This weekend, my husband I are traveling to Torino, Italy for work. We’ll do some sightseeing over the weekend, during the week we’ll start work as early as possible so we can explore the city some more in the afternoon and evening.
On Wednesday, I start first meetings around WordCamp Europe. Thursday is Contributor Day and more meetings. Friday I will head first into the first day of the WordCamp, meeting plenty of friends in the community in the Hallway Track. Saturday morning, I’ll be the MC in Track 1, then more session and conversations, Mullenweg’s Summer updated and After Party. Sunday we’ll head home.
This weekend edition covers updates from the last three weeks. So it’s stoke full of great information, tutorials, and videos. You’ll find below a few plugins for the block editor.
This edition needs to last for two weeks, as the next one (#296) will come out on June 22, 2024.
Until then, hope you have a great start of the Summer or Winter and you can enjoy the time with family and friends.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Beta 1 of WordPress 6.6 was released. The new version entails Gutenberg plugin versions 17.8 to 18.5. Soon we have more information coming out. For now, the Roadmap 6.6 post is the closest document to what we will see in the release.
If you want to dive into all the features and enhancements, the fastest way is to heed the call for testing with test instructions for 10 new WordPress features. Anne McCarthy put it all together for you in Help test WordPress 6.6. The table of contents allows you to pick your priorities.
The first Dev Notes for the Field Guide have been published, too.
George Mamadashvili, core developer sponsored by GoDaddy, explains in his post what plugin developer need to know to prepare for the React 19 Upgrade.
Rian Benguella write about JSX in WordPress 6.6. First he explains how to use the new JSX transforms in React and then how to update the build tools to take advantage of this new feature.
In the following weeks there will be more Dev Notes about the new features coming to WordPress 6.6
Meanwhile, WordPress 6.5.4 Maintenance Release was published and if you have automatic updates enabled your sites have already updated. Otherwise updates as soon as possible. The minor release fixes five Core bugs, among them the plugin redirect fix.
Gutenberg plugin releases
Alex Lende was the release lead for Gutenberg 18.4. The version comprises 185 PRs by 58 contributors, 7 contributors with their first merged PRs. In his post What’s new in Gutenberg 18.4 (22 May), Lende highlighted:
- Visualize grid layouts
- Group blocks with a keyboard shortcut
- Define custom aspect ratio presets with theme.json
Gutenberg 18.5 was released this week. The release post is still in the works.
My special guest on the Gutenberg Changelog 101st episode, Magdalena Paciorek and I had fun talking through the last three Gutenberg releases as we also covered what will be in WordPress 6.6. I hope you’ll listen in. It will land in your favorite podcasting app over the weekend.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8 with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio
Joen Asmussen published two updates on the work of the WordPress design team since the last Weekend Edition.
In the first post, you can see work in progress about Block Bindings, revamp of Learn.WordPress and update to Openverse design. The second post shows a mockup for the Media library using Dataviews component, UI to control background images and Openverse’s About page.
Upcoming Developer Hours and Hallway Hangouts
As I will be traveling again next week, this time to Torino for WordCamp Europe, I did a little research and surface the upcoming Developer Hours session and Hallway Hangout. The difference is that Developer Hours are prepared structured presentations while Hallway Hangout are more informal discussions with lots of input from the attendees. The links lead to the announcement post. Save the Date anyway for those without links, if you are interested.
- Jun 11, 15:00 UTC Developer Hours: Exploring Overrides for Synced Pattern in WordPres 6.6
- Jun 19 11:00 UTC Hallway Hangout: Theme Building with Playground, Create-block-theme plugin, and GitHub
- Jun 25, 15:00 UTC Developer Hours: What’s new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6
- Jun 26 11 am UTC Hallway Hangout: Grid Layouts for WordPress 6.6
- July 2, 2024 15:00 UTC Developer Hours: Building themes with the Create Block Theme plugin
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Rich Tabor and Jonathan Jernigan were contestants at Jamie Marsland‘s Speed Building Challenge on YouTube. Tabor used a block theme (Assembler by Automattic) and the site editor out of the box, while Jernigan used a classic theme GeneratePress to build a landing page by ConvertKit.
Ryan Welcher released an update for his Advanced Query Loop plugin. In version 3.0 it now includes sorting by comment count as well as by postID. “To mark the occasion, I have just released version 3.0.0 that contains a major overhaul of the codebase to make it easier to extend. Additionally, it adds support for sorting my Comment Count and Included Post Ids.” Welcher wrote on LinkedIn
As reported by WP Weekly, Tushar Imran, founder and CEO of Kodezen and Academy LMS, from Bangladesh, released a new block collection plugin via the WordPress repository, called aBlocks. It’s a fully functional beta version and offers quite a few customizable blocks, i.e. Container, Divider, or Star Ratings blocks. At its core it offers courses Block that goes well with its Video block for the Academy LMS.
Pedro Dornelas updated his free patterns collection at WP Alpha. It now includes 100+ free patterns that work on any WordPress theme. It also offers 10+ full page patterns for a premium. (TY to WPWeekly’s Davinder Singh Kainth)
Thomas Zwirner, Web developer from Leipzig released an update of hits Download List Block plugin. This is quite a unique plugin for a very narrow use case. It provides you with block to build a list of download files and automatically adds icons according to the file types. Users have a choice of three icon set or can upload a custom icon set. It also offers a few options on for the display. It also provides a Live Preview, powered by Playground.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
The contributor team of the Create Block theme plugin released a new version as well. In version 2.2 you’ll find, among other updates
- Update modal width to 65vw (#638)
- Fixed font utilities to work with font sources as an (optional) array. (#645)
- Handle font licenses when editing theme metadata (#649)
- Handle font credits in the backend (#647)
Justin Tadlock published his part 2 of Building a book review site with Block Bindings tutorial to tackle queries, patterns, and templates of the new features to extend core Blocks.
Fränk Klein contemplates in his post Pattern or Post Type: Discover the Best Way to Structure Your Content how the approach to handling different content types has changed from classic to block themes. You can use block patterns to display various kinds of content. Only when you need more data handling power, a custom post type might be needed. See the post for details.
With his post Moving the sidebar into a theme pattern Bernhard Kau continues to share in on his block theme building journey.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Nate Finch takes you on the journey on Setting up a multi-block plugin using InnerBlocks and post meta, a tutorial on how to use ‘create-block’ to set up a multi-block plugin and create two blocks: a Rating block and a Review Card block.
Ryan Welcher took his livestream audience along Creating a slide deck with the Interactivity API to add transistions.
WordPress Playground
The recording of the Developer Hours: Creating WordPress Playground Blueprints for Testing and Demos is now available on YouTube. Nick Diego and I first discussed what Playground and Blueprints are and then showed some examples from the Blueprint Gallery on how to configure Playground for specific use cases. Then I walked the audience through an example from beginning to end: Add a dashboard widget, set permalinks, import prepared content including features images. The code is available on GitHub.
Nathan Wrigley interviewed Adam Zieliński on How Playground Is Transforming WordPress Website Creation. “This project really does change the way that WordPress can be used, and there are so many exciting prospects for how it might shape the future of website design and development. If you’re interested in hearing about cutting-edge advancements reshaping the WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.” Wrigley wrote and it’s not hyperbole.
Rhys Wynne, WordPress freelancer from Manchester, England explored Can WordPress run Doom? (of course it can, here’s how) and share his process to making it work, including his success with blueprints to demo the plugin and the game.
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com