Howdy,
For my US American friends, I am sending Happy Thanksgiving greetings! I hope y’all had a Happy Turkey Day! 🦃 🍗 You probably won’t get to read this until Monday or even later next week. Hopefully, the Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday offerings turn out well for you.
I am so grateful that you let me drop a weekend edition into your inbox every week. And thank you for the thoughtful notes, questions, ideas, and product updates. Keep ’em coming. It is you for whom I build the Gutenberg Times, and it has been an ongoing joy and wonderful adventure!
I am also grateful for everyone working on Gutenberg and on WordPress. The contributors and the Community at large has been a home to me in a world more and more divided. I have been hurting through these two years of no in-person meetings, longing to see my friends again, so I hope to meet you’all soon at a future WordCamp!
That’s it for now. Y’all have a great weekend!
Yours,💕
Birgit
Updates on WordPress 5.9
A Look at WordPress 5.9 with the newly published video via WordPress News.
You can also take a longer discovery journey with Anne McCarthy on video Exploring WordPress 5.9: Block theme flows, Styling, Patterns Explorer, & more
New schedule for January 25, 2022 release
After a few features were deemed not-quite ready, the WordPress release team held intense discussions about the feature freeze and the release schedule of WordPress 5.9. Beta 1 was supposed to be released on November 16th.
After careful weighing a few aspects of contributor sanity, user expectations, and technical details, the release team decided to punt Beta 1 for two weeks and release it on November 30th, 2021. Because of the Holidays mostly in America and Europe, these two weeks delay resulted into a six-weeks postponement of the final release, now scheduled for January 25th, 2021.
Core release lead Tonya Mork has the details about the WordPress 5.9 Revised Release Schedule
Anne McCarthy, release co-lead for testing, wrote in Why I voted to delay WordPress 5.9, her hope “is to bring you all along for the decision-making process and to demystify how this decision came to be. “
Sarah Gooding over the WPTavern posted: WordPress 5.9 Revised Release Date Confirmed for January 25, 2022.
Gutenberg 12.0.x released
Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I asked Ryan Welcher to be our guest for the Gutenberg Changelog episode 56. As he also worked on the release of this version, we heard first hand what the experience is like.
Most contributors worked on the final touches for the WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 Feature Freeze, there are no big new features expected in this version. This version is more about the small details that end up making a big difference in the overall user experience.
The most exciting updates:
- Block Styles Previews (34522),
- Featured Image block Visual Enhancement in the Site Editor (36517),
- the Site Editor Welcome Guide (36172) and
- the updates to the JSON schemas for block.json and theme.json.
The changelog has a new section called Developer Experience. It lists the PRs that are relevant to WordPress extenders (plugin & theme developers and developers working in agencies) as well as core contributors. It goes along with the GitHub Discussion Category with the same name.
Find the full changelog on GitHub
Developing Custom Blocks
Alex Standiford published a 2-hours course to teach developer how to build a Block from other Blocks. He wrote: “You’ll learn how to build a WordPress block using existing WordPress blocks. This allows you to pre-build commonly used block patterns and drastically simplify the block editing experience, even with the most advanced page layouts.”
Lara Sc henck shared on her blog how to Retrieve taxonomy terms with compose, withSelect, and getEntityRecords, using the built-in @wordpress/data packages.
Ryan Welcher continues building a Poll Block on his Twitch Live Stream. Last week, he started on the block. This week, he decided to abandons the original approach and rebuild it with the <InnerBlocks/> that is part of the WordPress scripts and takes care of the “CRUD stuff”. Check it out!
In his article, Nadir Seghir, code wrangler at Automattic, explains how WooCommerce Blocks plugin renders interactive blocks in the frontend. The gist of it? Both, PHP and React component read the HTML data attributes. It’s of course more complicated than this. Follow along!
Full-Site Editing and Themes
Justin Sainton takes his readers along on his journey to Building the New website of the hosting company Pagely, recently sold to GoDaddy. He writes about what excites him about the new way of building themes. He explains what FSE is and how to get started with great list of resources. In his Bad & Ugly section, Sainton “found things to be painful or otherwise confusing.” He puts a lot of work in getting to the actionable details. Readers beware the post is over 4,500 words.
If you want to contribute and stay on the bleeding edge of the development of Full-site Editing, Design Tool, Global Styles and block Themes, Jeffrey Pearce posted the Gutenberg + Themes 74th weekly round-up of approximately 40 theme related open issues and PRs. He also shares released merged features and updates as well as overview issues that are a great resource to keep up with the development.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
FSE Program Testing Call #11
The deadline for Call for Testing #11 Comments has been extended to December 7th, 2021. FSE Program Testing Call #11: Site Editing Safari There won’t be any zebras, rhinos and giraffes, though.
If you prefer an Italian version of the call for testing, Piermario Orecchioni published the translation: ESF Program Test Call # 11: A Site Editing Safari.
Akira Tashibana posted the Japanese version of the FSE Call for testing #11 FSE プログラムのテスト募集 #11: サイト編集の探索
Carrie Dils prepared a one file import for LocalWP to have an easy way to set up a test environment for the FSE Call for Testing.
WordPress Events
December 11 + 12, 2021
WordCamp Taiwan
December 14th, 2021 – 5:00 pm ET / 22:00 UTC
WordPress News
State of The Word w/ Matt Mullenweg + Q & A
February 4+5, 2022
WordCamp Birmingham, AL
Call for Sponsors and Speakers are open now.
March 4th, 2022 all day
WordFest 2022
a 24-hour festival of WordPress. Call for Speakers is open. Deadline Dec 6th, 2021.
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events site, you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Events, around the world, including WordCamps, WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
