Howdy,
It’s the eve of the second virtual WordCamp Europe. Tickets are still available for another awesome three days with talks, workshops and contributor events. This year, the organizer decide to sprinkle contributor event into the rest of the schedule and have for all three days, a mix between techtalk, business talks and contributor presentation and discussions. There are quite a few events around the Block editor, Full-site-editing and block-based themes. I compiled a list for you. And just because I am so focused on Gutenberg, doesn’t mean you have to. 😎 Check out the schedule and get your tickets now.
Hopefully, it will be the last virtual conference and we will see each other at an in-person WordCamp Europe in 2022. I am still hoping for Porto, Portugal. At this state of withdrawal from meeting WordPress friends in person, it doesn’t matter where it will take place, thought. It’ll be a Hug-Fest.
Last week, I mentioned the next Gutenberg Times Live Q & A in the subscribers-only section of this newsletter. Now we have a full panel. Registration is officially open. I am thrileed to host Daisy Olsen, Jeff Ong and Tammie Lister for our show on How to get started on Theme building for Full-site Editing and using the Theme.json file to configure your theme, and its interaction with the block editor. The Theme.json file will be introduced with the release of WordPress 5.8 in July 2021. Get a head start and join us!
Grzegorz (Greg) Ziolkowski will be back from vaction next week and we will record our next Changelog episode on Friday 11, 2021. I am so excited and can’t wait until Grzegorz is back! If you have questions or suggestions or news, you want us to consider, hit reply or send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. We now have consitently 500 – 800 downloads per week. It’s humbling, mind-boggling and inspiring. And if YOU are a listener, Thank You! If you have a minute or two, consider writing a review of the podcast. We’d be grateful and might read it out loud on the next show.
Alright, that’s the news around Gutenberg Times. Below you’ll find what else happened in the Gutenberg universe. Enjoy!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
PS: Hope to see you at WordCamp Europe. Don’t forget to join the #WCEU channel on WordPress Slack and meet speaker, sponsors, organizer and attendees like you and me.
Full-Site-Editing & Themes
Anne McCarthy published the Stick the landing (pages) Summary. This post is a summary of the sixth call for testing for the experimental FSE outreach program, which also was translated into Italian to reach more of the non-English audience. Earlier calls were also translated into Japanese. The group of FSE testers is much bigger now, thanks to the persistent efforts by Anne to reach out to the community and stay on top of all the issues around the template editor.
A reminder: You can still join the the seventh call for testing: Polished Portfolios – The deadline for your feedback was extended to June 16th, 2021.
If you read this before Sunday night, you can participate in the Full Site Editing Review and Test-a-thon Sunday, June 6th at 7 – 8:30 pm with the WordPress Meetup group in Philadelphia.
Reading through the summary, I am stuck on trying to understand the difference between a template built by the site-owner and a theme template. What will happen with their templates when the site-owner decides to change the overall theme of their site? There is still plenty to be figured out. How edited block templates are linked to themes is topic of the discussion on GitHub. The Gutenberg team would appreciate some thoughts from folks familiar with these APIs (theme mods, performance, database).
Kjell Reigstad posted again acomprehensive list of issues and discussions regarding block-based themes and Full-Site Editing: Gutenberg + Themes: Week of May 31, 2021. Any of the listed items are worth checking out and consider commenting. The more the team knows the better the next iteration of Full-Site editing and block-based themes becomes.
WordPress 5.8 release preparations
From the meeting notes of this week’s Dev Chat: “Docs needs the most help with end user documentation. For block editor in particular. Some changes from 5.6 and 5.7 are still not published and we had a significant drop in number of contributors due to pandemic situation. Anyone interested in getting involved please ping Milana Cap (zzap on Slack).
The summary of needed DevNotes for new features in WordPress 5.8 is available on GitHub and could use contributors. There is also a “needs dev note” label for pull requests.
The widget screen could use some more testing. As a reminder, please read Help Test the Widgets Editor for WordPress 5.8 by Andre Draganescu
Block Patterns
Hector Pietro wrote in his post What’s next in Gutenberg? (June 2021):
“Since Gutenberg 10.7, block patterns displayed in the inserter are fetched from the WordPress.org Pattern Directory. This opens the door to having a big amount of wonderful patterns available in the inserter, which will require iterating on the pattern insertion experience.
For more updates on the Pattern Directory, stay tuned for Block Pattern Directory updates and check the most recent design iterations for the Pattern Directory.”.
Plugins for the Block Editor
Featured Box Plugin with this plugin “you can highlight a image with your key features” wrote Sumaiya Siddika on WordPress.org. Justin Tadlock took it for a spin.
JetFormBuilder — Form Builder plugin for Gutenberg from the plugins stable at CrocoBlock. The developers Andrey Shevchenko and Oleksandr Ivanenko also added an extensive Post action hook system that allows you to daisy chain actions and integrated with 3rd party systems. I haven’t tested it yet, but it looks promising. Crocoblock has been building plugins and tools for Elementor and has now started supporing Gutenberg with their products as well.
Another new plugin is the JetEngine for Gutenberg a dynamic content plugin that lets you build a complex websites fast and cost-effectively.
Themes for Full-Site Editing
A few people ask about Themes that are already working with the Full-Site Editing system and Site Editor. So I put a list together of those I know about. Now before you use them, you need to be aware that they are all built while Full-Site Editing is still under active development, hasn’t been released yet and ergo many features are still experimental. Do not use in production or live site.
- Block Base by Automattic
- Naledi by Anariel Design
- TT1 Blocks by WordPress contributors, the FSE sibling of the Twenty-Twenty-One Theme
- Block-Based Bosco by Fränk Klein
- Armando by Carolyn Newmark
- Q by Ari Stathopoulos
- Hansen by Uxl Themes
If you find any missing, let me know.
Gutenberg related Business Updates
This week’s big WordPress business news is the aquisition of Eliots Condon‘s plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) by Delicious Brains. With over more then 1 million active installs ACF is one of the widest used plugins. Thousands for developers depened on it in the last ten years to build complex WordPress sites.
Stepping away from ACF has not been an easy decision to make. The reasoning behind it comes from a place of humility. As the number of installs have grown from thousands to millions, the needs of the product have outgrown my ability to develop solutions. The last thing I want to do to this amazing community is unintentionally hold back the project, so something needed to change.
Elliot Condon, ACF
Early on into the development of the block editor, Candon was also developing a php way to build blocks and integrated it into Advanced Custom Fields Pro starting with the version 5.8. This effort certainly helped developers even more. Now they could use their existing tools and offer their users Gutenberg compatible sites withouth learning ES6 JavaScript or ReactJS.
Delicious Brains also caters to WordPress Developers with products like SpinupWP (💕), WP Migrate DB and more. Their team seems to be the right fit to pick up the torch and put ACF on an even stronger path for future growth.
You can learn more about the aquisition via
- WPTavern (Sarah Gooding),
- Post Status Excerpt (Cory Miller & David Bisset) ,
- A WordPress Announcement of Epic Proportions (Delicious Brain)
- 10 Years of ACF – A truly wonderful time
Join us for our next Live Q & A
on June 24, 2021 at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC
Theme.json for Theme Authors or building themes for full-site editing in WordPress.
Host: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Panel: Daily Olson, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong Register Now
Upcoming WordPress Events
June 6, 2021 7:00 pm EDT / 23:00 UTC
WordPress Meetup Philadelphia
Full Site Editing Review and Test-a-thon
June 7 – 9th, 2021
WordCamp Europe
A virtual event and contributor day. Call for sponsors is open.
🎉 Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021
June 10th, 2021
WordPress “Mega Meetup”: Plugins That Keep Websites Running
June 20 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Japan
The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think…
June 24, 2021
WPEngine Summit 2021
The digital breakthrough conference just released their schedule. Personally, I am very much looking forward to the Keynote talk with Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Marchall Plan for Moms at 12:55 EDT / 16:55 UTC. I also hope to see talks with Rob Stinston, Carrie Dils and Chris Wiegman. There are also deep dive talks listed into Headless WordPress. Enterprise WordPress is definitely heading down that route.
June 24 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Cochabama (Colombia)
July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
Calls for speakers ends TODAY!
July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress
August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua
September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”
On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.
