Howdy,
It’s already February. 8.33% of 2025 is done. Phew. 91.67% to go. Most of my week I spent testing things. Maybe I jinxed it with my mind set, I didn’t come across something really cool. I am excited about WordCamp Asia where I can browse this huge sponsor hall and go exploring all the cools things there.
What saved me a ton of time, this week, was using Claude AI. I used it to audit Playground blueprints in the Gallery. I pasted the description of the merged PR of modification on how blueprints work, then fed it code to rewrite using the new way. Doing this a few times, I created a tracking issue with the necessary changes to implement next week. I felt really lazy.
That was all off-set by trying to have Cursor AI write a block with some user input sections. It made great progress, but for some reason, it still doesn’t work. Sometimes debugging the AI is even more tedious than looking at your own code.
This week, we have a few strategic posts and practical tips for you in this newsletter. Enjoy!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
George Mamadashvili made Gutenberg 20.2 RC1 is available now for testing. Final release will be on February 5, 2025.
Aaron Jorbin announced that WordPress 6.7.2 will be released soon. RC will be released on February 4 and final release will hit the WordPress site near you on February 11.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Darren Ethier and James Kemp from WooCommerce talk about Building WooCommerce in Public in the latest episode of DoThe Woo Network They explore WooCommerce’s current state and future direction, with Darren highlighting his connection between Gutenberg and WooCommerce. They stress the importance of community and communication in development, discuss the significance of WordCamps, the need for key features, and WooCommerce’s evolution for better experiences. They also mention how changes in WordPress affect WooCommerce’s plans and the need for flexible, no-code solutions for developers. This conversation provides insights into WooCommerce’s development approach and plans.
On Learn.WordPress.org, Wes Theron published the lesson: Explore synced pattern overrides. It’s part of the Intermediate WordPress User course and covers what’s patterns are, and how you can maintain stylistic control while the content of a pattern.
In his post, Create a Custom Author Page Ronnie Burt introduces you to multiple ways how you can make use of the Gravatar profile for your website. He also explains why spending a moment on the design of an author page is very important for a company blog. Then he walks you through the various method how you can use the user information stored on a self-hosted site can be used to expand on the normally neglected and thinly populated author information.
Upcoming events beyond WordCamps
Apart from WordCamps, additional conferences are on the schedule for this year.
February 24 – 28 2025 The 2nd Annual WP Publisher Success Week will take place. You can learn best practices from leading experts in the field of WordPress for publishers.
March 17 – 20, 2025 CloudFest, Europa Park, Rust, Germany. As Bob Dunn, DoTheWoo reports, there will be a WPZone and a WPDay.
April 23 – 26, 2025 PressConf a conference for WordPress professionals will take place in Tempe, Arizona, USA. Speakers are among others Mary Hubbard, Matias Ventura, Rich Tabor, and Tammie Lister.
September 25, 2025 LoopConf returns to London, UK as a conference for WordPress developers.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In his latest blog post, Nick Diego wants theme developers to stop struggling with cumbersome theme.json files. He shares how he and his new buddy, Cursor AI succeeded in building a compiler/bundler to combine separate json file into an overall theme.json for a theme. Diego shares a video of the process and the final script, you can adopt for your workflow.
Hendrik Lührsen found that WordPress themes are facing a crisis. The introduction of Full Site Editing (FSE) has brought about complexities that are causing challenges in the WordPress theme ecosystem. This situation appears to be related to the rapid evolution of WordPress technology, particularly the implementation of the site editor, which is impacting how themes are developed and used.
While calling it a crisis makes the post viable for the successful spread via outrage advertising economies, Lührsen is not wrong, lamenting about all the short-comings of block themes. His suggested paths to improve the situation can be walked by every theme developer building sites for clients on top of WordPress, except the discoverability of themes on the repository. A standardized onboarding process, was discussed among Themes team members. Turns out that the many, many use cases are not easily pulled into a cookie-cutter closed system. It’s the nature of the 21-year legacy of WordPress. It also means, any developer can fill the gaps for their clients, and if they want to go the extra mile, share it all back to the community. WordPress is not a one-size fits all system. Flexibility and extensibility is a feature, not a bug.
In his YouTube video, David McCan looks into the current state of block themes, reviewing popular themes available in the WordPress repository, Then he looked under the hood to understand block themes. “I have a better understanding of block themes after going through this process.” McCan wrote in the description. If you rather read a blog post reader than watch a video, got here to read McCan’s thoughts
In his post Transitioning to FSE: A low-risk, high-reward move for enterprises HumanMade’s account director, Adam Jones, tells the story of how Human Made, “guided enterprise organizations through this process and seen the transformative benefits firsthand.” Adapting to the site editor and block themes allows businesses to enhance digital capabilities with minimized risk through careful planning and testing. Key benefits include improved scalability, workflow, and reduced reliance on developers, making full-site editing a valuable investment in digital infrastructure. Also on that topic: The three competitive advantages of full-site-editing by senior account manage, Lorna Lim.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Riad Benguella, architect on the Gutenberg projects, explains in his latest post The anatomy of a CMS and why any web developer should attempt to build a CMS just once. The magic happens through four key parts: how content is stored, how it looks, how you edit it, and how it gets shown to the world. Whether you want to create a personal blog, an online store, or a company website, a good CMS adapts to your needs. Benguella took a detailed view into the various parts of the WordPress CMS: block rendering, style engine and the fields system. If you wish to know how it all fits together, grab your favorite beverage and start reading.
What’s new in Playground
Check out this article by Ján Mikláš, Demo your Woo extension with WordPress Playground, where he breaks down how to set up WordPress Playground just for your needs. You’ll find out how to tweak your blueprint.json file with settings and steps, plus how to create a custom landing page and hide those pesky WooCommerce onboarding screens.
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