Gutenberg Changelog #97 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9

Gutenberg-Changelog 97 with Joni Halabi and Birgit Pauli-Haack
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #97 - WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9
Loading
/

In this episode, Joni Halabi and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Joni Halabi, senior developer at Georgetown University

What’s new for developers? (March 2024)

Developer Hours: Exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5

WordPress 6.5

Gutenberg plugin

What’s new in Gutenberg 17.8? (28 February)

What’s new in Gutenberg 17.9 (13 March)

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 97th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.5 is about to release, and then we have Gutenberg plugin versions 17.8 and 17.9. 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 thrilled that Joni Halabi made the time to join me again on the show. Joni is a senior software developer at Georgetown University and a regular guest at the Gutenberg Times shows. It’s so wonderful to see you again, Joni. How are you today?

Joni Halabi: I’m doing great and I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me back. I’m really excited about what’s to come in WordPress 6.5. It’s going to be a good one.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s coming out in 11 days. If we do it again, this is March 15th. We are recording this March 15th, 2024, and I’m fresh back from WordCamp Asia, and I brought back marvelous memories of the city because I did some sightseeing and memories of the Asian community where a lot of selfies were taken by WordCamp Asia. It was, again, a wonderful WordCamp and I enjoyed meeting all the friends again that I made last year, or that I have been communicating all these years in the WordPress community and met for the first time last year. It really felt more like a family reunion around the purpose of the open source project.

So from there I brought two announcements. I’m happy to report that this year’s State of the Word will be on December 16th, 2024, and it will be brought to you from Tokyo, Japan. It will be, again, an event in location, but of course, live-streamed and live translated from there. We will maybe have some time issues if we want to watch it live in the United States or also in Europe, because Japan has a different time zone. That’s probably half around the world.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I think they’re possibly 12 hours off from the East Coast of the United States, which is where I am.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if it’s at 3:00 in the afternoon, then you watch it at 3:00 AM in the morning. But it’s the second time that the State of the Word is outside the American audience, and as Matt Mullenweg in his AMA at the WordCamp explained, “It’s a tribute to the first community outside the US that sprung up early on. The WordPress community in Japan was the first one to translate the software into a different language, and back then they didn’t have all the tools available. They had to fork the full software and go in and translate every string in the code base. I also heard that 86% of all Japanese websites are built with WordPress. So the community is huge and strong and has been for almost two decades. So the first translation, I think it was in 2007 or something like that, I am sorry, I don’t have the exact year there, so it’s pretty cool.

And then the second announcement that came out of Taipei, Taiwan was that the next WordCamp Asia will take place in February, 2025 in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. So that’s the announcements that I have. There were great talks I saw, and many that I missed because I was chatting in the hallway and lost track of time. And apart from the workshops, you can catch them all on the so-called rerun on the live sessions, and I leave in the show notes, the link to the schedule of the sessions as well as to the YouTube live stream recordings, so you can catch up on the talks as well, dear listeners.

Joni Halabi: I love learning that. I had no idea that the Japanese community was the first to localize WordPress, and that is so exciting to me that they took that on themselves because I don’t know if you know this, in a past life I worked as a translation manager for a software company, and we translated into so many languages, and the hardest thing to do is translate something into that second language because it sets the stage for localization in all of these other languages. So they must have done so much heavy lifting. I’m so impressed by that. I love that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know that you were a translation manager. And you’re right, they were the pioneers of that, and out of that collaboration came the prodigal tool that now… So WordPress is translated into a hundred languages, and there are, I think, something between 3,000 and 5,000 translators now working on translating 6.5 into the languages. So when it came out that someone in Nepal or someone in India, or I think there are translators for seven or eight languages in India alone or in Arabic, can use their software with the new features within their own language. So that’s so cool.

Community Contributions

Joni Halabi: Very cool. Yeah, it sounds like a lot has happened in the last four weeks, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I imagine. Yeah.

Joni Halabi: So now we’re just going to catch up on all the details, including all the new features that are coming out. In WordPress 6.5, which comes out, we mentioned this before, on March 26th, so 11 days from when we’re recording this, and we’re just going to catch up on all these features in this latest monthly roundup. There’s a new post on the developer blog that was published this month. Nick Diego collected 28 developer relevant changes in this roundup post, and this post lists all of the new resources that are available for developers. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a really great post,

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And he has all the links to dig deeper into whatever comes out of WordPress 6.5. They also cover some of the things that we are going to talk about in 17.8 and 17.9 of the Gutenberg plugin as well. 

What’s Released – WordPress 6.5 RCV2

So when we come now to the section of what’s released, we are already in the middle of it actually. We have three releases to cover. That’s the 6.5 cycle and two Gutenberg plugin versions. So the WordPress 6.5 release candidate two was published, and the testing team collected notes on how best to test this version. And you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. You don’t need or go into the debug code stuff, developer stuff. You don’t need to use a hosted test site or local WP, you can just use WordPress playground and run WordPress in your browser. That’s the new cool feature that came out quite a bit, but we are now all the things that can be previewed or tested, we try to make this work with WordPress Playground. So the release candidate and the developer documentation were also published.

First one, sad news, my favorite feature, the sync pattern overrides was pulled just before the last release candidate as a few contributors felt it needed to simmer a few more months before it can be released to millions of users. So that has to wait to 6.6, which is scheduled when… The release schedule is not out, but I think about mid-July or so. So it’s only two, three months. No, four months. And in the show notes I will have for you the developer notes that are very heavy leaning to developers, hence the name about all the new cool features. It’s Block Bindings API. That is pretty much the coolest feature we’re waiting for, for the block editor extension to extend the block editor, and a lot of people have been waiting for and they’re really gearing up to it, using it and using the heck out of it, so to speak.

Block Bindings API allows you to connect a block with a data point. That could be post meta, that’s the usual custom fields, but you can also, and that is also explained in the def notes, register your own data sources, so it could be something from a different table from a different action or something like that. So that’s one thing that we’re all excited about. What do you think about it?

Joni Halabi: This is my favorite feature, hands down. I’m in love because it is not even borderline, it is turning. It gives the developers the ability to turn a static block, for example, a paragraph block into a dynamic block. So it’s mapping this content that somebody can update in a meta field or really anywhere else on the site, and it’s mapping that data to a static attribute in one of these blocks, and it is so cool. I see so many applications for it. There’s some examples in the new feature post that’s on the blog, and I’m really excited. I’m very excited to see how developers are going to use it. I really want to see how we can use it on our team at Georgetown. I’m just kidding.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Justin Tadlock on the developer blog, was also quite excited about it and he wrote a, I think it’s about 5,000 words about it and has a great example. He has part one and part two introducing the feature, and that is really, really important for developers to look into, but I think you will find it fairly easy to figure it out. And on the Gutenberg Times, actually, there’s also a post that is an almost no code way to use this, and I walk you through with little videos on how you can use the old meta boxes on the bottom of your screen and also add it to a template or something like that, so you have additional ideas that you could have as a site builder who is using not so much code, but more is on the no-code side or low-code side, so I was quite excited when I saw it too.

Another feature where has a lot of people excited is the fund library, and we have been waiting for it quite a bit because it was actually slated to be in 6.4, but then was pulled also in the release cycle that it needed to simmer a bit or have more testing done, but it’s now coming in 6.5. Then there is another API that came into 6.4, but it now has some update. That’s the Block Hooks API, and then we also have now public, and we talked about it for a year and a half on this show, on the Gutenberg Changelog, is the interactivity API is finally made public and in WordPress core. So that’s another feature where developers can actually build some great websites with it. It’s almost like there’s no reload on pages if you have interactivity pieces in there, and it replaces the reliance on jQuery quite a bit. A lot of it happens in PHP if you want to and of course also JavaScript. Have you played with it or tested it? I say play, but I mean tested the interactive API?

Joni Halabi: I use play too. Unfortunately I have not. I’ve been reading a little bit about it, but I just haven’t found a good case for it on our team just yet. We tend to shy away from interactivity, but I wonder if this will help us get into some more interactive elements on our sites.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had a hard time coming up with examples, but the developers who worked on it, they built a great movie demo application and of course made the code also available to that. So I can share that in the show notes. And then we have two people writing about. So Magdalena is writing an introduction into the interactivity API, and then Seth Rubenstein, who also has been on the show on the Gutenberg Live Q and A from the Pew Research Organization. He has done quite a bit of using the interactivity API for some of his voting and quizzes, and he’s writing a case study about some of his examples. So we’ll all get much more information about that in the following months, I would say. So the next two to three months or so might not be all ready for the release, but it’s here to stay, so there’s some great stuff going.

What else? Oh yeah, Steven Lin documentation co-lead for this release 6.5 has published the WordPress 6.5 field guide, and Carlos Daniele has published a great post on the Kinsta blog, who walks this through all, not only the user facing, but also the user facing changes that are coming down the pipeline. I can name it. We talked about them here on the podcast when they were all coming into the Gutenberg plugin, but it’s just to remind us all. It’s the robust revisions for style and template changes and the integration into the style book. Then of course the fund management system and then the background image support for the group block. I like them and you can have tiles or you can have them in a different aspect ratio. Speaking of aspect ratio, there will be support for the cover block and then shadow support for three more blocks. Button blocks had them already, but with 6.5, it also comes to the columns block, and the single column block and images.

The site editor gets plenty of quality of life updates where things get a little bit smoother and then the list view, but everybody’s friend is your list view. When you have longer posts, it’s a little bit more complicated and nested blocks that are even more powerful with a right click menu. And then also you can now change names in the block view, so when you have five group blocks together, you can name them and then manage them much better. Speaking of management, pattern management has also gotten some updates there and drag and drop support enlist you and editor canvas. I think those are the most important ones, but there are small little things that make life so much easier in all of these releases.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I was just going to say I really love the list view changes because I think, especially changing the names of the blocks, it’s going to make it so much more intuitive for people who, perhaps they just have a page and list view before, it would just say paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, list view. You really don’t know where you are in that list view, so if you can change it to paragraph about puppies, paragraph about kittens, paragraph about whatever you’re writing about, I think that’ll help people a lot on those longer pages.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So as we said, release is March 26th, and I know that the design team is working on some featurettes. That’s what they’re called. Short videos to show off the biggest new features. So watch the space and I’ll probably have more in the weekend edition of the Gutenberg Times in the next two weeks leading up to the release and afterwards.

Joni Halabi: We could probably spend another two plus hours talking about WordPress 6.5 because it is such a robust release and I really recommend, because we are in release candidate too, definitely check it out. You can check it out via the beta tester plugin or the WordPress playground like we had talked about before. 

Gutenberg 17.8

But it is time to move on to the Gutenberg plugin release 17.8. 17.8 was released just a couple of weeks ago, on February 28, 2024, and it included 164 pull requests by 45 contributors, and there is a blog post up that was published the same day, February 28th that runs through everything that’s new in Gutenberg 17.8. So I think it’s time to run through some of the key features.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The first up is that you can now bulk export patterns because that’s now added to the data views on the pattern list view. So go to the site editor and you click on patterns and you see on the patterns, you can now check some of the check patterns and then have a bulk action for export, and you get them in the JSON format. That’s a JavaScript Object Notation. With that, you can then import it into another website through the same system where there is, I think by the patterns, there is an import JSON button on top of the list view.

Joni Halabi: Oh, nice. Another new feature is in the template editor or inspector where you can show and select related patterns. So if you show a template or a template part, it will now show similar or related templates in the sidebar, so you can very, very easily in that sidebar switch to a different template or a different template part if you want to just play around with your design and see how something similar might look. I think that’s a nice interactivity feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And somebody who builds websites definitely needs that to gauge how it is going to look and have switched faster through that and not have that, “Oh, change it, save it, see how it looks.” But the preview helps out to curate all that, the list about it. On the grid block variations, that’s another new feature. There’s a toggle for the various grid types, so auto-generated or manual or rows or columns and all that. So you can play around with those grid block variations some more. It’s good to have. You can also change the minimum column width so you know how those columns distribute on your canvas in the front end as well as on the backend and also in mobile view because it’s intrinsically responsive. And that also is a feature. So for the grid children, so inside the grid, you can also specify rows and columns and change the column span and the row span. So even more to play around for all the designers out there.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. That gives you so many options for different layouts, alternate layouts, and I’m very happy that accessibility and responsiveness is also taken into consideration here because I think that’s going to be really important, especially when you start playing with all of these spans. And there’s some great screenshots in the pull request that give a really clear idea about what’s going on in the grid block right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And Justin Tadlock and Ryan Welcher, they had a Developer Hours on how to build more on web layouts with WordPress blocks, and they talked about some of the grid features, but also some can be done with CSS, and so you might want to check those out. And Justin shared all his code to use that in a repo, so I just wanted to make a shout-out for that. It does not cover these grid layout features yet because they weren’t out yet, but he’s preparing another show for that for sure, because he’s very much into grids.

Joni Halabi: Moving on to some enhancements, the script modules API got a new deregister option, so you can use that to override script modules if you want to de-register a module. There’s now an API hook into that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that is actually part of the WordPress 6.5 script modules, API that comes as a new feature. And this was, although it was outside of that, was one of the last Gutenberg plugin releases, it was back boarded to the release candidate, so it will make it into 6.5 when it’s finally released. And the same with the next one is the block bindings to actually lock the edit of the blocks that have block bindings, so a user can override that if it has a block binding. It also comes with a visual indicator in the toolbar that this block actually has a block binding connection with a custom field, so it’s much more visible what kind of block this is. So I’m glad that they found this. This also has been back boarded to the release candidate, so it will come in 6.5 as well.

Joni Halabi: Nice. Another new feature that I’m particularly excited about is when an editor is editing a block in content only mode. So it means that the block inspector is usually unavailable, but now there’s a new feature that allows editing of an image blocks alt and title attributes when you’re in that content only mode. And I think this feature is so important because, at least in my experience, a lot of content editors, sometimes they’ll forget to add a title or alt text to an image, and this just makes it much easier to remind them and give them access to write that content because that’s content, it’s content for screen reader users and people who need that. So I’m very excited about this one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, glad you pointed that out, yes. I’m looking through this. There is also an update to the theme JSON schema to actually include the background support that came in with previous versions of the Gutenberg. So you get now support if you use the VS Code or something like that, you get support for the code inspector for the background support. It’s for settings, and in the settings part, also, it’s used for the block JSON for custom blocks, so it’s in the support background setting in the JSON files. Very important.

Gutenberg 17.9

Joni Halabi: Moving on to Gutenberg 17.9. 17.9 was released on March 13th, and it included a total of 196 pull requests by 59 contributors. And this is what I’m excited about. Four of those contributors were first-time contributors, so that’s very awesome. March 13th, there was also a blog post about what is new in 17.9, so I definitely recommend checking that out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Go ahead.

Joni Halabi: Sorry, I was just going to run into the features, but if you wanted to say something before I did that, go for it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, go ahead.

Joni Halabi: Okay. So the first feature that I wanted to call out was that now color and typography presets have been added to global styles. So this was something that was really popular in classic themes where users were allowed to change the color palette and the families in the customizer. So now this is available in global styles.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yes. So it’s not only the privilege of the theme developer to offer presets for color and typography, so that’s really good. Another feature is a shuffler option for the pattern category. So if you have a category on your patterns that it’s maybe call to action, you can press that button, that shuffle button, and it shows you all the call to action at different order. So it makes it easier to select things and not always have to scroll past the same patterns that you saw before. So it makes it a little bit more surprising.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. Another new feature is in the inner blocks component, there is now support to insert before block and after block actions when you’re using a lot of blocks. So basically what this means is that if you are a content editor and you have selected a child block inside of some parent block, in the toolbar, there are now options that say add before and add after that will allow you to add child blocks before or after whichever child block you have selected. So it just makes it a little bit easier to add these child blocks as you’re editing. So I think it’s a really nice UI feature here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely. And I think it makes it also in combination with the block hooks, API makes it much more versatile for extenders to use that feature as well. Another feature is something that I personally have been waiting for since I saw the list block in Gutenberg, which I think was right from the beginning, but is to allow the tab key to indent a selected part. So up until now, you needed to use the click on the block toolbar to indent a set of list items. So the child parent kind of thing. Now you can use Tab, and that is much more… For me, it’s much more intuitive because I spend a lot of time in Google Docs and that’s how it works there. So I’m really glad that it finally made it to the block editor.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that’s a really nice one too, because I use my keyboard more often than I use anything else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Joni Halabi: The next feature that I want to talk about is connected to the block binding API, and this adds a visual indicator if you’re in the editor and you’re looking at a block, and that block is connected to a block binding source. So, for example, if you have a paragraph block and the content of that paragraph block is bound to some external source, a meta field, for example, in the editor in the toolbar, there’s a special icon that will just give the content editor a clue that, “Hey, this paragraph block, you can’t really edit this paragraph block because the content here is bound to some other external source. So this is not something that you can edit by yourself.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And before that feature came in, there was no way to find which blocks are actually connected to something else. So it removes the wonder and mystery of things, and I like that it’s purple.

Joni Halabi: I love that. I love that it’s purple, but also a different icon design because that means even if you’re colorblind, you can’t see the color purple, you can still see, “Hey, this is not the paragraph icon. What’s going on here?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Correct. Yeah,

Joni Halabi: Very nicely done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I just want to point out, if you are looking for documentation, there have been a ton of updates in the documentation sector, and they are all already live on the Block Editor Handbook, especially for the interactivity API docs and the other theme, JSON schema we talked about, and some of the core block references have been updated, so check them out. There are so many. We are not specifically calling them out, but just wanted to point that out for you. And I think we are done, are we?

Joni Halabi: I think so. I didn’t see any others in the list, but just a reminder, there are so many changes in WordPress 6.5, but also the latest two Gutenberg updates, 17.8 and 17.9. So I definitely recommend checking out those blog posts that are up on the blog, just especially if you’re interested in seeing what else is out there that they all link to the pull requests and it’s just a wealth of information.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. But now that we are at the end of the show, I wanted to point out that on March 26, that’s the day of the release of 6.5, Nick Diego and Bernie Reiter will explore block hooks in WordPress 6.5 in a Developer Hour. So that is on March 26th, 14:00 UTC, that is 8:00 AM Eastern, and they will explore the changes what happened with the block API. Bernie was also the developer who wrote the developer notes, so come with your questions on it, and I of course, share the link in the show notes so you can register for that. There’s also an April workshop on April 9th that’s also on what’s new in WordPress 6.5 with Bud Kraus. And Bud Kraus is a long time WordPress educator and he shows you some of the features that you, as a user, can see with 6.5.

And on March 26, there’s actually also a workshop on untangling templates with Kathryn Presner demystifying the templates and how to put this piece together. So there are great things coming on the WordPress online learning workshop as well, and we have the links in the show notes later on. All right, so what are you working on right now or when we are done with the show, it’s the weekend, but next week, what are you going to first check out on the 6.5?

Joni Halabi: Well, since the field guide just got published today, I saw the email come in this morning in my inbox, my plan for today, and probably early next week, is to pore through that field guide and see what changes affects our team at Georgetown because we have a very heavily customized set of themes and plugins that we use for the university. So it’s always exciting to see what new features are coming up, how we can leverage those, and what features are being released that affect our existing code. So that’s my plan for the next few days.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, wonderful, wonderful. And as always, the show notes of this episode will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast and this is episode 97. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com or ping me on the Make WordPress Slack or on Twitter. And when people want to connect with you, Joni, how would they do this? Where do they find you online?

Joni Halabi: I am just about everywhere @jonihalabi. That’s my handle in most places. I’m also on the Make WordPress Slack, so just come find me there. Feel free to shoot me a DM or send me a tweet or a Mastodon message. I’m on Instagram.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so this was it, dear listeners. Thank you for being with us and we’ll see you or hear you. Not see you, but hear you in two weeks again.

Joni Halabi: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Take care. Bye-bye.

Leave a Reply

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