Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program

Maggie Cabrera and Birgit Pauli-Haack Gutenberg Changelog 98
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog
Gutenberg Changelog #98 - WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program
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In this episode, Maggie Cabrera and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0, Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Maggie Cabrera

Announcements

Developer Blog updates

What’s new in Gutenberg 18.0? (27 March).

Story Dataviews Component

Design Share: Mar 11-Mar 22

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 98th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.5 briefly, Gutenberg 18.0, the community mentorship program, and some other things that are in the works. And I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time Core contributor for the WordPress open-source project sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future Program. That is a mouthful, and we’re going to repeat it again. I am thrilled to have with me Maggie Cabrera, also Core contributor, also sponsored by Automattic. She was also the co-lead for the Twenty Twenty Four theme development, and she does so much more in the community as well, and we will talk about those things. Thank you for joining me on the show, Maggie. Welcome. How are you today?

Maggie Cabrera: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m doing really good. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. I’m excited. Yeah, it’s kind of Easter weekend, and we get a few additional days.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, short week. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Short week, yes.

Maggie Cabrera: I’m really excited to be here with you.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So we have a couple of announcements that we want to kind of let our listeners know, and so one is, although contributors work really hard, the release team decided to delay the release of WordPress 6.5 for a week to get some more bugs fixed that are gravely impacting the user experience, and make the change to the default fonts directory. There was a discussion back and forth, and there was in Core, on the Core blog, you can certainly read up about it. I think the most important information is that it releases on April 2nd, just after the Easter holidays in Europe, so…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Yeah, I think it wouldn’t have, the holidays here, it would’ve been just a two-day release delay, or something like that, but I think it makes sense to take it out a little longer, and make sure that everything’s ironed out, and the change with the forms directory, it’s been a constant discussion, but it feels like there’s a solid decision now, so that it feels like it’s, 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a solid decision to get a release out, yes.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, it wasn’t easy, apparently. Yeah, yeah, it wasn’t a clear solution there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, and it’s kind of architectural versus practical, and all those kinds of different aspects of it, yeah. Would host work with it? How plugin devices work with it, and how users will find it. So I think it’s a decision, and we will see how it works out when WordPress 6.5 kind of hits your WordPress instance next week. 

Community Contributions

There are a few community contributions that I wanted to point out. The developer blog, we had a great publishing two weeks on the developer blog. Sometimes, we barely get one post out a week, but this time, we had two posts per week, so that is really cool, and in a very broad spectrum. So the first one was how to register block variations of PHP, and I think it was one of the most-read posts on that, and what we saw on Twitter was also the comments was, “Oh, finally, something for PHP developers who are not that comfortable with JavaScript,” and I’m glad we kind of, yeah, picked them up as well. Yeah, and another one that was well-received was the pattern design tips and tricks for developers and designers.

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, by Beatriz Fialho.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes, I love that one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. She did an awesome job with the dos and don’ts, and kind of make it also visually very attractive.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes. I need to link that one to the Community Themes project, because it’s really relevant, so that’s really good that I have the link there for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the Meta team asked me if we could add some of the dos and don’ts to the pattern directory guidelines as well, because that would probably also change a little bit how people kind of approach it. Well, you mentioned the Community Theme project. Do you want to tell me about it, or our listeners about it?

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah?

Community Theme Project

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, the Community Themes project is this really small thing that it’s… I hope it will attract more new contributors to the WordPress project. So, basically, it started after contributing to some of the previous default themes, I think it was Twenty Twenty One or Twenty Twenty Two. It was such a good experience for me to work with the community, and all the contributors, all together on a default thing, that it felt really sad that it only lasted a few months, and after that development was done, everyone went their own ways, and that was it. So I felt shouldn’t we just keep making blog themes together, and keep this momentum going? And so yeah, we just opened a repo, and started building some community themes that, they are block themes. It’s like this space where you can get with other contributors with different degrees of experience that can help you build block themes following the best code practices, and learn how to do that together. Now, we are using that project to also onboard new contributors via the mentorship program, which I think you’re going to talk about in a bit. So the new contributors will join that repo and help build the themes with some other more-seasoned contributors helping them out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so was it Twenty Twenty Two that had the call for style variations?

Maggie Cabrera: I think it was Twenty Twenty Three.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Twenty Twenty Three? Oh, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that was the community project that you are kind of working on, where you had about 38 people submitting style variations, and made it into the default theme. So that was really cool, and it was also interesting to see how different designers approach it, yeah, and was it one or two themes that the Community Theme project released? 

Maggie Cabrera: So, right now, there’s two that are already finished, but we’re working on four more. They’re still in different degrees of done, but we’re not in a rush, which is the nice thing, because a default theme has a deadline, but community themes don’t really, so we just go at the pace of the contributors, and hopefully there will be, like those four, will make it sometime in the future in the directory. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So where can people read up about it? Is a GitHub repo, or a GitHub space, or is a channel?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, it is a GitHub repo under the WordPress namespace. I think there’s an old post on the Make blog on the themes team, and it’s also part of the mentorship program. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, we definitely need to bring this out more, and amplify some of that work that you’re doing.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, whenever I go to WordCamps, and during contributor day, we usually work on that, on the themes table. So if you’re around in WordCamp EU, I will probably do more of that. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Excellent. So yeah, there are some more developer blog posts that I wanted to point out. The next one was drop shadow updates for WordPress 6.5. That kind of covers that drop shadows were only available for buttons, and only through the theme JSON file, so now, they’re available with a user interface under the Border and Shadows section in the styles, and come with five presets from Core. And you can add through the theme JSON additional ones, and they’re now available for images and column both, and the button block. Yeah, so those four blocks can now have drop shadows, have support for drop shadows. Yeah, it’s quite interesting to see how drop shadows make a revival design-wise, because they add a little bit of a dimension to a site, especially. Oh, and well, we talk about it when we cover Gutenberg 18.0 is, it now also came to featured image, but it will not be in 6.5. Yeah, and then Nick Diego published an Exploring the Block Hooks API in WordPress 6.5. You need, really, a big cup of coffee for it when you want to read it. It’s about 5,000 words, but it has 4 examples, how you can use this API to add blocks to various actions, and various other blocks, and also change content.

Maggie Cabrera: More PHP for the PHP lovers.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Say it again?

Maggie Cabrera: More PHP for the PHP-lovers.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s both, actually.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, you need to tell the block what to do. So that’s probably in JavaScript some more. Yeah. But yeah, that definitely, yeah, and then the last one was just published yesterday is how to use the WordPress React components for plugin pages, and so you can use the components that are pre-configured, pre-designed. You don’t have to make those decisions, but you can use them to also create your settings pages, your additional pages on the plugins, and it kind of goes into the next phase of things, when admin changes over to a few additional pages and all that, so… 

Mentorship Program

Well, you mentioned it before, the second cohort of the mentorship program is almost finished. It has really taken off. Almost 50 contributors were paired with mentors, and the program ran for six weeks. Mentees came from a lot of different countries, from Spain, from Egypt, from India, from Brazil, Italy. That’s just what I can kind of, at a first glance, see. So you have been part of it as a mentor, Maggie. So thank you for raising your hand and stepping up to that plate, and so what was your experience in working with a mentee in the whole program?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, it’s been really good. Our particular project has nine people working on building the community themes that I mentioned before. Of those mentees, they all have varying degrees of experience in blog theme development, and I was really happy to see that some of them were designers, which is something that slowly, we’re moving towards, which I’m really excited about.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s cool. That designers are going to now do themes. Yeah, absolutely.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Before, it was just developers, and then we’re getting more and more designers, because they don’t really need to actually know any kind of coding skills to do this. So I encourage any designers to join us, if they want to. I had the privilege to meet a few of them during WordCamp Contributor Day on the themes table. We were working on some community themes, along with other contributors that just joined our org, and I think this is the second instance of the mentorship program, which was successful, they did the first time around, and there’s been way more people this time, all over other teams of the project. I’m only talking about teams because it’s the one that I’m working on, but there’s a community, there’s Core, there’s tests, there’s documentation. All of the teams, I think, are represented. So everyone’s welcome. So yeah, I encourage, from here, anyone who’s interested in being a contributor to join it for the next one, and keep an eye on that. I think it’s the community Make blog where they are announcing when this mentorship is taking place, and it’s really nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That will be make.wordpress.org/community. So the program managers are Hari Shanker and Naoko Takano?

Maggie Cabrera: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And they’re both very experienced community members.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes, they are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and yes, the first cohort was in July last year. It started in July last year. It’s an experiment, yeah, and, obviously, the feedback was really great in how it all went, both from mentees and mentors. So they were able to expand this. I think they had 75 applicants. So there is an application embedding process for both mentees and mentors.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. There’s also been, this time around, there’s been a grant for LGBTQ+ people, so some of them are actually sponsored to join the mentorship program, which I hope will happen again. So yeah, I’m really excited about that, too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one of the many, actually, efforts to bring underrepresented minorities also to the contributor team, and I really love that there is a sponsorship there, because many women, I say, were non-binaries, have so much requests on their times, that apart from having a profession, or a job to do, they’re also caretakers of their families, their kids, their elderly, and so they are not as free, most of the time, in our society, not as free to take on extra time, and we can’t change that, but we can help offset some of the financial burdens that are there. All right, so yeah, I’m glad we talked about the mentorship program there. Thank you so much. 

Data Liberation

So there’s another initiative out there since the State of the Word in 2023. That was in Madrid. Matt Mullenweg talked about the data liberation, that anybody should be able to take their data and move either into WordPress, from WordPress to another WordPress, or from a third-party system, and the Data Liberation Project Initiative has invited developers and product owners to a hallway hangout, which is an informal discussion, to discuss and brainstorm around that project, and it’s on April 3rd at 7:00 PM, 1900 UTC, which is 1500 Europe or Germany, and 1900 is 1700. Well, time zones. Yeah, it’s 1900 UTC. Let’s do it that way.

Maggie Cabrera: We’re close to daylight savings, so you just let those people figure it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s going to change on Sunday. So today is the 10th, and it will be on April 3rd. So yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: For some people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For some people.

Maggie Cabrera: For some people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s okay. Only for some people.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, if you miss it, because either time zones or daylight savings time, there, likely, will be a recording, and the topics that will become discussions is kind of the challenging of migrating from third-party platforms to WordPress, the good, the bad, and the ugly of exporting WordPress content. So the potential interoperability between block libraries, and page builders, and what work will make data liberation, and who should work on it. So that’s quite an interesting discussion to have with those people that are interested in the project on April 3rd. Okay, yeah, every time when I was working in an agency, it was always a little bit hard to move people away from hosting that is bad, or from page-builder that was bad, and all of that. So I’m glad that there is a project now where all the community can put together their scripts, and their ideas, and their work that they have already done, and share it with the rest of the community.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. I know more and more people who want to move out of those walled gardens, and own their own content, so I think that’s going to be a great initiative, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the flexibility.

Maggie Cabrera: To keep an eye on it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The interoperability is just unmatched there that WordPress has with other systems, and the more a website grows up, the more needs there are, for sure. 

Developer Hours

Speaking of events, this week was a developer hour covering the block hooks API, and Nick Diego, and Ryan, or, no, Justin, went through four examples, Justin Tadlock, four examples of adding a like block to a page, and moving it from the comments to the top, or something like that, and then the Getting Started Guide in the Block Editor Handbook has a example of a copyright block. This developer API event kind of took that, and see what you could do with the block hooks, and get it into a footer, or get it into a template. And then the third example is to add a Back to Top link to a paragraph, or to the next heading, before the next heading, or something like that. Yeah, and then, last, but not least, how to add a login/logout block automatically to the navigation of a site in the template. So, right now, you can’t use the block hooks API, all the blocks. We should get rid of the name blocks, and just call it hooks.

Right now, it’s only for templates; you cannot do it for pages or posts, but that certainly is the next iteration of it. The recording will be linked in the show notes, so you can catch up on it, and they use the developer blog post on the block hooks API as a guide, and how they talked about it. Yeah. The next Developer Block Hour… God. There’s an erroneous block added to it, the Developer Block hours. No, it’s the Developer Hours, and it will take place on April 9th with Damon Cook and Nick Diego, and they will showcase examples on how to use the interactivity API and enhance your block-building experience for you and your users. So save the date, April 9th at 1400 UTC. You’ll figure out when that is for you, but I will link to register in the show notes, and it’s a link to meet up, and they do a good job in translating the times to the local times of your browser. All right, that’s about that, and I think it’s time that we start with the Gutenberg 18.0 release. Maggie, do you want to be honest and get us into the groove of things?

What’s Released – Gutenberg 18.0

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. The 18.0 Gutenberg plugin release has 206 closed PRs by 59 contributors. It has a record setting of 17 first-time contributors, which is amazing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, amazing. Yeah. The last time, I think, was Gutenberg 13 point-something. Yeah, it was 13, but, normally, we have 4 or 5 first-time contributors.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m thinking that the successful Contributor Day in WordCamp Asia had something to do with it, but it’s just a theory.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, or the mentorship. Maybe the mentorship, too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, mentorship, too, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. Everything counts, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Everything counts. Yes, of course. Yeah, every contribution is worth it.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. If you look, you’ll find, in the release, the result of additional data view works, improvements on feature image in all the blocks, and a ton of bug fixes, and about 35 PRs just for the contribution updates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Maggie Cabrera: So let’s have a look at some of them.

Enhancements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So DataViews is the prototype for the new admin design. Not a lot of people realize that, but if you’re in the blog edit and the site editor, the list views that you see there, the list of templates, and the list of pages, and the list of template parts, they’re all powered by the new data views, and this release brings with the multiple selection of filters. So if you were in a template view, you can say, “Okay, I want to combine the filter from the author with a theme,” or something like that. Yeah, or, “In a page, I want the ones that are published and pending for review, but not the draft ones,” or, “I want the ones published by a certain author.” So these, in the list here, I don’t think that’s actually available in the admin section now. I’m not quite sure. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Not as complex as this filter looks like in this PR. It feels like it’s going a step ahead, and what I think is very powerful is how this can be used, not just where it’s being used right now, but in any other place that a plugin author may want to implement it, or in the future, we’re going to see it in other places in the admin panel. So yeah, I think it’s really powerful, and they’re working really hard on making this something that can be used in many ways. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and in the pages state of view, they added some quick actions. The quick bulk actions. I think bulk actions is the one from the admin where you can say, “Okay, I want this page, and this page, and this page,” and then delete them all, or change something, or something like that. Yeah, and now, that’s also in the new ones. And the last one from the data view, there are tons of changes in the data views. Some were incremental changes, but one is that the updates…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, the story.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so I wanted to talk about the index page for the templates, because it now shows three different views of it. So you could have a table. So the templates are your archive pages, your single post template, and all that, and you can see them all in a list, or you use the toggle for the layout, and you can see a grid view, and the grid view gives you a little small preview of the template, so you know exactly what it will show with a featured image with where the content is, and all that, or you can have a list, but then, there’s another pane that gives you a preview of the full page, full template, where you can also edit it, so that, from table, to grid view, to list view, those are the different prototypes for the admin designs, and it’s really smooth how they move, and with all the animations, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. I’ve been looking at the PRs, and the contributors take a lot of care into the performance aspect of the changes. They are keeping close tabs into what the performance looks like. So these improvements, they’re going to be very important when this goes all over the admin. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next item on my list was in the site editor, the featured image is now, or in the site editor that we can look at, the post editor, the featured image section is now moved up to the top of the inspector control, which is….

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I’m very excited about that. It feels like it’s such a small change, but it’s something that you want to be up top there, so I’m really excited that that finally made it. That’s the kind of thing that it’s like, “Why is it that hidden?” And it’s also something that it’s toggled, so you need to click it before you see it. So now, it’s up there, right where you need all the info for your photos.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the web pages become more and more just also visually, need to be visually attractive. You need to have a featured image for the social posts. Yeah, so it’s such a strong piece of your design that it should be more in the forefront, as it is now. Yeah. Yeah, speaking of featured image, you can now use the featured image in a media and text block, which I find exciting, because you don’t need to use complicated columns. Yeah, you can just use a media and text block for your featured image, and the title of your post, and then it kind of shows up in a great way, and you don’t have it as a background, or as a cover, or something like that; it’s just the picture has its own right, actually, in your header of your post, or in your archive pages. Yeah, so I really like it. Have you seen any designs for that yet?

Maggie Cabrera: No. You’ve seen that particular block, but I can think of a few things that I’ve worked on that try to replicate the same thing with columns, and I’m glad that now, we can do it with the media and text block, which is probably simpler than those solutions that we built. So yeah, I’m excited to have another tool for the theme developers to get those featured images in your posts. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, media and text block is actually quite versatile in how you can use it, and also, the expanding of the picture when the text goes bigger, and yeah, it’s all some automation in there. That was very intriguing.

Maggie Cabrera: And the responsive controls, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was very intriguing to me, yeah, when I first kind of encountered it, and we mentioned it before, for the featured image, now, you can attach a box shadow or a drop shadow around it. It has support for that now. So you could have borders that are rounded plus a drop shadow on your featured image in the single post. It’s really cool. Yeah, I like it.

Maggie Cabrera: Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the layout changes are part of the grid layout experiments? Have you experimented with those grid layouts that are coming to WordPress, or to the Gutenberg Times?

Maggie Cabrera: I have tested some of the PRs. This is not yet on Core, right? 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s on 18.

Maggie Cabrera: Okay. Yeah, so that’s the reason why I haven’t used it in a production-ready theme, but I’m really excited. I’m following it, because I think it’s great. It’s the future of layout in WordPress. So I’m super stoked about how fast it’s moving, because grid is so complicated, and thinking about a UI for grid, that it’s both complex enough to give you all the tools that you need for those complicated layouts, while are still being friendly for users who don’t know how grid works in CSS, it’s an incredible difficult accomplishment. So I’m really excited to see it advance, and it’s looking really, really promising. I really think it’s the future for theme layout. So I’m really looking really closely into those features.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So right now, you can only experience it when you enable the grid layouts in the experiments section of the Gutenberg plugin, but it’s really eye-opening how it all works, and there are two new features in there, that one is to have start row, and column start and row start controls in the grid so inside the grid, so you can drag and drop around blocks, and use the drag and drop, which is, visually, much easier to accomplish than trying to figure out which column to put where, something wherever, and another one is that you can group blocks in a grid, so you have six paragraphs, and then you highlight them all, and you click the grid button, and then it arranges them in whatever grid you say, three by three, three by two, four by two, kind of… Yeah, it’s actually really magic. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: It’s magic. It’s magic, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, and it’s just so amazing that this is possible in WordPress, where you never had any layout tools before. Yeah, so yeah, we are really happy about that. The next thing is that, also, in the site editor, when you look at styles, up until now, you have just the style variations, but now, you also have access to the color and the typography presets in the same page or same column. So you can say, “Okay, I want this style variation, but I want it in a different color, and I want a different font for that.” So that informs your whole site as well. You don’t have to do it for every block, and every template, or something like that. Yeah, so this is really powerful to kind of bring the global styles, not only to the style variations, but also to color and typography presets. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, sometimes you really like everything about a style variation, but the colors or the typography, and now, you can mix and match however you like, which is nice having the extra option, and I think it’s also a stepping stone for more changes, in that vein, that will come. So yeah, I’m excited about that, too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and it’s also visually pleasing. So if you try that out, then when you use the Gutenberg plugin, you have some great visual representation of what the presets would be like, and also, when you click on it, you have a preview on the right-hand side, so you know what you get yourself into. So it’s really good. 

APIs

There’s a new API for developers, and that is the plugin document settings panel. So in the document settings, you can have, now, a slot fill, where you, as a plugin developer, you can have put additional fields in there, additional information, and additional controls, and it’s now available, also, for the site editor. You could do this on the post editor, but now, it’s also available for the site editor. So there’s this matching-up with post editor and site editor kind of becoming the same.

Maggie Cabrera: Yes. Yeah, that’s important.

Bug Fixes

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah. There’s one bug fix that I really love, and that’s the code bug. Finally. So yeah, especially for the developer blog, yeah, we had a few code examples.

Maggie Cabrera: I see why you highlighted it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … where we had to kind of spend hours, no, not hours, but at least a half an hour, very tedious work, to remove the breaks, and kind of have new lines in there in code view. So, now, that’s finally solved, and yeah, we can now start writing again.

Maggie Cabrera: Focus your time on what’s important, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s actually very soothing. It’s almost meditative doing that, but you need to be in the mindset for that.

Maggie Cabrera: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Put on some music.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, put on some music. Yeah.

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, I get it.

Documentation

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think I wanted to highlight one of the documentation things. So, if you, as plugin developer, or agency developer, are interested in the data views, there is a… Well, all the components are in a storybook kind of site that gives you a representation outside of context of a component, and you can see all the attributes for it, and you can try it out, and they just updated the story for the data views component, and so it’s easier for if you want to kind of experiment with it, or, in your research, you can definitely use it now, and get a better handle on how the data views would maybe work for you in your plugin, and give us your more complicated custom post types that you might have. I will link the story to this DataViews component into the show notes so you don’t have to hunt it down.

I think that was it. That’s all from the Gutenberg plugin 18.0. Of course, if you’re interested in any of the other 209 PRs, the release post will be on makeblog/core later, after we’ve finished recording, but way before this podcast is published, so we’ll have it there for you in the show notes. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Now, we’re at the section of what’s in active development or discussed, and I wanted to point out for you, dear listeners, what’s coming with the admin design. We know we see a few things already in the site editor, and as kind of a prototype of Saxon Fletcher from the design team showed in the video how the next version of DataViews, the admin pages, could work, and it’s an insightful 18-minute video shared in the design channel, and he summarizes the most recent thinking, particularly about layout and transitions in and out of the editor, and walks us through some of the Figma views and prototypes. It also goes into details about some of the Core paradigms, and if you’re not part of the WP Slack, you can also watch it via the latest design share on the Make design blog. So, Maggie, did you watch it? What was the most intriguing for you, or what was it from it?

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah, we talked about the DataViews earlier, and I think it’s really exciting to see how it’s shaping up. I think one of the comments that he makes is probably what some of the people have mentioned, about how the drilldown on the sidebar looks like, and how you’ve got to kind of click too many times to get where you want, and if you want to go back, you got to get taken back again, and it’s nice that they’re looking into that, and see if they’re going to iterate on that design. I think it’s really important for extenders, and even just regular users, to look into those design explorations, and give them feedback, because there’s only so many things that the design team can take into account, even though they make a great job at trying to figure out all use cases, and all probable ways of using the WordPress admin, but if you have feedback, I think this is the key moment to give it. So go ahead and look at the video. It’s really exciting. I think it looks really good, and I’m super stoked to see it actually live, and maybe even work on it. I really enjoyed, particularly, the color stuff, so I’ll delve into that, if I can chime in on that, but yeah, absolutely 100% look into it and give feedback, because now is the moment. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, what struck me as really interesting to see was how the new layout, we talked about the layout being on the left-hand side, being the menu, and then you get a list view, and then a preview, that has also been explored to use with more complicated custom postings, like a product, for instance, that has a few additional settings that you need to enter it, and he showed, very nicely, how that can be done in that content area in the middle of it, and then you could either switch to settings of the product, and have additional tabs, and additional fields and forms, or you could go and edit the product in an editor view. So I think there’s some great explorations there, in terms of more complicated custom post types, and to see those in a more modern interface is, really, it’s quite exciting for me. Yeah, and I can see how, because the admin designs are all extensible right now, and that accessibility needs to come back. So yes, so…

Maggie Cabrera: Yeah. WordPress needs plugins to live. Plugins are the soul of WordPress, so having them be more consistent with the general admin field is going to make WordPress, in general, a better experience for any users, whatever the plugins are. So that’s really good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, in the Figma space section, it also showed some of the standard colors, and how the variables for primary, secondary, and tertiary could work out, but he also had a section in there where he changed a whole palette from light to dark, and then every screen would also follow suit, and how that is already thought through about it because admin themes are, I think on Core, we have six or seven admin themes, and plugins add additional ones there, so that needs to be taken care of as well. And with the Figma place, where all the standards are, it’s probably easier for the plugin developers to make decisions, and to come forward to going to production much faster than before, because they don’t have to invent the wheel over and over again. Yeah, so that’s an active discussion on the design team, and I have a link for you in the show notes, and, with that, we are at the end of the show. 

Maggie, it has been a great pleasure to chat with you, and I hope you’ll come back in a few months for another Gutenberg Changelog episode.

Maggie Cabrera: Absolutely. Yeah, I would be really happy to. It’s been a pleasure for me. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you, Maggie.

Maggie Cabrera: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, and the pleasure was all mine. So, before we end the show, I want to remind everyone, April 9th, next Developer Hours on the Interactivity API at 1400 UTC. I think it’s 8:00 AM Eastern, but don’t hold me to that. 

As always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 98, and if you have questions, or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com. That’s Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com, and if you want to write a review about our podcast, I think our last reviews were from 2021. I also have asked that much for it, and I have the experience that when you ask for it, people will step up to the plate and write a review. So if you want to do that, that would be really helpful, because it helps with discovery for new people. All right, that’s it. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Maggie Cabrera: Goodbye.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Until the next time. See you.

Maggie Cabrera: See you.

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