Howdy,
It’s been a while! How were your holidays? Did you get some rest?
Wishing you and yours a Happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! May all the goals be reached and serendipity take you to new adventures.
🎉 ✨ 🍾 🎆
Now we need to catch up on the development and community around Gutenberg. What a long list again! It’s a feature of the persistent medium of a blog or an email, you don’t have to consume it all in one sitting. You can come back to it every day.
Glad you are here again!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Gutenberg and Page Builders
Kyle Van Deusen shared his experience building a simple Landing Page with Elementor and then built the same page with Gutenberg with a helping of GenerateBlocks plugin. In his post “Damn. Gutenberg Smokes Elementor”, you can read more about the process, challenges and speed metrics measured via GTMetrix as well as with Lighthouse.
Eric Karkovack published his take on switching from a page builder (here: Visual Composer) to a Gutenberg-based site, the challenges he encountered and how he solved them.
Gutenberg Plugin Releases
Two new plugin versions were released: Gutenberg 9.6 and 9.7. The Gutenberg Changelog episode covering both versions will be available later this weekend. Meanwhile, WPTavern has you covered:
Anne McCarthy has more details and a video on the new Drag and Drop features in the Block editor: Core Editor Improvement: Drag & Drop Blocks and Patterns from the Inserter 🐉 & 💧
Full-Site-Editing
Right after the release of Gutenberg 9.6, Anne McCarthy called upon participants of the FSE Outreach program to test specific parts of the full-site-editing experience and report back their findings. You can still participate in this first test. The deadline is January 13, 2021.
Learn more about the program here and here, and in the separate WP Slack channel #fse-outreach-experiment
For setting up local tests Carrie Dils published a Full-Site-Editing Blueprint for Local by Flywheel, now Local Lightening.
On ThemeShaper, Jason Crist published the 3rd part of “Get Started with Block Themes” tutorial. He covered how the new feature Global Styles come into play. “An important goal of Global Styles is to make it easier for users to change how their site looks without having to know or write any CSS. ” He explains the new global settings, naming conventions, how to set global and block styles not only via JSON file of your Theme. You also learn how users could change them via the Sidebar in the new Site Editor screen. Jason has links to an empty theme and the themes experiments repo and also to the developer documentation.
Apropos, Global Styles, Jon Quach has and update for us on the Implementation of the new G2 Components. Now you can follow along on the progress on this project via the beautiful new Status page.
Triggered by audience questions, Justin Tadlock ventured into the details of the Query Block in his post “Understanding the Query Block and Its Importance in Site Editing”.
During last year’s State of the Word, Joen Asmussen demonstrated the Site Editor screen. He showed us how to edit template parts, or change the Global Styles or the Archive pages.
Join us on January 29th, 2021 at 11 am ET / 16:00 UTC (Changed date!) for our Gutenberg Times Live Q & A: Update on the WordPress Site-Editor (TNG)
We will talk with Carolina Nymark back, our resident expert on Full-site Editing as well as Ari Stathopoulos, Core Contributor and who landed the first block-based theme, Q, in the repository and Anne McCarthy, from Full-Site editing outreach program. We’ll have the latest updates on Full-Site-Editing, block-based Themes and Global Styles for you and answer all your questions.
Gutenberg outside of WordPress.
Paul Ford and Gina Trapani of PostLight, a WordPressVIP agency, discussed with Matt Mullenweg the expansion of WordPress and his love for open source. In the podcast episode “WordPress and Beyond”, Mullenweg “shared controversial opinions on open source and explains why we’ll all be headed there in the future.” It’s one of the more thoughtful conversations on the web and open-source. They also cover the aspect that Gutenberg can be integrated into non-WordPress sites and CMS.
Matt said: “(…) We’re actually re-licensing Gutenberg to the MPL, which is the Mozilla Public License to allow it to be used in proprietary mobile apps. So, the idea is that a Mailchimp or WordPress or Tumblr, a Drupal, a Facebook all can utilize this.”
The whole episode is a great listen for web workers of the 21st century.
Plugins for the WordPress Block Editor
Tim Toomey, and the team at Covertnine has been busy updating their C9 Blocks plugin and themes with Animations. They also published a demo site with the Twenty Twenty One theme and their plugins installed.
Artur Piszek released a new plugin for the block editor: Roam Research Block – This block lets you search and embed Roam Research blocks inside WordPress block editor. I started using Roam Research a week ago, and I found a complete more organic way to organize my thoughts, my writing, my bullet lists and notes for projects. I am in the process of migrating approx 2800 notes from Evernote. That has its challenges, but I will move ahead as the hassle is absolutely worth it. Artur has more details about the WordPress plugin on his blog
Block Development
Justin Foell, shared his thoughts on WordPress Blocks Backwards Compatibility on the WebDevStudios blog. There are several things to consider: React versions, Gutenberg plugin versions, version of the @wordpress/packages, to name just a few.
Greg Ziółkowski published the tutorial “How to Start Block Development with Scaffolding” and walks you through the use of the official create-block script. The command line tool gets you started on a single-block plugin with all PHP, JavaScript and CSS files wired up for the plugin directory and the block editor. Greg walks you through various sections and how to customize the templates for our processes.
Nick Diego write “A primer on WordPress SlotFill technology”. Slot and Fill together with the SlotFillProvider are available for developers to extend the Block Editor in JavaScript.
WordPress Events
January 22, 2021 – 24-hour event
The festival of WordPress – WordFest
The session and schedule are now posted. The format is 30 min pre-recorded w/ 15 min Q & A, so attendees can interact with the speakers live. There are over 45 sessions on four stages. The Global stage runs talks for the full 24 hrs. Holy Cow!
I am looking forward to connecting with the audience for my talk on 1/22 at 4 pm ET / 21:00 UTC “Case Study: A #Nocode Contributor Journey On The WordPress Gutenberg GitHub Repo”.
Daisy Olsen will also give a block editor related talk: Extending the WordPress Editor With Block Patterns (11 pm ET on 1/21 / 2:00 UTC – I will need to catch it on the re-run).
January 30–February 14, 2021
WordCamp India
Yes! You read those dates right. The Organizers plan to have our WordCamp over three weekends! It will be a fully online event
- January 30 – 31 – Workshop Days
- February 6 – 7 – Contributor Days
- February 13 – 14 – Speaker Talks
Featured Image: Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash
