Howdy,
I had a fabulous time on our Danube River Cruise. We walked the capitals of Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava, learned about the long history of the region and had excellent food and wine tastings.
In the past three weeks, a lot has happened in many corners of the Gutenberg project. It will take us more than one weekend edition to catch up.
For this edition, I kept it mostly within WordPress team posts and articles. In the next edition, I will also include content and updated from the community again.
Glad to be back. I missed you.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Justin Tadlock curated What’s new for developers? (August 2023). The seventh edition of a monthly series that cuts through all the noise, bringing you the latest features, updates, and fixes you need to know about to build on top of WordPress.
Anne McCarthy announced Introducing WordPress.org/blocks “To better tell the story of blocks, both within WordPress and as a broader framework for folks to consider with their next project, a new page has been created on WordPress.org that attempts to pull together the ease and power of blocks into a single source”.
In his Design Share: Jul 31-Aug 11, Joen Asmussen, reports on work by members of the WordPress design time. You’ll find listed various prototypes for the redesign of the Documentation and Learn WordPress site, the Showcase section of the WordPress site, and the already published design assets for the WordPress “Lionel:” 6.3 release and its new microsite and some early mock-up so of list views for the WordPress Admin section.
Saxon Fletcher, contributor on the design team, published the first design mockups for the Admin Design Kickoff. You can review videos, and screenshots with a ton of explanation of challenges and considerations. The overall look feels like an enhanced version of the Site Editor screens and concepts.
WordPress 6.3
It’s probably just me, who feels that WordPress “Lionel” 6.3 was released a long time ago, instead of just two weeks and a half. It’s been a massive release and there is still additional information published, i.e., about the considerable performance improvements and the update to the Navigation blocks and features.
- WordPress 6.3 performance improvements by Felix Arntz
- What’s new for Navigation in WordPress 6.2 and 6.3 by Dave Smith
Sarah Gooding reported on the created release assets: WordPress Publishes 6.3 Release Video and Landing Page Demo.
WordPress 6.4
Anne McCarthy published the Roadmap to 6.4, the next major release of WordPress, led by an all underrepresented gender release squad scheduled for November 7th, 2023. A tight release cycle with the first beta scheduled for September 26th, makes this an ambitious list of features and updates.
Part of the next WordPress release is also a new default them. Jessica Lyschik published the article Introducing Twenty Twenty-Four. “The idea behind Twenty Twenty-Four is to make a default theme that can be used on any type of site, with any topic.” she wrote.
Sarah Gooding wrote about the roadmap, too: WordPress 6.4 Roadmap Includes Typography Management Features, New Blocks, and Twenty Twenty-Four Default Theme
Gutenberg 16.4 and 16.5
Release lead, Sarah Norris published What’s new in Gutenberg 16.4? (9 August) and highlighted
- Auto-Inserting Blocks (Beta)
- New Progress Bar Component
- New Commands in the Command Palette
- New Block Supports for Footnotes Block
- Minimum Supported PHP Version Bumped to 7.0
Sarah Gooding’s post on the release: Gutenberg 16.4 Introduces Experimental Auto-Inserting Blocks
This week, Siobhan Bamber, contributor on WordPress mobile app, handled the Gutenberg plugins release and published the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 16.5? (23 August). She highlighted the new commands and enhancements to the Command Palette and additional block support for multiple blocks including Details and Post Content blocks.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8 with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio
Ellen Bauer and I had a great time catching up since we met in person at WordCamp Asia. I was delighted that Ellen came on the Gutenberg changelog show to discuss the latest happening in WordPress and. The Gutenberg Changelog 88 episode will arrive at your favorite podcast app within a couple of days.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Although the deadline to post feedback for the latest call for testing from the FSE Program #25: Let’s start from the beginning has passed, it’s still a great set of instructions to test WordPress 6.3 and all the new features that come with it.
The WordPress Theme team rep Ganga Kafle announced that Blue Note: The second community theme is released. “It is an elegant and fun block theme inspired by jazz and the record label “Blue Note Records”, he wrote.
Anne McCarthy invites you to the next Hallway Hangout about Improving accessibility in the Site Editor on September 14 at 15:00 UTC. WordPress Accessibility team members Alex Stine and Joe Dolson will demo current of pain points and open a discussion about ways to resolve/address current, known issues.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Mary Baum published The anatomy of a letterform, part 2 of the six-part series, “Make your site’s typography make a statement’ on the WordPress Developer Blog. Personally, I enjoy the primer typeface, the deep dive into the terminology and genesis of a typeface and the role it plays on the web and for readers. It’s a great preparation for the new features coming to WordPress the Font Library, a way to select, store and manage fonts on your website.
ICYMI: The 3-part series on Beyond Block Styles by Justin Tadlock is now available on the WordPress Developer Blog:
- Part 1: Using the WordPress scripts package with themes
- Part 2: Building a custom style for the Separator block
- Part 3: Building custom design tools
Tadlock wrote: “The goal of this series is to teach you how to work with the APIs that block developers get to play with every day. Only, you’ll use those features in a theme, instead of a block. And you’ll use code and techniques that conform to the guidelines for the WordPress theme directory.”
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
If you had trouble getting definitive answers on how to handle assets with the iframe post editor after the WordPress 6.3,release, Nick Diego added a new page to the documentation that should answer all questions: Enqueuing assets in the Editor
Michael Burridge wrote a tutorial on Styling blocks: empowering users with CSS custom properties describing a way how you can offer more styling options to used of your blocks beyond the settings via block.json. The post is available on the WordPress Developer Blog.
Juan Ma Garrido posted a status update on the Interactivity API, that includes the links to the GitHub spaces for discussion and code, and a getting started guide.
Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego invite you to a Hallway Hangout To explore the power of block variations on September 14, 2023, at 18:00 UTC . An often overlooked feature, you learn how you can use block variations to extend existing blocks and can be as simple or complex as you like.
Update on HTML API
Dennis Snell published a Progress Report: HTML API on the WordPress Make blog. It’s a longer post as he explains why and how the HTML API came to pass and what the future will hold.
On August 30th, 2023, Dennis Snell, is also scheduled to be on the Developer Hours with Michael Burridge for an Introduction to the HTML API. The session will take place at 15:00 UTC.
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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