Happy New Year! 🎆 🙌 🎉🥂
I hope you had some wonderful time with your family or friends over the holidays, and you started re-energized and excited into 2025.
At Gutenberg Times, we, that’s you and me, are now celebrating our seventh anniversary! Although, I started curating Gutenberg updates right after WordCamp Europe in June 2017, I registered the domain Gutenbergtimes.com and started the newsletter on January 14, 2018.
My dear friend, Bob Dunn aka BobWP started the DoTheWoo network around the same time, and we are planning a joined anniversary podcast episode to chat about our journey in the WordPress community. Stay Tuned!
As I just returned from vacation, I am pretty sure I haven’t caught up with all the great things that happened around the block editor. The updates here are pretty cool, though!
More again next week 🤗
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: We are not only four weeks away from WordCamp Asia. If you want to meet there, use my public calendar to self-schedule a meeting: bit.ly/bph-wcasia.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Jonathan Derosiers has published the final planning information for WordPress 6.8. The 10-person release squad consist of long-time contributors with a ton of experience. Desrosiers also confirmed the schedule, which was earlier proposed by Hector Prieto,:
- March 4, 2025, for Beta 1
- March 25, 2025, for RC 1 and
- April 15, 2025, the general release.
WordPress “6.8 will focus primarily on being a polish and bug fix release. New features will be considered if deemed reasonably ready.” Derosiers wrote.
Justin Tadlock published the monthly roundup post on the WordPress Developer Blog What’s new for developers? (January 2025). You learn about the new Query total block, updates to styling blocks in themes, Playground updates as wells important update for Plugin developers.
State of the Word
On December 16, 2024, Matt Mullenweg, Matias Ventura, Junko Fukui, and Mary Hubbard delivered the State of the Word 2024 from Tokyo. The WordPress YouTube channel has all three videos for those of us, who could not be in Japan.
- State of the Word 2024
- Q & A with Matt Mullenweg
- STOW Panel Discussions on publishing in the open and the future of WordPress in Japan and beyond.
Nicholas Garofalo published a recap on the WordPress news site: State of the Word 2024: Legacy, Innovation, and Community.
Jyolsna J E posted her recap on the WPTavern. Recap of the State of the Word 2024
Gutenberg plugin
Gutenberg 19.9 was released on December 19th. In his post What’s new in Gutenberg 19.9? (19 December) manager Ramon Dodd highlighted:
Jyolsna JE has the skinny for you via WPTavern: Gutenberg 19.9 Introduces Style Book to Classic Themes
Gutenberg 20.0 was also released. It’s the 200th release of the Gutenberg plugin. The release post is still in the works but you can read the changelog on GitHub.
Next week, Tammie Lister and I will talk through the two Gutenberg releases on the next episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It’s going to be great fun as Tammie was one of the original designers/developers on the Gutenberg team, so the 200th release is a great occasion to talk about the journey in WordPress. Tammie Lister is also the design release lead for WordPress 6.8.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #123 – WordPress 6.9 and Gutenberg 21.9 with Isabel Brison, core contributor. and JavaScript developer at Automattic.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Ella van Durpe created an early prototype to Write Books With the Block Editor. The nascent project outside of WordPress is used to create e-books and documents using the Block Editor, even offline. You can export your work in EPUB format for e-book readers like Kindle or as DOCX files. Its features include chapter navigation, cover design, and a demo editor available as a Progressive Web App (PWA). It’s still evolving, with planned improvements like revision history and better file support. Feedback is welcome to shape its development. You can try it out by going to the demo editor and install it as a PWA locally via the installation icon in your browser bar: 
Marko Krstic released his DBlocks Finder plugin for blocks & synced patterns and helps users find and manage Gutenberg blocks and synced patterns within their WordPress sites.
Anne Katzeff shared in her blog post Convert Content from the Classic Editor to Blocks, the few easy steps to converting content from the Classic to the Block editor. Katzeff also created a video with the steps you can follow along which covers converting blocks one post at a time or Global conversation using the Convert to Blocks plugin by 10up
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Nick Diego published a code snippet on the Developer blog on How to filter the output of a block binding, using using the block_bindings_source_value filter. He provides a practical example of modifying the display of book prices in different currencies based on a URL query parameter.
In his post WordPress Themes Need More Weird: A Call for Creative Digital Homes, Nick Hamze advocates bringing back creativity and uniqueness in website design, especially when it comes to WordPress themes. He points out how everyone’s designs are starting to look the same, which kinda kills the vibe of real self-expression. Hamze is urging theme designers to ditch the boring old layouts and go for bold looks that show off strong opinions and suit specific needs. Think of themes like album covers—it’s all about having personality and making that instant visual impact. Overall, it’s a shout-out to designers to try out those unconventional ideas to jazz up WordPress themes and make the whole web scene way more fun and varied!
In Mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes, Justin Tadlock shows you how you can implement a light or dark mode depending on the visitors system settings. “The color-scheme property and light-dark() function are the foundation of the method used in this tutorial. They are both baseline CSS standards in 2024, so the challenge is making them work with WordPress standards.” Tadlock wrote.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Eric Karkovack posted on the Kinsta blog on how to Use the WordPress Block Bindings API to power your blocks. The Block Bindings API, introduced in WordPress 6.5, is a significant advancement for WordPress developers. It allows binding data sources to core WordPress blocks, enabling the creation of dynamic websites more efficiently.
For more use cases and more in-depth insights, you can also peruse the WordPress Developer Blog. This page lists all articles on Block Bindings.
In his video, Create an AMAZING WordPress Carousel with the Interactivity API!, Elliott Richmond takes you along on to build a Slider with the create-block scaffolding tool, using the interactivity api template. You’ll learn in this video:
- Setting up a carousel container and managing context variables.
- Calculating offsets and indices dynamically for smooth navigation.
- Adding seamless transitions with CSS for a polished user experience.
- Reverse-engineering forwards and backwards navigation with ease.
- How to prepare your slider for integration with WordPress settings or database values.
Sounds like a fun programming adventure! Richmond also shared his code on GitHub
Ryan Welcher also shared a snippet on the WordPress Developer Blog:
How to register a block variation but hide it from the inserter. “In some cases, a custom block is overkill, and a block variation is a better solution. For example, a user in the outreach channel wanted to add an attribute to a block that was only used in a template and, based on the existence of that attribute, add some custom functionality.” Welcher wrote.
Playground updates
This week, and new version of WordPress Studio, the local development environment based on Playground, was released. The post Build Locally, Deploy Globally: Meet Studio Sync for WordPress.com has all the details of the new Sync features. You can use it to
- Synchronize local sites with WordPress.com hosted sites
- Take a local site live with a WordPress.com hosting plan.
The Sync feature is available to users with a Business or eCommerce plan.
In the online workshop, an online workshop on WordPress Playground for developers,, Core WordPress Playground developer, Berislav Brgiacak joined developer educator Jonathan Bossenger to share insights into how developers can leverage WordPress Playground. Their notes are available on GitHub. You’ll learn
- how to configure a playground instance with your custom plugin and theme, and store that in GitHub.
- how to create a blueprint version of the above configuration to share with clients and coworkers.
- about possible use cases to use Playground.
Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher also tackled Playground in their latest Developer Hours: Everything you need to know about WordPress Playground. WordPress Playground allows users to create fully functional WordPress instances directly in their browser, with no installation or setup required. Beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground offered powerful capabilities, from testing plugins and themes to running demos and even supporting app development. No matter how you engage with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer. In the session, Welcher and Diego explored tools and workflows for plugin and theme development, demonstrated how to use Playground for testing and support, highlighted key improvements introduced in 2024, and offered a preview of exciting new features planned for 2025.
Adam Zieliński did some experimentation over the holidays, and has been using WordPress as a git repo, using Playground. As to answer the WHY he wrote: “I want Notion that’s free, offline first, and where I own my data. I also want to collaborate with my wife and my improve group. WordPress is the perfect foundation, the hosted version solves many of my problems, but I really want to version my data as static files.”
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com