Howdy,
Next week is release week, with Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for WordPress 6.1 scheduled for Tuesday, and Gutenberg 14.3 stable scheduled for Wednesday.
RC1 is the time when developers also published their Dev Notes for the Fieldguide, that covers all the changes, fixes, and features coming to a WordPress instance near you soon. Final release date is November 1st, 2022.
It’s the second time, I volunteered for the documentation team on the release squad, so the Dev Notes have been on my mind the last week. The first set of Dev Notes you’ll find linked below.
What have you been working on? Please let me know in the comments or email me pauli@gutenbergtimes.com
Now happy reading.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: Every week that starts with chatting on the panel of This Week in WordPress show is bound to be a great week. It was again great fun chatting with Nathan Wrigley, Bob Dunn and Kathy Zant. The recording is now available. We discussed last week’s WordPress news from the open-source teams and around the ecosystem. In the show notes Wrigley provides a ton of interesting articles you might have missed (as did I) 😎.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
This week, the 6.1 release squad collaborated and release Beta 3. Dan Soschin has posted the update WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 Now Available. You can help test it by following the call for testing
Sneak Peek: The meta-team just released the beta version of displaying Style Variations in the Theme Directory, a trac ticket opened by Carolina Nymark. You can browse an example with the Twenty-Twenty-Two theme.
Developer Steve Dufresne commented : “To turn on the feature, add ?beta=style_variations to the URL. The URL gets updated when you browse themes, so you’ll need to re-add it for each theme page and reload. If nothing loads, there are most likely no style variations for that theme—your best chance of finding them is in the ‘Block Themes’ category.”
When you click on the small variation card below the screenshot you will notice that the screenshot changes to show in with the variation applied. Very slick. The growing interactivity on the Theme directory makes it great fun to spend more time browsing themes and be fascinated by all the creativity.
Reminder: This is still hard hat area, travel at your own risk.
WP Briefing – Episode 40: All Things Testing with Special Guests Anne McCarthy and Brian Alexander, and they discuss with host Josepha Haden, their work on the Testing Team, the FSE outreach program and how to get started with testing in the WordPress project. Testing Beta releases, Gutenberg plugins functionality is one of the most impactful contributions community members can make.
Dev Notes for WordPress 6.1
Ryan Welcher wrote about all the Create-block scaffolding tool updates that went live between the WordPress releases. Technically, you don’t have to wait for the WordPress release as any changes are already available when they are merged with the Gutenberg plugin. Two new features make the use of the official block scaffolding tool even more useful
- -variant flag to either create static or dynamic block
- — no-plugin flag to use the tool for adding another block to an existing plugin.
Documentation was also updated with a separate page on How to create an external template so a developer can extend the script with custom templates.
Glen Davies wrote about the work on the Introduction of presets across padding, margin and block gap to the block editor to provide consistent spacing of blocks and nested blocks out of the box. Learn more about the implementation, fallbacks added for backwards compatibility and how to disable the presets for themes.
Fabian Kägy wrote the dev notes for Block-based “template parts” in traditional themes. That topic isn’t new to GT readers, though.
Justin Tadlock wrote a Building a Block-Based Header Template in a Classic Theme – A step-by-step tutorial teaches you how to build a block-based header template in a classic theme in WordPress, including CSS tweaks, template parts, pattern creation, and more. Theme authors who are considering adopting block template parts, especially those with classic themes and existing user bases, this tutorial is for you. It touches on a few different features and how they come together.
Andre Draganescu wrote about the newly implemented Navigation Block Fallback Behavior in WP 6.1. In other words, it describes various scenarios of what happens when a user adds a navigation block for the first time, or switched to a block-theme, that has a navigation block in the header.
More developer notes can be reviewed on the Make Core Blog
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Learn.WordPress On WordPressTV: Benjamin Evans No-Code Techniques to Showcase Your Images on Any Device
Marko Segota, Anariel Design, just published a brand-new guide to Getting started with the WordPress Block Editor. It walks the reader through the first step and explains basic concepts along the way. If you know someone how is new to using WordPress or the block editor, this post will quickly get them up to speed.
In his latest video “I found all the CHANGES Coming To WordPress 6.1 in 5 mins” core contributor, Dave Smith, points you to five resources where you will find information about updates of the block editor and what is to come to WordPress 6.1 on November 1, 2022. Among them a very kind mention of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast (#4). Dave Smith was a special guest on the show of our 68th episode.
Casey Cavanagh, technical writer at Awesome Motive reports on the release of Easy Digital Download plugin: Introducing 10 New Core Blocks, Email Summaries & More…. Among the blocks mentioned are the blocks to display the Cart, a login form or the Order History of a customer. But there is more.
Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern has the skinny for you: Easy Digital Downloads 3.1 Adds 10 New Core Blocks, Introduces Email Summaries
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #98 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 18.0 Community Theme Project and the Contributor Mentorship Program with special guest Maggie Cabrera
ICYMI: Gutenberg 14.2 was release last week. Sarah Gooding wrote about it on the WPTavern. Gutenberg 14.2 Improves Writing Flow, Adds Kerning Controls for Headings in Global Styles. Gooding wrote: “One of the most impactful improvements to the writing flow is that the editor now hides all floating block UI while the user is typing.”
On the Gutenberg Changelog podcast we will cover Gutenberg plugin versions 14.2 and 14.3 in next week’s recording.
Nick Diego, creator of the Icon Block, announced an update for his plugin: The Icon Block turns one plus a recap of Version 1.3.0. In core open-source manner, Diego started working on the plugin as he needed an efficient way to add SVG icons to the Editor. “Over 4,000 active installs later, the Icon Block has become one of my favorite side projects.” he wrote.
WooCommerce Block 8.6 is available now. Marco Lucio Giannotta published the WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 Release Notes.
Sarah Gooding dug in and reported among other things on the new Cross-Sells Products Block feature
In this video on WordPressTV No-Code Techniques to Showcase Your Images on Any Device, Benjamin Evans, faculty member at Learn.WordPress walks you through some concepts of responsive design, and the options WordPress offers to showcase images responsively without using any code.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Rich Tabor, Extendify and Damon Cook, WP Engine joined Doc Pop on last week’s Torque Social Hour to talk about recent trends and advancements in the world of WordPress themes.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
On the podcast WPTavern Jukebox podcast, Nathan Wrigley has Alex Ball, as guest on the episode #45 – Alex Ball on Customizing Core Blocks for Clients “Alex is a Lead Software Engineer at Mindgrub, a digital agency in Baltimore, Maryland. His website leadership experience continues to inform his decision-making today, especially for training clients and making the block editor as easy to use as possible, and that, in essence, is the subject of the podcast.” wrote Wrigley.
As mentioned in the show, Alex Ball also gave a presentation at WordCamp US with the same title. You can watch it now on YouTube from the WCUS live stream.
Arjun Singh wrote a guide to Getting Started With WordPress Block Development. Singh starts with “to me, a block is an entity, with some properties (called attributes), that represents some content. I know this sounds pretty vague, but stay with me. A block basically manifests itself in two ways: as a graphical interface in the block editor or as a chunk of data in the database.” He explains the concepts and code examples in details, especially the files and their purpose after using the official create-block scaffolding tool.
Ganesh Dahal walk you through the solution on How To Customize WordPress Block Theme Cover Templates with Dynamic Post Feature Images. He explains how with the new template editor you can as hero section on your single block post and automatically display the post title without any programming. Dahal also reviews themes that deliver this out of the box and walk you through it to style a custom theme implementation.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Upcoming WordPress events
Oct 11 – 13, 2022
WooSesh A virtual conference for WooCommerce
The schedule is now available. I am excited for Darren Ethier’s The Future of Personalizing Your Storefront and what WooCommerce is doing in the era of WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) on October 12 at 1pm EDT / 17:00 UTC.
Have a look at the schedule of upcoming WordCamps.
Learn WordPress Online Meetups
October 17, 2022 – 4 pm EDT / 12:00 UTC
Part 1: Re-Creating Block Designs with Wes Theron
October 31, 2022 – 4 pm EDT / 12:00 UTC
Part 2: Re-Creating Block Designs
