Howdy,
It’s good to be home again. As much as I enjoyed spending time with WordPressers in Porto, and with my family and long-time friends in Germany, it’s good to be back, too. It’s easier to work when there are less distractions.
Isn’t it an odd way of putting things? We are trying to find the sweet spot between working remotely from anywhere in the world, be it the home town where parents live or a new city, like Porto. There are always temptations and more fun things to do, or people to see, that make it hard to focus on work. If you work remotely, how are you dealing with it?
Anyway, speaking of distractions, there were some rumblings in the WordPress space, that took away some focus from WordPress 6.1, Gutenberg and the block editor and other cool things that are happening around the open-source project. You can read all about it on the WPTavern or this week’s issue of The Repository.
Back to the usual programming …
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
PS: Don’t forget to reserve your seat for the upcoming Gutenber Live Q & A. I can hardly wait to talk about the cool block things happening at Pew Research Center!
A Block-First Approach at Pew Research Center with lead developer Seth Rubenstein and head of digital strategy, Michael Piccorossi
on July 22, at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC
WordPress Release Information
Gutenberg 13.5
Anne McCarthy was the lead for this week’s Gutenberg plugin release and in her post What’s new in Gutenberg 13.5? she highlighted: “The 13.5 release comes with 12 enhancements and 15 bug fixes, with an improved featured image UX, expanded design tools for the Post Navigation Link block, a few solid accessibility fixes, and some nice quality of life improvements.”
Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern has more detail in her article Gutenberg 13.5 Adds Featured Image Placeholder Support for Cover Block, Cleaner Pasting to Other Apps.
Mary Job and I will bundle the changelog of Gutenberg 13.5 and 13.6 together in our next episode of Gutenberg Changelog, which will be recorded around July 7th, 2022. If you have questions for us or Gutenberg developer send us an email to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
🎙️ Latest episode: Gutenberg Changelog #93 – Gutenberg 17.1, Command Palette, Data Views and Grid Layout – a chat with Isabel Brison
WordPress 6.0.1 and 6.1 scheduled
The core team identified the team for the minor release 6.0.1 and proposed to schedule the RC for July 5th, 2022 and the final release a week later on July 12th,2022. Sergey Biryukov and Adam Zielinsky will coordinate the release. Anne McCarthy posted more details on tickets and PRs in her post WordPress 6.0.x release team and 6.0.1 schedule
Hector Prieto shared in his post WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup the proposal schedule for the next major WordPress release, 6.1 and added a call for contributors to join the release team. If you are intested, leave a comment on the post. Proposed Release date is October 25, 2022 with Feature Freeze and first Beta on September 20, 2022. ICYMI, Matias Ventura posted a the Roadmap for 6.1 (block editor edition) a few weeks ago.
Building Themes for FSE and WordPress
On WordPress TV, the Anatomy of a Block Theme was published. “You quickly learn the key components of what makes up a block theme.”
Ramon James Dodd, Contributor to Gutenberg, posted an update on initiatives and goals around Block editor styles. “The purpose of this post is to highlight ongoing initiatives targeted at addressing these issues, and to outline longer-term ambitions to output more readable, efficient and extensible frontend styles.”
Dodd divided his post into three sections: First he highlights the recurring challenges for theme developers to style blocks, then he offers a three part strategy to tackle those challenges, and then he outlines how the contributors could get there, admitting: “Style nirvana might well be out there, however the path comprises individual stepping stones, discovering how individual parts contribute to the whole, and balancing compatibility and stability with innovation.”
This week, Mike McAlister, creator of Atomic Blocks in the early days, and now product designer and principal software enginieer at WPEngine announced on Twitter the alpha phase of FSE Studio, a “developer tool to make building full-site editing themes faster and easier to manage.” McAlister and Phil Johnston also shared a YouTube video of a first FSE Studio walk-through. It reminds me a little bit of Carolina Nymark’s Theme Generator and of David Gwyers ThemeGen App, both have a different goal in mind. From little I saw of the FSE Studio in the video, I like the one page list to check or uncheck the various design tools for users, and I am also intriged by the built in pattern creation tool. It promises “to streamline the theme building process and make theme management a breeze”. Can’t wait to see the alpha version. You can do, as they are looking for alpha testers. Connect with Mike McAlister via Twitter DM
If you can’t wait for the tool to go public, I wrote about four other block theme generators before.
- In Weekend edition 215 we listed three generators,
- Last week in #219, you learned about the  Create-Block Theme plugin.
Also this week, the WPWatercooler gang hosted Brian Gardner, creator for the theme Frost and developer advocate at WPEngine in their show about Full Site editing and Block Theme. Listen in on WordPress Themes Block It Like Its Hot. Brian Gardner also talked about his new theme he just announced via Twitter.
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.
WordPress Social Learning Spaces
June 27, 2022 – 1 pm EDT / 17:00 UTC
Hello Blocks! Coding a custom block with Ryan Welcher
June 30, 2022 – 5:00 PM EDT / 21:00 UTC
My First Recipe Blog with Destiny Kanno
July 4, 2022 5 pm EDT / 21:00 UTC
Using Block Patterns with Wes Theron
July 12, 2022, 5 pm EDT / 21:00 UTC
Explore the Block Directory with Wes Theron
