Weekend Edition #155
Howdy, howdy,
This week felt that I finally landed in the new year. I could focus on client projects, manage distractions well. I found back to the rhythm of working every day. Feels good.
It’s been a while that I talked so much to so many people about the block-editor and Gutenberg in one week. The organizers of WordPress meetups in and around Philly held a fabulous potpourri of Blocks session. Big Thank You to Kim White, Kevin Cristiano, Amy Letson and Liam Dempsey for a great evening among so many friends. Warmed my heart. I learn a lot and as soon as the recording is available, I’ll share it here, too.
We still have to #stayathome, wear a mask and wash hands, as we have been doing since March 11, 2020. It seems vaccinations are on their way. Still, patience is a virtue. Just in case, you are tempted to organize a meetup again. Try Community team proposed this checklist for you.
In that spirit, I hope many of you registered for next week’s Live Q & A with Carolina Nymark, Ari Stathopoulos and Anne McCarthy and our discussion on Full-site Editing and Themes. Bring lots of questions! If you can’t make it, and you do have questions, just hit reply and send them. We’ll get them answered one way or the other. I am looking forward to seeing you there!
Below, you’ll find what else happened in the block editor universe.
Enjoy your weekend,
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Table of Contents
Timeline and Scope on upcoming WordPress releases
Gutenberg 9.8 was released this week.
Release Notes: Gutenberg 9.8 by Bernhard Reiter
WP Tavern has the skinny for you. Gutenberg 9.8 Brings Rounded Borders To the Group Block and Moves the Site Editor Canvas Into an Inline Frame by Justin Tadlock
Mark Uraine and I recorded our 36th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog on Friday. It’s now available via your favorite podcast app. The show notes are available. Transcript is still in the works.
WordPress Core 5.6.1 and 5.7
WordPress 5.6.1 will soon come to a WordPress instance near you.
Beta 1 for WordPress 5.7 is scheduled for February 2, 2021, signifying feature freeze. Gutenberg 9.9 will be close to final release at that time be the last version to make it into the next WordPress core release scheduled for March 9th, 2021. The full range of block-editor features from the Gutenberg plugin versions 9.3 to 9.9 come to WordPress core version.
Josepha Haden, executive director for the WordPress open-source project, published the Big Goals for 2021. Among other topics she wrote, the goal for Full-Site Editing is the ability to edit all elements of a site using Gutenberg blocks. “This will include all in-progress features designed to help existing users transition to Gutenberg as well.” She aims for April 2021 to have an MVP (Minimum viable product). A first version is slated for WordPress 5.8, scheduled to be release on or around June 8th, 2021.
It seems like an audacious goal to get Full-Site-Editing into Core by Mai 2021 (Beta 1 of WP5.8). There is a ton of activity in Widget and Navigation Screen, though and with more people testing the site editor it just might happen.
Contributing to the Block-Editor
Also, at WordFest 2021 I gave a talk about how someone who doesn’t write code can contribute to the block-editor and assist in improving it by filing and testing issues on the GitHub Repository. Recording, slide-deck, resources and transcript are available on GT.
On Learn.WordPress, Anne McCarthy published a Workshop on How to do triage on GitHub. She wrote: “Triage is the practice of reviewing existing issues and pull requests to make sure they’re relevant, actionable, and have all the information they need. Anyone can help triage and this course is meant to help you learn how to get involved covering everything from the various ways to help to how to escalate serious problems.”. Made for #nocode contributors!
Marcus Kazmierczak published a proposal on how to handle Stale Issues in Gutenberg Repository. 2,716 open issues, many of them have been stale for years. Multiple ideas are floating around to apply a friendly reminder bot for the original poster with an option to close the issue after another period pass. People also thought about a list of cases where automatic closing wouldn’t be wanted. It’s a rich conversation for passionate people.
Sarah Gooding collected some comments in her article: Gutenberg Contributors Consider Implementing a Bot to Close Stale Issues
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.
Block Editor for Content Creators
Chris Lema shared in his post “This site now runs on the Blocksy theme” how he changed his personal blog from a page builder to the block-editor. It’s an interesting read. Check it out.
Yesterday, in his Ask the Bartender column How To Bulk Convert Classic WordPress Posts To Blocks Justin Tadlock published a list of other plugins for bulk conversion by Organic Themes, Fränk Klein, and the 10up Team. In the comments, Automattic’s newspack-converter was also mentioned.
Plugins for the Block Editor
Jack Kitterhing published EatsWP plugin for restaurants. It’s a solution to help restaurants provide menus for smartphones in time of a pandemic. Justin Tadlock has taken a closer look.
We have highlighted Munir Kamal‘s work quite often in the last three years. He is one of the very early adopters of Gutenberg, creating additional features for the block editor in plugins and keeps pushing the boundaries with his template builder and EditorPlus. His site, GutenbergHub starte in 2017. WPFounders interviewed him this week. Munir Kamal – Founder of Editor Plus
The team of WPXPO built PostX – Gutenberg Post Blocks for “creating beautiful Gutenberg post grid blocks, post listing blocks, dynamic post slider blocks and post carousel blocks.” – The core block latest posts has some nice features, but it’s not suitable for online Magazines or News sites. With PostX you can arrange the post in various layouts, to showcase the depth of a site in various layouts. There is also a premium version available on their website, with demos and downloads.
Developing and designing for the Block Editor
Giorgos Sarigiannidis shows you how you can provide your users consistent design between the post editor and their site’s front end. Two lines of CSS for more consistent design between Gutenberg and the frontend
Kjell Reigstad posted his 35th update on Gutenberg + Themes and shares the latest discussions on Full-Site-Editing problems, what has been merged and the list of developer resources around themes and block-editor. Personally, I am very interested in the progress of the Refactoring the Gallery block as wrapper around core image blocks.
We certainly will talk about some of those discussion also during the upcoming Live Q & A on January 29th at 11am ET / 16:00 UTC – Interested? Register now
Gutenberg Changelog Update
Episode #35 is now available with show notes and transcript.
Episode #36 is at the editor and will be available later this weekend.
Next recording on Friday February 5th, 2021
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an Interview with Birgit Pauli-Haack
