Hey folks, this edition has scooped up some cool videos for you! No surprise there, since everyone’s buzzing with excitement over the fresh features rolling out in WordPress 6.5 now that Beta 1 has made its grand entrance.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.5 Beta 1 is now available for testing. The release post offers four ways to start testing this new version.
Olga Gleckler posted for the test team Help test WordPress 6.5 Beta 1
Damon Cook of WPEngine tweeted a link to a blueprint you can download and add to your LocalWP instance. More details are available in Cook’s blog post Beta Testing WordPress with Local Blueprints
InstaWP also tweeted a link to spin-up a test site with the beta version.
Release lead, Maggie Cabrera, published the release post on What’s new in Gutenberg 17.7? (14th February). She highlighted:
- Shadow support for more blocks
- Data views enhancements
- Refined Link Control UI
- Making Font Library ready for Core
Tammie Lister and I will discuss the last two Gutenberg versions 17.6 and 17.7 in our upcoming Gutenberg Changelog recording for episode 96, happening next week. Stay tuned. You want to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app.
Joen Asmussen posted a new Design Share: Jan 29-Feb 9 and shows off the work of the WordPress design team: of the last two weeks:
- WordPress.org polished nav
- Font Stacks
- Discussion: Concerning Placeholders – designers among you might have an opinion to share
- Summary polish
- Revoking Google Fonts access
- Openverse dark mode
Each item’s given a quick rundown so you can jump straight into the conversation spots. Drop your thoughts and join the chat!
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8 with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Tammie Lister published again more Editor Tips this week:
- Control visibility of comments on a post template
- Reorder navigation in the navigation section of the editor
- Clear customizations on a template party
- Use black and white duotone
- Select multiple blocks and group
- Quick access transforms in site editor
Anne McCarthy is on a roll again, creating awesome videos. This week’s video is about the New powerful views to make your own in WordPress 6.5 (and a taste of phase 3). The latest updates give you a new and improved way to view and rearrange the different parts of your website, like pages and designs, with ease. Now, with just a few clicks, you can choose how to see everything and decide what details you want to be visible. Think of it as organizing your workspace in a way that’s best for you.
These new tools are also preparing for more cool features to come in the future. Currently, these changes are only available for the website editing section, kind of like a test run. This allows people to try them out and give their thoughts, which helps decide how to introduce these helpful tools to other parts of the website-building process later on.
Jamie Marsland, PootlePress, seems Something small but HUGE is coming to WordPress 6.5. I would rather not spoil the clickbait :_)
Inspired by the article Synced Pattern Overrides – an early review, Matt Medeiros posted a video New in WordPress 6.5: Synced Pattern Overrides walking his audience through the blog post and zero’d in on the business aspect of it if you are building sites for others. “Synced Pattern Overrides takes using Patterns to a new level, especially when you’re collaborating with others on your WordPress website. Patterns make it easy to design a collection of blocks to use across your website. In WordPress 6.5, you’ll be able to assign individual blocks to allow users to override, when using synced patterns.”, he wrote in the description.
Anne McCarthy also created a stand-alone video about the Synced Patterns Overrides: Explore a game changing feature for synced patterns in WordPress 6.5.
This video goes through a new feature coming to synced patterns in WordPress 6.5 that allows you to set on a block by block basis the ability to customize the content of an individual instance while keeping the overall layout intact.
Want to modify the layout of every instance? Go for it. Want to reset an individual instance to the original so you can start over? Easy.
Currently, this only works with the Heading, Button, Paragraph, and Image blocks. Join the discussion around how you’d like to see this feature evolve beyond WordPress 6.5
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Elliot Richmond recorded a YouTube Video to help fellow developer to understand Block Theme Development. “Block themes simplify this process allowing developers to create fairly simple HTML themes, lowering the barrier to entry for WordPress enthusiasts, and also adds the benefit of using a block-based approach to building websites through the full site editing experience.” he wrote in the description.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In her post Development challenges with WP blocks and Gutenberg, Anne-Mieke Bovelet interviewed Jakob Trost about the complexities and learning experiences of dealing with challenges such as unfiltered HTML, the navigation block and global styles.
Woo 8.6 has been released and brings, among other things, Product Blocks & Order Attribution Updates. Nigel Stevenson highlights
- New block style for the Product Details block
- Six new collections added to the Product Collection Block
- Featured products in the New Product Form
- New important notices for Legacy REST API users
- Improvements to debug logging
- Bringing back classic notice templates for classic themes
On that last item, Niels Lange published a Tutorial: Overriding notice templates on the Woo Developer Blog. He covers the topic for both, classic themes as well as block themes.
In his latest video, Using Core Data and Sharing Context across WordPress Blocks, Brian Coords covers how to use the WordPress Core Data package to communicate across blocks. “We get pretty deep into the weeds to understand tools like useSelect, useDispatch, block context, block filters, and more.” The transcript is available on his website.
Deryck Oñate shared in his post “How to create a Dynamic Block in WordPress” the steps on creating a custom block to read external information and render it on the front end of a website. He covered how to use the create-block scaffolding tool to start a dynamic block and shared the PHP, CSS, and JavaScript code on how to query an external API and display the results in the editor screen and on the front end.
Ryan Welcher has a quick tip for you as YouTube Short: Creating a plugin with multiple blocks, and tells you how to get this accomplished with the create-block scaffolding tool and wp-scripts package.
Developer Hours
The recording of this week’s Developer Hours on JavaScript for modern WordPress development is now available on YouTube. In this one-hour session, Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego explored how JavaScript is used in modern WordPress development. Whether you’re just beginning your WordPress journey, or if you’re already familiar with development and looking to stay updated with the latest techniques, this Developer hours equips you with the knowledge and practical tools to effectively build your own custom blocks and Editor extensions. The shared resources are available on this Google Doc.
Upcoming Developer Hours
Save the date for the next Developer Hours. Some are still working on but join the WordPress Online Learning Meetup group to receive notifications of newly added events.
- February 27 at 16:00 UTC: Developer Hours: How to build modern web layouts with WordPress blocks
- Save the date: March 12, Developer Hours: Interactivity API
- Save the date: March 26, Developer Hours: Block Hooks
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