Howdy,
I can hardly wait to be in the same room with fellow contributors across many teams during Contributor Day at WordCamp Europe, collaborate on the open-source project tasks, and meet new contributors in person!
Next week, my husband and I will fly to Porto for a two-week work-cation prior to WordCamp Europe. We will explore Portugal’s second largest city and its wider area during lunch breaks, evening strolls and weekend excursions. It’s a new way of traveling for us and we are grateful for our remote work so we can stay for a longer period of time in a city.
And now back to the topic at hand: News and community resources around the block editor, block themes, full-site editing and more.
Enjoy the mixture of articles and post. Have a great weekend!
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
This week’s releases
WordPress 6.0 RC2
WordPress 6.0 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) Now Available for Testing. It seems everything is on track for the final release scheduled for May 24, 2022.
Curious what WordPress 6.0 looks like? Watch this great video by Jamie Marsland with short succinct demos of the most important features for site builders and he asks WordPress 6: The Most Exciting Update Ever?
Can you believe, Core Contributors already started Bug Scrubs for 6.1? I guess you can never start too soon.
Gutenberg 13.2
For the first time, George Hotelling led the release for the Gutenberg plugin and posted the release notes: What’s new in Gutenberg 13.2? (May 11). Many PRs were Bug fixes, and not so many new features. Hotelling highlights the new save method for user’s editor preferences. Now that the preferences (Welcome buide, Full Screen, Top Toolbar etc) are stored in the user meta table of the site, you can now access the site from any computer and it will remember the choices you made. We waited quite a while for this feature to land.
Justin Tadlock took the plugin for spin and he has more details in his article: Gutenberg 13.2 Adds Persistent User Preferences and a Visualizer for Margin and Padding Controls
Earlier this week, I was part of the This Week in WordPress #208 live show and podcast. with Daniel Schutzsmith, Nathan Wrigley, and Michelle Frechette.
We talked about FSE Testing Call 14 using the refactored List and Quote Blocks, the new feature to assign patterns to the page creation process, the Artist in Residence program by DigitalCube, introduced by Rachel Winchester and so much more. It was lovely to connect with my friends again. We had great fun. Listen in!
Three Block Theme Generators
Ever we started seeing Full-site editing evolving, community members pushed the envelop and created tools for creating themes. Today, I put three of them in one space.
ThemeGen.App by David Gwyer was very early and the site provides you an easy way to make all the color and settings choices via a nice web interface and then create a theme.json file.
Carolina Nymark‘s Block Theme Generator makes a few decisions for you. She offers visitors to download a basic block theme, and empty theme and an advanced block theme. The latter is the best teaching tool, as it includes not only a bare bones theme, but also example templates, block patterns and block styles. With help of a bare bones form, you also can select your color palette and some default settings.
While both mentioned Block Theme Generators are aimed at the Theme developers working with code, Jamie Marsland of PootlePress just built a Block Theme Generator that’s aimed at the #nocode site builder. It’s fairly new and used out of the box tools and the WordPress site editor to design every aspect of a theme that you then can export. Marsland explains in this video on YouTube, how he built it, why Theme Export is such a big deal, and how you can also build a theme generator for you team.
Full Site Editing & Plugins for site builders
WordPress 6.0 To Ship New Block Locking Feature – Justin Tadlock gives you a sneak preview on the new feature.
Full-site editing experience is not for everyone yet. Ruth RaventĂłs, CEO of Nelio, after explaining what FSE entails, walk you through the decision-making process on if your site, your online business, is suited to adopt aspects of FSE. It’s not a technical evaluation, rather than a strategic approach. “The first task you should do is to understand all the functionalities you want your “new” website to have and see which of them can be provided by FSE. Then, for those that are provided by plugins, evaluate if they are compatible with FSE or what alternatives you have.” Ruth RaventĂłs wrote.
4 (four) more days, until May 18th, 2022, to heed the FSE Program Testing Call #14: Rallying Recipe Reviewers. It’s also available in Italian. (Raduniamo i recensori di ricette), thanks to Piermario Orecchioni
Anne McCarthy, Courtney Robertson and Sarah Snow tested all the features mentioned in the call for testing together in a zoom video meeting. If you don’t have time to do the testing yourself, but want to know what’s in the pipeline you can watch this on WordPress.TV: Testing WordPress Together: New Interactivity Features for Recipe Websites
Vikas Singhal announced that their block theme Gutena already supports Webfonts API that allows you to host fonts locally, with a single line in theme.json.
In his latest Building with Blocks post, Justin Tadlock walks you through the process of How To Build Coupon Cards With WordPress Blocks. Get ready for the 2022 eCommerce season for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the fall. Or for any other eCommerce sale you might have in mind.
Bernhard Kau, who is not only co-organizer of this year’s WordCamp Europe but also a plugin developer, just released a new plugin: Campaign Archive Block for Mailchimp
After adding an API key in the settings, the block displays the latest newsletters from your Mailchimp account. Kau has added some display settings and a control for the numbers of campaigns to be listed. This way, you keep your visitors for one more page on your site before they head off to read you latest campaigns. A plugin that does one thing and only one thing. The best kind of block.
It’s a solid first version and if you are interesting in a short twitter exchange between Kau and myself, on possible improvements, you can follow along here.
Munir Kamal, developer of the EditorPlus plugin, demonstrates in this video How to Create Animated Search Box in Gutenberg. All through the plugin and a short CSS snippet added to the backend for rendering the animation. Pretty nifty!
Justin Tadlock reviewed one of the newest block themes: Catch FSE Is a Bold, Business-Friendly WordPress Block Theme
Developing Custom Blocks and Tools
Core contributor and Gutenberg developer Dave Smith, gave a presentation recently on Gutenberg Now, Next and How to Use it Better Today.
He spoke to developers at the WordPress agency CornerShop Creative who are building sites for nonprofits, small and large. The video description has time stamps so you can jump to the relevant topics. Smith also points out that the second half of the presentation was Live Q & A and he provided answers to questions, you might have too. The slidedeck is available online.
Liam Giddy ventured into building a business listing using ACF Blocks and the Query Loop Block with a block theme and created this tutorial. It’s great step on the journey to switch to block theme development.
Upcoming WordPress Social Learning Meetups
May 18, 2022 – 6 pm EDT / 22:00 UTC
Sticky Styling: Getting Colors, Fonts, and Sizes to Stick w/ Sarah Snow
May 19, 2022 5pm EDT / 21:00 UTC
Using the Navigation Block w/ Wes Theron
May 19, 2022 – 2pm EDT / 18:00 UTC
Builder Basics: Working with Templates in Full Site Editing (Part 3) w/ Nick Diego
May 23, 2022 1pm EDT / 17:00 UTC
Hello Blocks! Coding a custom block w/ Ryan Welcher
May 25, 2022 – 7pm EDT / 23:00 UTC
Design With Me: Create a Simple Website for your Small Business w/ Sarah Snow
