--- title: "Why WordPress Agencies Are Embracing Gutenberg - Help Test WordPress 5.8 - Weekend Edition #171" date: "2021-05-29" author: "Birgit Pauli-Haack" url: "https://gutenbergtimes.com/why-wordpress-agencies-are-embracing-gutenberg-help-test-wordpress-5-8-weekend-edition-171/" categories: ["News", "Updates", "Weekend Edition"] --- Howdy, Memorial Day is a federal holiday, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. Although a sad occasion for many people in the US, it is also the first long weekend after a cold winter. Many of you will hopefully take the opportunity to spend it leisurely outside with family and friends, away from the screens. Look up from your phone. The content keeps until Tuesday when you get back to work. After catching up on my publishing schedule, I will spend the weekend with friends at the [Cricket Club](https://sarasotacricket.org/), and at the [Dali Museum in St. Petersburg](https://thedali.org/). Let me know about your weekend! With the release of Gutenberg 10.7 version, we are in the “feature freeze” which means from now to the first beta release on June 8th, 2021, it’s all about bug fixing. Below you’ll find several ways how you can help make it a great release. > There is something to be said that 5.8 is probably the biggest release for Gutenberg since 5.0 and in terms of merged code might even be bigger.Riad Benguella, editor release lead for WordPress 5.8, in #core-editor meeting 5/26/2021 Yours 💕, Birgit PS: Thank you to all who shared great resources on wp.data last week! If you used the wp.data package in your blocks, I am looking for real life examples. Ping me in Slack @bph or [email me](mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com). PPS: Huge “Thank You” to **[Dave Smith](https://twitter.com/get_dave) **for [his wonderful review of our podcast.](https://app.mypodcastreviews.com/podcasts/k7H9zO/reviews/6950436) *Grzegorz (Greg) Ziolkowski* is on vacation, and we’ll record the next Gutenberg Changelog on Friday Jun 11, covering both releases 10.7 and 10.8. Send us your questions to [changelog@gutenbergtimes.com](mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com). --- A new call for testing is now available from the FSE outreach program! **Deadline: Jun 9th,** 2021. **Anne McCarthy** sends you down the rabbit hole to create a [Polished Portfolio Pages](https://make.wordpress.org/test/2021/05/26/fse-program-testing-call-7-polished-portfolios/), using the Template Editor and your personal Query Blocks design. She guides you with nice ideas for your Portfolio page, the accompanying template and shares designs from the web. [On WPTavern](https://wptavern.com/fse-outreach-7-building-a-portfolio-in-the-upcoming-template-editing-mode), [Justin Tadlock](https://twitter.com/justintadlock) followed along. He shared his page’s source code and the joy and frustrations along the way. --- [Huge W. Roberts](https://twitter.com/HughRoberts05) introduces you to the [Five Photo Editing Tools Available To Use On The Block Editor](https://hughsviewsandnews.com/2021/05/27/5-wordpress-photo-editing-tools-available-to-use-on-the-block-editor/) and explains in detail how to crop, resize and zoom and other features of the Image block. --- Speaking of which, WordPress 5.8 will bring a new feature to the image and cover block: [Coloring Your Images With Duotone Filters](https://wordpress.org/news/2021/05/coloring-your-images-with-duotone-filters/), created by **Alex Lende**. Details about this wonderful new feature are now available on the WordPress News site. Using the Gutenberg plugin, you don’t have to wait until July 20, 2021 for WordPress 5.8 to come out. You can use today! --- [Blockbase](https://themeshaper.com/2021/05/27/blockbase-a-parent-theme-for-block-themes/) “This block theme attempts to make all the common theme styles configurable in theme.json, and provides the CSS needed to make them work until the blocks themselves support these settings.” wrote [Ben Dwyer](https://twitter.com/scruffian) [The Blockbase themes](https://github.com/Automattic/themes/) is available via GitHub. Justin Tadlock at WPTavern kick the tires of it. He concluded: “It is the modern-day [Underscores (_s)](https://underscores.me/) for blocks, and the WordPress theme design community will need such a project moving forward. They will need a starting point and educational tool, and Blockbase is just that.” You’d be interested in more details. --- **Hector Pietro** published [What’s new in Gutenberg 10.7?](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/05/27/whats-new-in-gutenberg-10-7-26-may/) The release notes for this week’s Gutenberg plugin release. This is the last version of Gutenberg features that will be coming to WordPress core. What didn’t make it? Navigation screen and block, Post Author Block and the Refactor of the Gallery Block. The latter is a bit disappointing as I was very much looking forward to building galleries with image blocks. Ah, well. --- **The new Widget screen** made it and could use some major testing round: Use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, enable the nightly stream on the bleeding edge channel and start testing specially for backwards compatibility with existing themes and plugins and configuration. [Pantheon gives Developer 2 free testing sites](https://pantheon.io/register), and has a powerful [migration tool ](https://pantheon.io/docs/migrate)for cloning existing sites for testing. It’s what we will use for our long-time client sites. If you feel you don’t have enough times, but also don’t want to see any surprises, you can install the [Classic Widgets plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/) by core contributors **Tonya Mork** and **Andrew Ozz**. --- **Allison Rivers **wrote [Why WordPress Agencies Are Embracing Gutenberg](https://torquemag.io/2021/05/why-wordpress-agencies-are-embracing-gutenberg/) for the Torque Magazine. Rivers interviewed 15 Agency leaders in the WordPress space who shared why they are slowly moving away from 3rd party page builders favoring the block editor and the rich ecosystem around it, with Generate Blocks, Kadence Blocks, Toolset, Stackable, Genesis Blocks and more. --- The above article was a nice palate cleanser after the rather lively debate on [This Week in WordPress #164](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLiDu7WwCRI&t=1s) with Nathan Wrigley and Spencer Forman. The reasoning from the agency leaders might also explain why hard-core Elementor fans get so agitated. Big “Thank You” to Nathan Wrigley for having me on the show. 🤟 It was quite entertaining, to say the least. --- In case you missed it, I thoroughly enjoyed **Nathan Wrigley’s** interview with **Benjamin Intal**, of [Stackable ](https://wpstackable.com/) on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and **[Why he is betting his business on blocks](https://wptavern.com/podcast/3-benjamin-intal-on-why-hes-betting-his-business-on-blocks).** --- [Eric Karkovack](https://twitter.com/karks88) did a deep dive into the plugin [Block Visibility](https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-visibility/) by Nick Diego and shared his insights in his article [An Easy Way to Edit Block Visibility in the WordPress Gutenberg Editor](https://speckyboy.com/edit-block-visibility-wordpress-gutenberg-editor/) .I mentioned the plugin multiple times before. If you didn’t get a chance to test it on one of your projects, Karkovack’s article gives you definitely more insight in how it works, and what use cases are suitable for it. I also discovered the plugin **[Conditional Blocks](https://wordpress.org/plugins/conditional-blocks/) by [Morgan Hvidt](https://twitter.com/morganhvidt) **with a slightly different approach. Both plugins also provide pro versions via their respective websites. --- ## Upcoming WordPress Events **June 7 – 9th, 2021** **[WordCamp Europe](https://europe.wordcamp.org/2021/)** A virtual event and contributor day. [Call for sponsors is open.](https://europe.wordcamp.org/2021/call-for-sponsors/) **🎉** Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021 **June 10th, 2021** **[WordPress “Mega Meetup”: Plugins That Keep Websites Running](https://www.meetup.com/SF-WordPress-Users/events/278491308)** **June 20 – 26, 2021** **[WordCamp Japan](https://japan.wordcamp.org/2021/)** *The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think… * **June 24, 2021 ** **[WPEngine Summit 2021](https://attend.wpengine.com/summit-us-2021/)** *The digital breakthrough conference* **June 24 – 26, 2021** **[WordCamp Cochabama](https://cochabamba.wordcamp.org/2021/)** (Colombia) **July 17 + 18th, 2021** **[WordCamp Santa Clarita](https://santaclarita.wordcamp.org/2021/)** Calls for speakers was extended to June 5th, 2021. **July 23, 2021** [WordFest Live ](https://www.wordfest.live/)– *The *festival of WordPress **September 21 + 22, 2021** [WPCampus 2021 Online](https://2021.wpcampus.org/) “A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.” [Call for Proposal is up](https://2021.wpcampus.org/proposals) and proposal are **due May 26, 2021** --- On the[ Calendar for WordPress Online Events ](https://wpcalendar.io/online/)you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups. --- **Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? ** Type in your Email address to subscribe.Subscribe We hate spam, too and won’t give your email address to anyone except Mailchimp to send out our Weekend Edition Thanks for subscribing. --- Featured Image: Photo by [Ravi Palwe](https://unsplash.com/@ravipalwe?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/lego?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)