah, great job there as well. It’s really fabulous to kind of follow up on that. Yeah, I’m so glad we stayed in touch after WordCamp Asia and you just returned from WordCamp US. So how was it and what are your takeaways for that?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So yeah, it’s my first word WordCamp US, so it’s very new to me. And I also volunteered this time, and I didn’t get to attend a lot of sessions, but it always awesome to meet and have a chat with fellow WordPress enthusiasts because you don’t get to meet them every day. And I think it’s one of the WordCamp’s struggle to decide between attending the session or talking and catching up with everyone.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I know I have this every time that I have my sessions checked off to say, “This I want to do,” and I put them in my calendar and then I stay in the moment with talking with somebody and then whoosh, the time is gone and I have to catch the livestream. Totally get it. And for WordCamp US, there is a lot of FOMO that I had to endure.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Yeah, yeah. There are actually lots of interesting sessions, but as we know, we can just catch up with the sessions in WordPress YouTube channel or WordPress.tv. But yeah, I actually really want to see the one with NASA and the White House because we get to see WordPress implementation in those two websites. Because for me, it’s the most interesting thing about the session is we can see how WordPress is really for everyone because many of us in the end users, we think WordPress is only for hobbyists, but it’s actually can be for big organizations like this that require fairly customized website and high level security.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So true, so true. Yeah, the bandwidth is really broad. I’m glad you got to see that.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: And I also really love about the contributors day because as always, it’s the time for us to work together with other contributors who we usually only meet on screen. And so far the WordCamp US is kind of unique because usually we all gather in one big room, all of the teams are gathering in the same place. But this time teams which works closely related, were spread in multiple rooms. I actually love the comradery of being in the same room as all contributors, but this time I also love it because there was no confusion about which table belongs to which team, and also more space or creating breakout room. For example, in training team, after onboarding the new team members, we can split into this is the people who are interested to be content insider. This is for people who are interested to be content creator. And also since the training team is in the same room with the Docs team, there we can discuss more about cross collaboration effort regarding how to better work together with the backlink material and each other.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I can see that there’s some overlap between the Docs team and the training team, and the more we can streamline the processes between the two, I think the better it is for WordPress users to find the right material at the right time. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this report back from WordCamp US and how you found it from a contributor point of view. Yeah. 

Announcements

Dear listeners, we have one announcement that we wanted to share with you is about WordPress 6.4. So WordPress 6.4 is in less than three weeks away. WordPress 6.4 beta is only three weeks away. Don’t get scared. The last Gutenberg version for features will be 16.7. Today we are talking about 16.6, so there’s only one more Gutenberg plugin release to go and release candidate for 16.7 is scheduled for September 20th.

That’s one week longer than the usual two-week schedule. And so all the new features will need to be merged by that time. And after that, only bug fixes and fixes for blast features can be added to the WordPress release. So it’s the time to test all the Gutenberg plugins versions that go into, it will be 16.2 all the way to 16.7 and whatever bug fixes come in 16.8 and nine. 

The final release or the release for 6.4 is scheduled for November 7th, and so that’s still about a month and a half away, two months away. So just so you’ll get the timeline a little bit, we will repeat this on the next shows as well when we… Next time is with Tammy Lister. She’s on the editor tech lead, so we will have some more information about 16.4.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: It’s my first time to see how many improvements that come with one version of Gutenberg. So it’s like, “Oh my God.” So every time we release one version of WordPress, that must be a huge improvement. So by seeing the rundown, that’s the first time I realized that how much is the improvements.

Community Contributions

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s a change log and that can be overwhelming indeed. And the last five versions kind of go into WordPress. So yes, so 16.2 and three had major jumps in improvements to the site editor and to the block editor. Especially because 6.3 and 6.4 wrap up the phase two of site editing. But 6.4 also will ship with the new default theme and amply named 2024, and it’s also expected to be in early November together with the 6.4 release, the designs are already available and you can follow up on the introduction post on the Make WordPress core website. We mentioned it on one of the previous episodes as well, but I really like to talk to you about, Maya, you looked at it and what do you think about the new theme?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: As an end-user, I’m really excited to use this theme because this one is aimed to be a multi-purpose team, right? I sold three use cases in the Make WordPress website, one specifically tailored for entrepreneurs and small business, one for photographers and artists, and one for writers and bloggers. So it provide a better look into how the theme would look like when it is used to display lots of images, when it’s used to show multiple chunks of text and how it may look like as a landing page, which is so cool because I can instantly imagine, “Oh, this is the stuff that I can do with this theme.” Since it’s a collection of templates and patterns which combine into a theme, it’s even cooler because the patterns include in it, it has various home templates or different use cases such as out page and then project overview are SVPs. So yeah, it’s basically very handy for no-code people because we can just… Yeah, I want to make this, I want to make this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what you’re saying is that it gives you a vision or an inspiration of what your website could look like when you use that theme and then gives you all the tools. I like that it also thinks about… Or the creators think about the full page templates so you don’t have to assemble all the things.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Yeah, it’s very nice to not have to create everything from scratch because sometimes it can be intimidating to start from a pure blank slate like that. At least that’s for no code people like me. But this one is the default color and typography style are already versatile and very timeless. It gives professional and elegant flare in general with the understated color and the sunset of point variation. So it can be used for any, many needs.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And with the site editor providing all the design tools, you can really make it your own in terms of the look and feel. And I really like that. I think it’s the first default theme that’s not very opinionated about the design that is only for a niche or for a certain topic or so. It’s more really that is actually the purpose that you just said is that many people can see themselves building with that theme, and I am really happy that comes out of it also for you. Yeah, there is the Figma I can share in the show notes. I’ll share also the link to the Figma file where you can kind of browse the designs. It’s right now in development, the report from the leads of Jessica Lishick and Maggie Cabrera and they both were at WordPress US Contributor Day and they had about 31 contributors at the theme table who wanted to work on the theme.

So there is some rapid development going on, and I will also share the GitHub report link where it’s all happening with the issues and the PRs and everything, and where you can see all the discussions. The GitHub report will closer to release candidate, it will disappear and then it will be on track because that’s just for development. Default themes are then housed with the core files on a track. Yes, in the repo, yes. Another community contribution gets you all the way from that no-code site builder, single site builder, private person to all the way to the enterprise level of using WordPress. And there is a new guide for WordPress for Enterprise Together.

So where the major WordPress agencies that deal with enterprise clients and there are Big Bite and 10Up and Alley, Human made Inpsyde and XWP and they got together and in WordCamp Europe as well to think about can WordPress be advertised or shape the conversation with enterprise IT people and CEOs about using WordPress for content management system on their large scale organizations. And they came together and created a free guide for WordPress for enterprise. It highlights all the high profile companies like CNN, Vogue, Google, Spotify, the White House, and many more, now NASA and also responds to some of the misconceptions that are still out there. Mainly the one that it’s not secure that it’s only for blogging and all that kind of thing. So it’s a really good guide that you as a small agency can certainly also use in parts for talking to your clients and to your customers about things.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: I like it that this guide is easy to read because sometimes people from big enterprises are not really tech-savvy. So having it with layman’s term, it can deliver the knowledge better to a wider audience about the possibilities for creating a customized platform to fit any organization. And yeah, I checked the chapters in good discussion about platform security, scalability, internationalization, solution, cost and value. Those are the stuff that enterprise really cares about. I think it shows one of the beauty of the WordPress community, everyone’s coming together for it, but to constantly improve the platform and to share to others that this is a solution you can use. And it’s really nice to see how these agencies provide insights related to aspects that are important for enterprises.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I also like that they kind of highlight the open source part, which scares enterprise, but the open source part that there are hundreds of contributors that are actually maintaining the code and doing all the performance testing. We have this awesome performance team that has brought down the load times of WordPress out of the box just for 6.3, around 20%, which is huge when you think of the millions and millions of websites that use WordPress. And I saw a statistic that already 50% of WordPress is now 6.3 installations. So the community has really reacted fast to the new versions and that will also be for 6.4. So we will share of course the article from WP Tavern that talks about it. We also share the blog post about it and with a link to download it. You don’t need an email address to download it, so it’s all free out there for you to use and to contemplate. Yes.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 16.6

Which brings us to the section what’s released and right now, we’re talking about Gutenberg 16.6 that was released earlier this week and Vincente Canales was the release manager for this. And in his release post he shared the change log and as well as some highlighted things. And we follow suit of course, and the first thing that we wanted… Most of it, there’s not really some big stuff coming in 16.6, but it was some great quality of life changes that make working in it much smoother and less confusing and more consistent together. But there are few highlights that we wanted you to know about.

Enhancements

So the first one is it says I needed to read through the PRs and look at the videos to try it out myself to actually actually know what it means. So it says, “Capture toolbars,” in the quote block or navigation block. What it means is that the toolbars for child blocks or inner blocks are now seamless attached to their parent block and offering a more intuitive and organized editing experience. They don’t jump around that much, which is sometimes a little disconcerting and distracts you from the work that you actually wanted to do. Right now they are in place for the navigation block, the list block, and the quote block.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Yeah, I think this one makes the publishing experience way more enjoyable. Because sometimes you just move a little and the block will follow through like, “Oh my god, can you just stay right there?” And I publish articles in daily basis, but it’s only recently that I discovered the top toolbar feature that we can activate by clicking, what’s the name?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The options.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: In the right panel. Yeah, the block tool work can be annoying sometimes. So having this improvement capture toolbars, this will be… And making the toolbar staying at the same nearby spot like this, I will definitely prefer this one than the following.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. I found that some users are actually struggling with the concept that depending on which block is focused, that they have a different toolbar from the parent block. And to get to the parent block, you have to know that you need to click on the leftmost kind of button to get to the parent block again. And I think I haven’t found a better way to get to it to kind of imagine a better UI for that. But I think with tying both toolbars together and just switch in place and not also move it, it’s a much better experience. Yes, definitely. Another one is that for the query pagination block, it was that you only had one or two… The pagination block is the block that you have underneath your loop block or the query loop where it says, “Okay, get me next pages,” from that query from that loop of next pages of articles.

And when you look at it, there were only two… You only saw the first two ones, and then the last two ones. But you couldn’t click to, if you say, the third one or the fourth page because you knew it was things on there you had to click on next, next, next to… You didn’t find a… And now a user can determine how those numbers in the pagination block are actually organized. You can say, “Okay, give me four numbers in between.” That’s a really good improvement considering that that was possible before in the classic theme very much so. But this is kind of getting it all feature priority and it really is a good improvement. It’s such a small thing, you would think, but navigating a list of posts deeper into it, they’re not just the first page, sometimes is really needs some support, some better support there.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Sometimes more like things that at the front end it seems like a very simple change, but I believe that under the hood that there must be many things going on, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then now you have in the sidebar, you have additional fields where you can put in numbers and some more explanation, if my explanation wasn’t helpful at all. And the next part is that the list view now has a keyboard shortcut for duplicating blocks. So if you are working through a list view by keyboard and you now don’t need to change controls to duplicate a block, you can just use command shift and D, and then that block that was just focused is duplicated. This definitely helps with rapid content creation and laying out some articles.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: As a content writer, I definitely agree with this one. This will be very time-saving.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Super, yeah. 16.6 Gutenberg also adds a custom taxonomy for user created patterns. So WordPress 6.3 came with the feature that you now could create synced and unsynced patterns, but if you have three or four or 15 of those, it was hard to sort through them. So now you can use some taxonomy labels for your creative patterns. So you can give other editors on your site a little bit more help with what are those patterns that Birgit created and now you can help them to be a little bit more organized here.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So this can be for the synced and unsynced patterns?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Yeah, this will be… Having a feature to organize it, it definitely will be beneficial for the content creators also because we can easily choose which one we want to use.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you can drill down because I can see that an organization has created at least 10, 20 patterns depending on how the different content they provide. And the beauty of it is, it’s actually based on the default taxonomy patterns, not patterns, API that comes with WordPress because the patterns are custom post type. So the built-in taxonomy is now just surfacing on the editor. There was not a whole lot of… There was development being done just to make it into the site editor, but the underlying backend was already there. So it’s good to have a fallback like that. 

Bug Fixes

So now we are coming to the bug fixes and there’s just a few that we wanted to point out. Maybe just one, no, maybe two or so. Do you want to take that?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Okay. So for the bug fixes, I like this one about the post notification link, which is the remove unnecessary space between rows and label. I think for some end users this might look like a very simple improvement that almost unseen, but I believe for those who work around design a lot will be happy with this. “Finally, I already feel it sometime ago.” Because it’s only a very tiny character, isn’t it like the space between the arrows and labels? But once it removes it, it’s like, “Yeah, this is how it should look.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it gives you a consistent look and don’t really get that. That’s fixed now. And then also for the block styles, there’s the preview of the popover is now working also with right to left sites.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Yeah, I think this is also one of the great examples of a form of striving for inclusivity and equality in WordPress because it makes a site building experience equal for everyone, whatever language you use, including the right to left languages like this. So when your site using the right to left languages, you will have the exact same experience as everyone in the world.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sometimes that kind of falls a little bit through the cracks. So some head bubble for those who record those issues on the GitHub report so they can be fixed if they are not working right. In the site editor, there’s one bug fix.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: About the unified delete button style in the dropdown menu and making it red. So I think it’s also a nice improvement, especially for end users who still learn to use WordPress for the first time because it’s easier to tell the effect of clicking this button. When you see it previously it’s blue. So people might just, “Okay, I will just try to delete this,” and turns out it delete all the stuff that they actually don’t want to delete. But by making it red, it’s making… I think it’s related to psychology of color, people can be more considerate when they offer this button. This one will do a significant effect to my content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s kind of, “Stop. Think what you’re doing.”

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Oh, what is it? What is it? It’s red. I will avoid doing something with this because it can avoid accidental deletion.

Experiments

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s part of really the small changes that have big outcomes. So the Gutenberg 16.6 also brings a new feature, new API and that’s called lock hooks. It was introduced one or two Gutenberg versions earlier and labeled as order inserting blocks. And the PRs that are accompanying it are still referring to that, but it’s on activation plugins now can have the capability to order insert blocks, enhancing the integration and automation between the plugins and the Gutenberg editor. So the examples that you see in the PRs… And I would recommend to look through the PRs to kind of see how it all works. And the change log has the list of the PRs in there. So what is it useful… And I think we talked with Ellen about it, Ellen Bauer on the previous episode about it. So you can add a like button to a comment section or a card icon to the header with this API and any other thing that you want to add to a block that’s automatically added for the user.

The user now also has with the… They created now the block inspector panel and have a plugin section there. So it identifies the plugin that added a block and you can toggle the appearance or disappearance of it on your templates and on your posts. So depending on what the use case is for this plugin that you installed on your site. So this very much expands the capabilities of the block editor for plugin developers outside of adding custom blocks or adding additional features in the sidebar. Now you can add a few content as well. So this is a really good new feature and it will come to 6.4. It definitely needs some major testing. So if you are having a test site and you want to check it out and yeah, please report back on what your findings are and if you tripped up by things.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So here in the PR, the example is log in logout, card and checkout, but it’ll be different for each plugin? For different plugins?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so there’s an API where a plugin developer can say, “Okay, I want this content or this particular feature added to a columns block.” Or to a paragraph block. For instance, just an anchor link to every paragraph. You can write a plugin and say, “Okay, for each paragraph add this anchor link on the right-hand side.” And then a user can install that plugin and then automatically has that on their blog and can now reference certain paragraphs. So some people do blogging more like a diary where they have all the sorts of a day in little paragraphs or in a cluster of paragraphs and say, “Okay, today I wrote also about my adventure of riding the bike down the hill on a certain hill,” and then want to link to that through Twitter or through Instagram because there’s also a picture to it.

So you can go back to the blog and read a little bit about it. So that’s one tiny use case. Another one is, as I said, the like button for comments. Normally comments don’t come with like buttons. But you can build a plugin that says, “Okay, every comment gets a like button for me and I want it at the top of it or on the bottom of it.” And that’s all in the API controls. And then when it’s installed and the user wants to use it can also say, “For this paragraph, I want to toggle in and off. I want to disable that particular added block for this particular paragraph. And then for the next block I want it again.” So it’s kind of a beginning of a new interface or a new way to customize the block editor.

Documentation

Speaking of development, 6.3 brought a few pickups to the surface that with the… Enqueuing of assets in the editor and the CSS and Nick Diego updated the documentation and how to guide to and queue assets in the editor and best practice or how it’s actually supposed to work, especially now with the iFrame editor in the post editor as well. There were some early adopters of the block editor created a few workarounds, the early restrictions that were there. And now with 6.3 or the iFraming of the post editor, some of those don’t work anymore as one would hope. So here’s a how to guide on how to enqueue assets in the editor after 6.3.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So this how to guide is targeted for developers? Or for everyone who wants to learn about Gutenberg in general can also try to learn this?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, sure, sure. It’s a website, so the website doesn’t know who’s coming in. So it’s on the developer… The link goes right now to the Gutenberg repo where the pages, but I will share the link in the show notes where the actual documentation page was created. So it’s in the realm of the other documentation of the block editor. Yeah, it’s definitely helpful when you start out thinking about your theme development or your plugin development and you have additional assets like JavaScript files, CSS files to go with those entities and how to do it to control your iFrame editor. There has also been an update on the block variations API, and that has been… Block variations have been around since the beginning of the block editor where you can modify in a core block that then add additional feature sets or styles or just kind of different behavior to it.

And the block variations FPI had been updated, but this goes well with a new article on the developer blog called An Introduction to Block Variations where Nick Diego walks you through certain use cases on how to use it. So how to create a block variation, how to unregister. So you could use the block variation. So if a simple example is you have a button, you want the button to have a certain style, you can certainly do this through the theme.

But you can also say, “Okay, I want to unregister the core button and I want my block variations for the core button to be the default.” So it shows up in the inserter as a core button, but it will always have the right color on the border or the background or the right font size that you have decided on the design of it. And the user doesn’t have to select between the two they just have one. Same could be with a code block or a verse block. You can really have quite a few methods and attributes that you can use to create those lock variations. Yeah, I learned quite a bit from the article.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: No, I just wanted to say that this resource is pretty comprehensive. We can learn many stuff about the block variations from the basic to the putting it all together and everything. We can check it here. So yeah, it’s great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it also helps you how to control the icons for it or how the sidebar is behaving. So yes, it’s a really good article. All the articles on the developer blog, that’s actually a very rather new entity on the wordpress.org site. It only has been around for eight months, give or take. Official launch was actually March, so it’s only been around for five months officially, but we started in November with it. And there are quite a few blog posts now that are tutorials and go a little bit deeper on then documentation help you picks up the developer from a different place, from a beginner place and go all the way to advanced. Or say, “Okay, this is your use case.” There are a series of blog posts as well as standalone posts. And you can also learn about the slot fields. What’s slot fields? Well, it’s the spaces in the sidebar of a block where you can add additional features, fields and all that.

So the developer block is definitely something to check out if you are a developer and extending the block editor. And yeah, this concludes the change log for 16.6. We are through that. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

And as I said at the beginning, we also wanted to discuss a few things, or two things. No, actually three that are in active development. And the first one is a big feature that is announced slated for 6.4. The contributors have been working on it for quite a while, almost a whole year to get font management into WordPress. Meaning upload funds, make them available for blocks, make them available for templates, and then also delete funds, and have them across themes. So you are not depending on a theme developer to provide you with the right fonts. You can as a site owner also make different choices there. And I will share with you a link to a PR that kind of puts it all together, how it all works.

And Jeffrey Pearce also just made a call for testing on Twitter where he provided a link to a WordPress playground site with the configuration to test this successfully already in place. Because you need to make changes to the WP-config file and then you need to enable the plugin for it, the experiment for it and all that. So there’s kind of a set-up manually to be done, but this link to the WordPress playground gives you the PR, or the version of Gutenberg that has the PR in it as well as the right setup. And then you can test it, you can upload fonts, you make them available through the interface. You can use them on pages, on posts and on templates and see if the font on front end and editor actually would display correctly. And anything that you find that’s not working right, report that back to the PR so they can go and fix it.

Once it’s merged, so right now the PRs are still in the works and a lot of people are testing it, but it could use some more testing. If you listen to this and the PR has already been merged, it will be available through the Gutenberg nightly plugin version that you get on the Gutenberg Times, and then you can start testing it on your normal, like any Gutenberg plugin version on your test site. And my favorite tool for testing is actually local WP from the WP Engine and Flywheel folks. That has been a tremendous help to go through all those testing. So font library is a big, big step forward for WordPress and any help you can give to testing it would be really appreciated.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So we can also use font library in playground?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: With the link that… The link is a Bitly link. It’s shortened because it’s actually 15 lines long. It’s bit.ly/text-font-library, and then it gives you a new WordPress site and then you can use it and test it. You cannot install other plugins there. You cannot install themes. So you would have to test it with the default theme Twenty Twenty Three. And the second part… It’s only two things, is a lot of people, especially content creators were really waiting for this, it’s the adding a background image to a group block. It’s coming, it’s already available in the Gutenberg nightly because the feature has already been merged with trunk. It’ll be released with 16.7 Gutenberg plugin. And if you can provide user feedback, that will be really great. And if the provided user feedback doesn’t reveal any big issues with that new feature, it will also arrive in WordPress 6.4 with the next upgrade on November 7th, 2023. How do you like that, Maya?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: I will definitely use this. I can see myself using this, I don’t know, for my company, for my day job, I don’t know about that. But so I have a website that is just to play around, my test site. I really like it. So I think I will definitely use this because it’s like, yeah, adding more creativity fuel to my toolkit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can see that there are some very, very subtle backgrounds that could happen on different paragraphs, like wallpaper in a house or something like that where you can change that for a different group of posts or for… If you wrap a quote post into a group block, then you can add a background image to it, and that background image could have a photo of the person who gives the quote. So you don’t have to use backgrounds and fiddle around with all the blocks, you can just put it on the background image and then upload that to the quote block. And yeah, I really like it. 

So we are at the end of the show. I just wanted to make sure people, when they want to connect with you, what would be a good place to meet you online, Maya?

Nadia Maya Ardiani: So I’m on Twitter and also I’m on Instagram. So yeah, I think I will… And on LinkedIn also, so in three places. So yeah, I will share the link to you so we can put it in the show notes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much. As always, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast and this is the episode 89. And if you have questions, suggestions, or news that you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And there was a time when we had quite a few people add reviews about the podcast on different podcast websites like Stitcher or Apple or Google. It would be time to do another round of reviews. If you like what you hear and get value out of this podcast, please submit a review to Apple, that’s probably the most prominent one, to iTunes or podcast, and that would be really lovely. And as a bonus, we will read them in our next show. So yeah, come on then.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Give a little shout-out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Give a little shout-out. Yeah. So Maya, thank you so much for joining me today. It was lovely to have you on the show and give your input and have opinions will travel that’s always beneficial at WordPress. Yeah, and I thank you all for listening and I’ll hear you in two weeks. We won’t have a 16.7 then, but we will have Tammy Lister on the show and we will talk about WordPress 6.4 and the whole process. And I wish you all well, take care and goodbye.

Nadia Maya Ardiani: Thank you, Birgit. Forget the pleasure is all mine.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.