Gutenberg Changelog #95 – Gutenberg 17.5, Early Testing of WordPress 6.5 and Block Themes

Gutenberg Changelog episode with Carolina Nymark and Birgit Pauli-Haack
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Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #95 - Gutenberg 17.5, Early Testing of WordPress 6.5 and Block Themes
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In this episode, Carolina Nymark and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss Gutenberg 17.5, early testing of WordPress 6.5 and block themes

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special Guest: Carolina Nymark

Live Q & As with Carolina Nymark

Questions

Quick Tip: How to use a classic menu in the navigation block of a block theme

Upcoming Events

Data Views & Extensibility

Community Contributions

What’s released

What’s in the works and discussed

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 95th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 17.5, early testing on WordPress 6.5 and block themes, and everything in between. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future Program. I’m so thrilled we were finally able to make it happen. Carolina Nymark is on the show today. Carolina is a core contributor sponsored by Yoast and has been an evangelist, educator and blogger about block themes when we all knew that it was coming but had no clue what it will be and when we still called it full-site editing.

Many of you might have visited her site, fullsiteediting.com where she teaches developers and site builders how to use the block themes. Carolina also joined us on the Gutenberg Live Q&As multiple times to talk about that. And I’m so happy to have you finally also on the podcast. Welcome, Carolina, and how are you today?

Carolina Nymark: Thank you. I am very well. Thank you. So we are recording this on a Friday in January, and I have been back at work maybe only two weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Carolina Nymark: I had December off, which was very, very nice. I used WordPress, but I did not code anything for almost five weeks, so it was a really nice break.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah, I imagine that. I got about two and a half weeks off over the holidays, but I’m back. Also two weeks. So it’s all a new year and I hope you got into the new year well. 

Block Themes

So there have been early discussions, you and I and with others that we’re working on it, early discussions about the block themes in 2020 if not 2019. I’m a little bit unsure and I really want to thank you for being such a great advocate and educator for block themes. I think it has changed WordPress quite a bit. We are not there yet entirely, but how do you feel about block themes now that you have to work with them over four years?

Carolina Nymark: Well, it doesn’t feel like four years. It feels like it’s been much shorter. I agree, it’s not there yet. While I love working with the site editor and creating visual layouts that I can tweak as a coder, I do love that, but I still wish that we would have come further.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what do you think is missing? Do you have examples of what you find missing from when you go from a classic theme building and want to recreate the magic also in block themes?

Carolina Nymark: Yeah. So one of the big parts is that when we use PHP to build our themes, we use a lot of conditions if else to display different things depending on what’s happening, what the user is doing, what they’re viewing. We can’t really do that with blocks. At least not with the current core blocks that we have. What is also missing is a way to manage and base custom fields. Of course, the Gutenberg developers are very aware about the need for custom fields management, and it has been of course ongoing discussions for several months and it will happen in some form.

Right now it has had to step back a little bit because a lot of the Gutenberg developers need to focus on the new data views, which is part of the… Well, it’s going to be a part of the admin redesign.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, custom fields that I have seen so early. So there was this whole hangout last week with early views on what’s in the roadmap of 6.5 and also even if it wasn’t on the roadmap to go to 6.5, but it’s actively worked on, and one of them was to have in the block toolbar a button that you can connect something in the content of the block with a custom field.

I don’t know how that all surfaces, but that is really interesting approach because you don’t have to go out and go into a different interface. You can all do it there. But apart from there, the conditions are pretty big. I think what it comes down to is that you build a lot of templates for different kind of cases, use cases, and that duplicates code quite a bit. So when you want to migrate a site from a classic theme to a block theme, there is no one click conversion.

But what would you think a site editor should do? So I had the same conversation with Sarah two weeks ago and because I’m doing that for the Gutenberg Times, and I’m trying to find a good approach that other people could follow. So let me tell you what I do. I installed the health and troubleshooting plugin on my life site and then switched off all the other themes and switched on the themes that I wanted to use.

I was testing the twenty twenty four I was testing Frost and some other of the block themes, one or two of them from Edna Snoren or Ellen Bauer and then see how my site changes with the new block theme. And then I made notes what needs to be changed. So this archive page needs to change and that needs to change, and here the block don’t. The biggest hurdle was that my featured image on the block loop, on the archive page is a landscape, and most of the themes that I tested, the feature image was portrait format. So that kind of thing, but that’s I think not a big… That’s an easy fix. You can change the template, you can change your aspect ratio and you’re done with it.

So I have my notes. I have my scope of the changes that I need to make, and then I’ll create a staging site, install the create block theme plugin, and then make my changes there. And then I can export that theme and import it into my live theme. Is that a good process or as good as any?

Carolina Nymark: I do think it’s as good as any right now, but it really does sound way too complicated for the, how do I say it, the average user. And it’s difficult. How are we going to help them? How are we going to make it easier? But it also depends. It all depends on how complex your existing theme and your existing site is. But yes, start with pen and paper. Really write down the already must haves and do spring cleaning. If there are things that you don’t need, remove them. And then you won’t have the problem of trying to recreate at least those spots.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: I mean if you’re switching to a completely new theme, of course, there are going to be a lot of things that don’t match your current website. So they’re definitely going to be tweaking. And create a block theme is a great tool because yes, you can activate any block theme and export it as your own. So of course you’re not limited to using the default themes. If there is a block theme to define that matches what you want closer, pick any of them. What you want to look at though is the last updated date. You don’t want to pick a block theme that was updated in 2020 or 2022. You want one that is…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good reminder.

Carolina Nymark: … continued, developed, and supported.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good reminder. So it should be 2023 or something like that and not the default theme, but the update should be at least in 2023 if not in the last three months or so. That’s definitely a good point.

Carolina Nymark: So if you’re picking from wordpress.org. Look at the reviews of this theme. Look at the support firm. Is the developer responsive or maybe they’re directing you to a different support firm where they’re active. That’s also absolutely fine. But just look to see that there is someone who’s able to help you if you run into bugs or if you’re blocked somewhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, most of the time when I switched themes before with classic theme to classic theme, there were always tweaks. There was no one switch and everything was good. There was always a little bit… CSS kind of change here and template missing here, and the condition are not working right. So I think that’s pretty much to expect when you switch themes and normally you don’t. It’s the third switch in five years for the site. So I think it’s pretty much on par with that. And I’m also late, but I also want to do some experimentation with the new features that are there, that are coming out, like the interactivity of PI and the block hooks and that kind of thing.

It was really hard to do this without the block theme because they’re all built for block themes and the latest. So that’s why I’m switching over on the site. So that’s one thing, the site migration… But you come from the classic theme building. You’ve been a theme team rep for many, many years and have been… So if you are a theme builder and you want to create a block theme, what are the hurdles to overcome? Are there any blockers, pun intended, especially mental blockers? Are there something that is something people need to get on with it, so to speak?

Carolina Nymark: Yes. Mental blocker absolutely are big at perhaps the code challenges, unless you’re building something very, very highly custom and specialized. So as a coder, if you really enjoy coding, you might love PHP, and then suddenly, if you’re not working with a designer, of course because we have two different… Of course, more than two different ways to do this. But if you’re on your own and then suddenly switching from writing your templates in your code editor, and you have to go to this visual interface, you really need to learn how to maximize the blocks.

You do need to learn how to sketch, draft the layout in the editor, and then you will go and make your tweaks. Once you have exported your base layouts for one template or 10 or maybe four is more realistic. When you have four templates, you have what font sizes, what colors, what spacing you’re using then you’re going to tweak the details in your exported theme.json file and you tweak the code in your templates. But you still have that element where you need to go to the visual interface and actually move things around, change the alignment, etc. And it’s a big change of course.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But it’s also lowering the barrier for those who don’t know how to code to create their own themes. So I think it’s a good balance to get more people involved in creativity and creating themes and do some designs. A lot of designers are actually not coders per se, and they might… I think what’s still missing, going back to the earlier question, is actually a user interface for editing the theme.json file. I know it’s all in the database and you can export it, but you still have to fiddle with that long and the theme.json files, the more features come in, the longer it’s going to become and the more unwilling it comes.

Carolina Nymark: Oh yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are VS Code extensions that help with that, but I think you need to really squint quite a bit when you read the code to get into the right settings and all that.

Carolina Nymark: I absolutely three. So not all the settings in theme.json actually have an interface. It probably shouldn’t be exposed to all users, and that’s where do we draw the line? Do we really add an advanced view to the site editor or does it need to be in a plugin? And several people of course have tried to build this plugin because we do need it and have not succeeded or have needed to stop halfway because… Well, I can’t really tell why.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: One reason is probably…

Carolina Nymark: It’s just not easy. The base coding in Gutenberg, it just doesn’t make it easy to do that kind of option page, or at least not right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can also see that it’s really taxing to build a feature for something that’s so inactive development and has updates every two weeks to keep up with it, especially when you have a product. So I can see that the initial momentum getting this, “Oh, this is a great idea and let’s build it,” kind of weans away when after a year or two you still have to go in every month and update this thing because there’s new features or things have changed.

Well, I think great way to talk about block themes and thank you for that. Are you planning to work further on the fullsiteediting.com or do you think that the new block handbook has been overhauled enough to say, “Oh yeah, now documentation.” I think there was a reason why you graded that because there was no documentation and there was a lot of need for explaining the concept and all. But the new developer theme handbook has been overhauled in the last, I don’t know, four or five months. Do you think that the documentation is up to par now?

Carolina Nymark: Yes. So Justin Tadlock who did most of their work on the handbook has been amazing. The handbook has been greatly updated and fullsiteediting.com has not, because I have not had the time. And it’s a bit of a stressor. I guess I do want to keep it up to date. I want to fight about what I’m exploring, what I’m finding, what problems I’m running into, and of course maybe some more code examples. It’s difficult for me to prioritize.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I imagine.

Carolina Nymark: So there’s room for both. So fullsiteediting.com of course I can express opinions in a whole different way that you can’t do in a handbook, which needs to be very strict and act even a bit friendly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Neutral.

Carolina Nymark: Yeah, I’m still a little bit apprehensive about how we’re going to keep it up to date. So even if we only have now three releases per year, that goes into WordPress Core, it’s still a lot to keep up with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You need more volunteers.

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if somebody wants to contribute to documentation specifically for the theme handbook, what would be the steps apart from having a Slack account and having a wp.org account, and a GitHub account?

Carolina Nymark: The easiest way is to, first of all, reach out in the theme review Slack channel from your account, and we can guide you a little bit more from there. So the team handbook is currently written in WordPress on the website. So the content is not managed right now on GitHub. It’s not marked on files. It’s actually WordPress. It’s a poster page custom post type.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that lowers a lot of barriers actually.

Carolina Nymark: But all the issues when we see that the page needs to be updated, we add our issues to the documentation teams issue tracker on GitHub.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, cool. So if you’re on the documentation team, you already know how the process works. That is really good. So dear listeners, if you have an aptitude for technical writing, your English is good enough, so Carolina is a non-native speaker, and I as a non-native speaker can read it. You are in it. You can join the team and you’ll have some great people there that help you. I know that Justin Tadlock has quite some onboarding and he’s happy to help anybody also with writing and do some copy editing.

So you don’t have to be scared just because you’re not a native English speaker to do that. All right. So this was all about block themes and I’m really glad that we talked about some of the issues there. So let’s get on with the show. 

Listener Questions

We sometimes also answer some questions that we get either from Twitter or listener question. And this question came through Twitter and that is how to use a classic menu in the navigation for block theme. And it’s very hard to find when you… And so I put it a little tutorial together, a quick tick I call it because it’s less than a hundred words or so on how to use it.

It’s mainly the screenshot and where to find things, a little video. So you need to grab the header in the site editor and then the menu that is there from your theme. And then there is on the right hand side, there’s this toolbar or the sidebar where the block settings are normally and there’s one three-dot menu where the switcher where you can see all the classic menus listed that you had previously on your site and then you select it and it’ll magically appear in the navigation block.

So I think you don’t have to recreate all the classic menus that you had before when you switch it. That is definitely a hidden gem. I don’t know if you can surface it even better. We need to kind of talk to design about that, but that’s where you find it and it’s your secret superpower to know where it is now.

Normally, I think, if I understood this correctly and Carolina you help me out, when you only have one menu, the block theme magically adds it. If a navigation block is in the template, it will be added to the navigation block as a default. But if you have more than one classic menu, it doesn’t know which one to pick. So it kind of makes it up as it goes along. I think when you switch from twenty twenty to twenty twenty four, it takes the social menu, which is kind of weird, but that’s the randomness of this feature. But it also points you right there, this is something to fix.

Carolina Nymark: At least that problem is quite obvious because it’s not the correct content inside the block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, listeners, that was our quick tip of the week. 

Upcoming Events

We also have some upcoming events that are on the list that happen in all kinds of different places. So first of all on February 7th at 12 noon UTC, the media component maintainers come together in a meeting to discuss phase three media items that could be ahead of development or phase three. And Anthony Burchell who is one of the maintainers, invites you to be part of it. And if you haven’t contributed to any code yet in the recent years, that is definitely a good place to see what work needs to be done and how it’s organized.

Then February 8th, a day later, there will be a hallway hangout to discuss intrinsic design and how to use it in a real life projects with the block editor and the block themes and we will have some interesting people there. Fabian Kagy is going to be there, Tammie Lister, Justin Tadlock. They’re all proponents of the intrinsic design testing. Tadlock wrote a nice introduction to that on the developer blog a few months ago, but it’s definitely… But Fabian and Tammie, they have also some ideas of what’s still missing, what you can’t do with intrinsic design, which you still would need to do with your own CSS and some conditional coding and templates to get this going.

And they bring some solutions with them. Then not so far out January 25th at 15:30 or 3:30 UTC, there’s a developer livestream reviewing Gutenberg 17.5 by Ryan Welcher. He does it on Twitch. It’s not a scripted show, he just dives in into a topic or multiple topics and shows some code. If you haven’t followed Ryan on the Twitch stream, you can also follow him on YouTube. And he has this fabulous series of the block development cookbook. Every show is a little recipe on how to do things with a block editor development. And then also next week is the extensibility issued triage meeting on January 23rd at noon UTC.

There’s a project board with increasing Gutenberg extensibility and we go over some of the columns there and see if we can move some of the issues or PRs forward to be slated for some of the major releases this year. So it’s going to be a real good… Yeah, there’s some agency developers in there. We also have joined by Gutenberg developers. So this is a chat meeting. It’s not a video meeting or something like that. Carolina, do you know of any events that listeners might, we could let them know about?

Carolina Nymark: There’s rumors that there might be an upcoming hallway hangout about migrating from classic themes to block themes. But it’s not scheduled yet, but if you have the chance, definitely join one of these that we just spoke about.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And speaking of events, there’s always in the theme review channel, there’s a theme meeting. When do they happen?

Carolina Nymark: It’s every other Tuesday. I’m sorry, I believe it’s at 4:00 UTC. I’m usually unable to attend because of the timing, so I don’t have the exact time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Well, we can look it up. Tuesday testing JavaScript. Theme biweekly 4:00 PM, Yes. 4:00 PM UTC. And the next one is, it’s on the 23rd. So next week, Tuesday is the fourth Tuesday. So it’s on the second and the fourth Tuesday, 4:00 PM UTC. And so if you want to be part of the theme development or theme review documentation team, you can join there and meet all the people there.

Carolina Nymark: So during these meetings, we usually recap how many new themes went live this week, for example. We also repeatedly bring up things like, are the requirements still correct? We need to update them. What are we going to do about react-based themes, settings, pages, onboarding of users when we have a block theme of a need, an easier way for them to select the front page. So both about theme reviews, but also really wide topics. But they are, again, just posted that you can read of course, and also proposed topics too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if you want to follow up on some of them, the summaries are posted on the make theme blog as well. Cool, cool, cool. Those are the events and meetings. There’s under make.wordpress.org/meetings, a calendar of all the teams meetings, not only the theme team but all the teams. So it gets a little bit overwhelming and you shouldn’t join every channel on WP Slack, but pick the team that you’re involved in or you want to be involved in. You can definitely be in a meeting every day of the week.

Carolina Nymark: Oh yes. There are often meetings that collide as well if you’re interested in several topics.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sometimes they’re Slack meetings, so you can actually switch between the meetings a bit because people need to type things. 

So speaking of extensibility, Fabian Kagy from 10up and also has been a guest on the show quite often, he started a conversation about extensibility for the new admin views, and Riad Benguella posted a great response on how extensibility is actually approached and what they’re planning once they have the APIs are finalized and they want to create APIs for retracing new fields, new layouts, new field types.

I like the new layouts. The grid layout and the preview layouts and all that. Also, defining default views and fields and allowing third-party developers to have their own views for their pages. What they haven’t yet put in there, and they want to still do this before any extensibility is considered is inline editing and editing the fields and views in the UI.

So I have not seen any design views for those interfaces yet, so that might still be a little bit off, but I’ll share the issue and the comment in the show notes, of course, like everything else that we talked about. But Riad is also summarizing the approach that the built the APIs, then UIs, and then if it all works together and the APIs are stable, then open that up to third-party developers to using plugins and themes.

But he also has a suggestion on how third-party developers can start experimenting with it, and that is using the WordPress data views NPM package and start testing those. Documentation is available on the packages read me file, and you definitely can connect with Riad if you have any questions or something like that. But I think it’s time to start looking at that if you’re a plugin developer or a theme developer, just to make sure that you start getting the mindset and you see what the users are going to see. Any comments?

Carolina Nymark: So glad that this question was asked and highlighted, and I’m happy with the answer. And as always, when this is like, “We want it now,” we can’t have it yet. And third-party extenders, plugin developers, we really do need to help testing. Again, we need to be very clear in our feedback on what we need because we have to leave that feedback when there is still a chance to make changes. If something is not what we expect, the earlier the feedback, the better. Easier it is to respond to and address. I also do my part of the data views.

I need to use it more to really get used to it. I have problems with the very, very narrow list. So on the left side you have a brief description, the name of your, for example, your template or your post. This part is very narrow, but I do like that you can switch views. So you can choose if you want the list, grid or a table. And there are so many more things that you can customize with filters already. So I really like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Also, like the grid layout patterns in the pattern data views or for… It would be really beautiful for the media library to have a grid layout like it is now. And even posts. If you want the feature image and you don’t need a list, but you want also kind of see how… Which have featured images and which don’t. 

Community Contributions

Which brings us to the next topic that we have here that is early opportunities for testing. Thank you for bringing that up. Test, test, test.

Carolina Nymark: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Anne McCarthy has published a post called Early Opportunities to Test WordPress 6.5 ahead of beta 6.5 that is scheduled for February 13th. These are early opportunities to feedback and testing it for your own sake. It’s only a selection of features in the post, but it’s very good in the instructions of what you can do and what you should test. So a part of the burden for testing is you have to come up with what is it that I actually want to do? Have those decisions and make a list of it. And Anne McCarthy has done that particular work for you and shows you how to test the data views. Also, the pattern overrides and the font library, of course that has been in the works for quite a bit, and the robust revisions.

So for templates and styles you now can have… In 6.4, we already have revisions, but now those are actually getting to the next step and being really cool.

Carolina Nymark: The revisions are a really nice update. I also hope that we can do something to improve the post-op block editor revisions, which are not as easy to use, say, style visions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely. And in the post you also find ways on how to set up test websites for that. I also will share a link to the playground with the Gutenberg nightly that actually… At least for the data views, because you need to enable the experiments to do that for the data views as well as for the pattern overrides. So we have some playground instances… Not have some, but we build the blueprints for those so you can call them up in WordPress playground, which is a nice browser-based WordPress instance. It’s really amazing how that would work for someone who has done work with so many servers.

It’s a long, long post, but it has all the details that you need for each feature. It’s divided up into explaining the feature, prerequisites and then test instructions and what you could do with it. Feedback, you could leave it on the post if you have some feedback or if something is not working, or you could do that as a bug report on the GitHub repository or just post it into the co-editor channel and we’ll figure out which part of your experience is actually the bug report or a feature request or something like that.

So it’s not always easy to get it right for a GitHub issue, but there are people here to help you. Definitely. Have you tested any of those features or looked at those apart from the revisions you said?

Carolina Nymark: No, I’ve tested them on my own. I haven’t read the full testing instructions. I mean, I have some feedback that I need to add, document and write down, and perhaps why not start working on fixing it as well. So I need to do that maybe next week.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Do you have something else that we could talk about it in community contributions?

Carolina Nymark: We spoke a little bit about how to find the team’s team and how to help with the handbook or just join the meetings. But of course there are so many teams that you can contribute to, and the application for the contributor mentorship program has opened. So this is for the first quarter of 2024. It is open for both mentors and mentees. So if you’re an experienced, well actually, user. You don’t even have to be a developer. If you’re an experienced WordPress user, contributor, you can apply as a mentor. To be a mentee you do not have to have any previous experience, just be engaged and want to join.

So the mentorship program is a one-on-one mentorship or a group mentorship, which is new. So the group mentorship is new. You can actually apply to work on a specific project together with others with your mentor, which is really interesting. Nice idea. It’s great to meet more people and collaborate, which is a really nice opportunity.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you for bringing that up. Is there a deadline on it?

Carolina Nymark: The application deadline is February 7, and you can find the application by going to make.wordpress.org/community and it’ll be one of the pinned articles on the top of that page.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And of course we’re going to share the link to it in the show notes of this episode. That is a great new program for getting more contributors. It’s also meant to create contributor leadership as well, and also to have more sustained contribution. We have in many teams the problem that are these flyby contributors and sometimes you need continued contributions to make a team work and we need both. But I think it’s harder for contributors to have an ongoing relationship with a team, especially when they’re not sponsored and their work life or their life.

Now, if you have a family, your free time is all but WordPress. If you work as a freelance or in an agency, the workload can be up and down and sometimes you don’t have two months in a row where you can contribute. So this mentorship group is also meant for those who do feel they can do ongoing contributions.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.5

All right. I think we come to the stage where we talk about what’s released and we have to talk about three releases. One is the release squad for WordPress 6.5 has been announced and release lead is again, Matt Mullenweg, release coordinators, Akshaya Rane, Hector Prieto, and Mary Baum. And core tech leads are David Baumwald and Pascal Bircher. And editor tech leads are David Smith and Riad Benguella. But there are in total 27 contributors on the list of release leads.

So there’s also editor triage and design and all that. Carolina, you are also part of the release squad in 6.5. Thank you for raising your hand. And you are named as a default themes lead. That seems to be a new role on the release squad. What does that include for a release that doesn’t have a default theme?

Carolina Nymark: It means that you are continuing doing what a bundled theme component maintainer does. It is triaging track tickets, looking at new report issues. But the part that I wanted to focus on that we haven’t really done before is that we need to know what the new features are in the editor. Mostly that can affect our themes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: When you say our themes, you mean previous default themes?

Carolina Nymark: I mean, the default themes. Are there new features that should be implemented? Doesn’t have to be implemented, or shouldn’t. We have to make decisions about this and then we have to start looking at the code. Can we solve this? Do we need to fix CSS conflicts? We have to test on multiple, multiple workers expressions to see that we’re not causing problems.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s pretty good. I really like that role, but it takes a lot of work because how many default teams are there? 15 or so?

Carolina Nymark: I’m hoping that we’re going to focus on the ones that are actually bonded when you install WordPress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: Not the ones that you download. At least not in this round. We haven’t brought this up, but there is a proposal to have a default theme task force. This was proposed in December and you can volunteer for it. We’re still waiting for more information, but the idea is that we do need more contributors to help triage all of the open issues. And triaging issues means that we read these issues and confirm is this actually a bundled theme issue or does it belong to a different component?

For example, if the reported issue is a problem with a block, it probably needs to be moved to the Gutenberg repository and solved there because it affects more than the bundled themes. It affects all themes. So that’s one of the kind of sorting that this group would need to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think it’s a brilliant idea, especially because it’s an early warning for changes in the block editor or in block themes that might trickle down to classic themes and changes CSS behavior. There’s one discussion right now about the specificity of elements and block themes and does that affect… If it’s changed, what’s the trade-off? It makes it the work that it would cause to update existing themes, but moving forward lessens the work. So I think with your role in there, you definitely can chime in early warning and also say, “Okay, well this is something we need to have in the developer notes because theme developers will have to take a look at that also for their theme.”

So this was missing. It’s the first release that I won’t be part of since 6.0 on my first release that I was part of on documentation, 6.0 to 6.4, all five releases. I was part of documentation or editor triage and it was really interesting to see how documentation actually surfaces there. That early warning part could have saved some of the hard work that was done retroactively when there was even a new note there or even a new minor version needed to be cut very early after the release.

So to iterate on the release schedule, I think we talked about it earlier, but you can always look it up about beta one is scheduled for February 13th. 25 days left. So if you want to control it or you have some features that need to be moved forward, get on it. There are two more Gutenberg plugins, 17.6 and 17.7 with features that will go into 6.5. Afterwards it’s just bug fixing or maybe a little bit enhancement.

And then release candidate one and with field guide and dev notes deadline is March 5th, and that’s just before WordCamp Asia. So we all go release 6.5 and then head out to Taipei because WordCamp Asia starts on March 7th. The final release is on March 26th, 2024. It sounds also far away, but it’s really not a whole lot of time anymore to see what’s getting in there. So looking at the hallway hangout where contributors kind walk through all the features might be a good idea to just get up to par with that.

Before we get 6.5, we get a minor release, 6.4.3. Aaron Jorbin is the release lead for that and he announced the schedule for this minor release for January 24th, 17:00 UTC is the release party scheduled, and I’ll share the announcement post in the show notes where he also listed the tickets, the bug fixes that are solved for this final release is also maintenance release, so it’s automatically updated. So watch out next week.

Gutenberg 17.5

And that brings us to Gutenberg 17.5, the latest Gutenberg release. There’s not a whole lot of in there, but there’s a lot of… There are big topics in there, but not many specific things. So the continued work on the editor unification, meaning that the site editor and the post editor have the same features, the same panels, the same preferences, and can be reused. And so developers as well as users don’t have to learn two interfaces for almost the same thing.

Carolina Nymark: There’s some randomized quality of life changes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And then of course that’s related to the history of how Gutenberg progressed, the post editors from the phase one and the site editors from phase two, and now they’re making them being the same. Especially the unified distraction free preferences. I’m really glad that it comes to the site editor now. Also spotlight mode and the show breadcrumbs, broad cramps. Yeah, there’s some German kind of cohort going in there. Sometimes I have that. It wasn’t as prominent when I was living in the United States because I was talking English all day long, but now with the German interacting with Germans, sometimes my English kind of sucks.

Carolina Nymark: It happens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: As long as you all still understand me, dear listeners, I’m not stopping with this episode with Gutenberg Changelog. There are some component updates and the font library updates that are going into 6.5 to get the final touches done. They had to refactor some of the rest API interactions for the font library, but that is well on the way for the editor or the block library. We have two changes that I want to point out.

One is that in the post featured image block, there is now an attribute that you can set to use the first image that’s in post as a featured image. I think that’s a great enhancement. That’s a feature that was missing from the classic editor or from some of the themes because I was really missing that. Oh, I have pictures in there. So use one of those and sometimes that would work and then sometimes it wouldn’t work. But now having that as an attribute in the block is really cool. Is there a user interface for that or is it just for the template?

Carolina Nymark: As far as I know, it’s just for… Well, developers are advanced users. We have the user interface.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay. And then the second one is the gallery block. Now, you can just do a random setting, order setting for the pictures in the gallery so you don’t have to fiddle around with the order and moving around and you just… It’s a toggle switch in the site editor, in the blog editor sidebar where you can just switch it on and off and it orders the picture at random. Pretty cool.

It definitely streamlines your production time of things and you don’t have to spend an hour forming an opinion what order you want and then executing on that opinion. If you don’t have an opinion, that’s fine. Is there anything in there that you want to point out, Carolina?

Carolina Nymark: In the update or in the block library?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The change log. The change log.

Carolina Nymark: There are many small permits. We have some exchanges for the pattern overrides, which is their partially synced pattern with a new name.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Naming is so hard.

Carolina Nymark: It is. It is so hard.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Carolina Nymark: We’ll see. Eventually we’ll see where it actually lands when we have to write a documentation.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then once the documentation is written, it’s kind of set in stone because nobody knows when you rename things. There are so many people out there who still talk about full site editing in new posts in 2024. So not on the WordPress site, but people here write the portals and all that. The pattern overrides have a lot of expectations and I think the 6.5 first iteration will be very limited in features that I think for paragraphs, for heading and for images.

Carolina Nymark: It needs to be limited, I guess. Well, we need more time, but also it just makes it easier to test and to receive feedback for it and not as overwhelming hopefully for users to actually learn.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, good point. Good point. I like it. And of course the data views, there are a lot of people working on the data views and it’s still under experimental flag, but it’s coming a long way. It really has some great attention right now. You can use it on the one store feature is enabled in the experiments. You can use it on the patterns page. On the pages page it’s already by default available for templates. I think template parts are still under the experimental flag, but those things will all come out of experiments hopefully very soon. So we can all test everything.

Carolina Nymark: It’s moving very fast. It is still unclear what will actually be in 6.5. But we’ll see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think every release in the last so 16 point… This is 17.5. So 17.3, I think, had the first data views or 17.2 even. And every release had over 20 PRs kind of going in into that feature. So it’s really moving fast and it’s beautiful now. I really like it. There’s quite some excitement out there in the community as well for those who have looked at it. And if you have an opinion, dear listeners, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com, changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.

So there are two items in the documentation section. There’s a lot of changes in documentation, but two, I want to point out because it’s for beginners on the block development. There’s a new section in the quick starter guide. If you haven’t seen the quick start guide for block development, I only use it to talk about other things. So the quick start guide for block development walks you through a tutorial on grading a block for copyright, dynamic copyright year on your website and use that block.

There was a developer just last week and the recording is up on YouTube where Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher go through that tutorial and show how this all meant to be. It’s one thing to read a tutorial and try to follow along yourself than to watch somebody else go through a tutorial and then follow along. It’s a much richer experience. And the documentation changes here are all about the local development environment. What are the tools that you can use for local development on your machine?

And one of them is WP-env, which is the built-in WordPress development based on Dhaka. There are actually, I don’t know if you use them already, efforts to make the WordPress playground a local development. You don’t need local development. You can use the WordPress playground for development and have code editor in there. So I’ve seen some great mockups from that.

Carolina Nymark: I have not tried it yet. It’s on my very long to-do list because I’m absolutely curious about it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s amazing. But the WP-env script also, you can call it together with a create block scaffolding and you have almost instantaneous a good block development environment set up. There were some changes to block.json as well as theme.json And documentation and that’s pretty much what I wanted to point out. Code quantity is all very technical and all the efforts to write all the end-to-end tests and playwright migrating fast. And to build tools have been updated to the latest things.

All right. Oh, here it was, yes. So that was a change log for 17.5. It was not a whole lot in there for a WebPress user. It’s more like the future of things. It’s really cool, but not for immediate use. But sometimes you have these releases where there’s some foundation work being done.

Carolina Nymark: The releases are some frequency, yes. Sometimes there will be these kind of releases but with less new ready features and more work on what’s coming.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

So speaking of what’s coming there is this active discussion. I mentioned it before. There is an effort on PR that reduce the specificity on the global styles, CNS by, I think it was Isabel, Brison tele machines. She’s working on that quite a bit. And there is a call for testing, especially for classic themes to see how impact that will have on your custom CSS or even on block themes because the high specificity makes you create workarounds on all the different places. And if it’s reduced, you’re losing your targets. So how much work would it take? I’ll share the related ticket in the show notes, but did you take a look at that?

Carolina Nymark: I have read it. I have planned, sets time away in my calendar to do some testing and this is where it would really help to know what specifically to test for, like having something to help us get started because it’s a bit wide right now. It’s just test if your sales is still correct. This is also where tool like visual regression testing would have really helped. But in the next couple of days, of course we are going to have a little bit more testing done. We’re going to have some more comments on these issues, tickets and narrow it down a little bit so that we can have tests in the instructions and test results presented there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Aaron Robishaw who’s also working on those, he did some explorations on the current approach to see… I think his summary also helps with figuring out as a theme developer, “Okay, where do I need to look in my theme to test this rate?”

Carolina Nymark: That sounds good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I share both of them in the show notes of the show. And it seems that we are at the end of our show. Carolina, you made it.

Carolina Nymark: We made it. Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We made it, yes. It’s an awesome show. You have some great discussions on block development and block themes, and contributions, and a call for contributors. So it’s a full rounded show. Is there anything, Carolina, that you want people to know that you didn’t get to mention before, while you have an audience and think about it, and you could also tell me where people that want to connect with you, where they find you?

Carolina Nymark: Well, you can find me on Twitter, @carolinapoena. You can message me there. If you go to fullsiteediting.com, in the footer is also actually a link to a Slack channel that you can join if you like.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Carolina Nymark: And on the WordPress Slack, my nickname is Poena. Yeah, that’s the easiest way to reach me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right.

Carolina Nymark: I think that we need to mention everything a little bit about, but to think about when you’re switching your website to a block theme or what we need help with in testing the upcoming release and what we need help with for the bundled themes that we need more contributors and we need more testing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right then. Before we end the show, remind you, there’s these events out there February 7th, that phase three media library. February 8th is the intrinsic design hallway hangout. There will be developer hours in February. I don’t have a date yet, but keep up on the meetup extensibility issues. Triage meeting is January 23rd. And then there is a livestream on Twitch about reviewing Gutenberg 17.5. I’m going to watch it and see what Ryan Welcher is digging up from this change log that we might have missed.

Dear listeners, thank you all for listening again, and if you have any news or questions, or suggestions, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. Again, thank you, Carolina Nymark for being on the show and sharing all your wisdom here. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for me.

Carolina Nymark: Bye.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Bye.

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