Hi,
ICYMI, organizers of WordCamp US (WCUS) announced Danny Sullivan, search liaison at Google, as the keynote speaker. It’s hugely relevant now that sites are dealing with decreasing clicks from search engines. The brilliant Rae Morey of The Repository has the skinny for you about what else is happening at WCUS.
I am really getting excited for WordCamp US. Are you, too? Did you get your ticket yet? I would love to meet you and catch up!
You might have to juggle family plans and necessities, though. You might need to get kids to school or enjoy the last summer camping trip over Labor Day weekend. Or you might be apprehensive about traveling to the US in general. All good reasons. And I will miss you. We can catch up afterward. 🤗
Enjoy this week’s updates.
Yours, đź’•
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
First-time release lead Aki Hamano made Gutenberg 21.3 RC available for testing.
Tammie Lister and I included Gutenberg 21.1, 21.2, and 21.3 in our latest Gutenberg Changelog episode recording. We also talked about WordPress 6.9, the AI Team, and more. The episode will drop on your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
Admin Redesign, Abilities API, and Routing
Lead architect of Gutenberg Matias Ventura published two issues on GitHub for broad discussion of the next iteration of the Admin Design and tied together concepts of the Command Palette with the Abilities API.
In Admin Materials and Surfaces, Ventura outlines the next iteration of the Admin redesign with screenshots. He breaks it down into three main building blocks. You can think of it like organizing a house:
- Materials are like the rooms and spaces (the foundation, main areas, and pop-up spaces)
- Concepts are like the furniture and appliances that go in those rooms (navigation menus, content lists, forms, etc.)
- Screens are like how you arrange everything together for different purposes (living room setup vs. kitchen setup)
The goal is to make WordPress’s admin area more flexible so users can customize their workspace, and plugin developers can create interfaces that fit naturally with the rest of the system. The updates need to ensure consistency, flexibility, scalability, and clarity across the entire admin and plugin experience. To learn more details, consult the GitHub post.
In the Abilities & Workflows Overview, Ventura outlines plans to create a unified system for handling keyboard shortcuts, commands, and AI-powered workflows. This would enable creating a “smart assistant” for WordPress that can help users accomplish tasks more efficiently.
The post aims to show how contributors can connect these three things that are currently separate and also creates a shared language to discuss these concepts.
- Abilities—Callable functions with well-defined descriptions, inputs, and outputs schemas that both humans and AI can understand and use
- Workflows—Chains of abilities, possibly requiring user interaction via form controls along the way to accomplish complex tasks
- Visual Workflow Editor—A drag-and-drop interface where users can create custom workflows without coding
In short, the idea is to make it possible that you instead of manually creating a new page (going to Pages → Add New → entering title → setting up template), you could use a workflow that asks for the page title upfront, automatically creates it, and takes you straight to editing – all triggered by a single command.
In his overview issue, Admin Redesign: A solid routing foundation, Riad Benguella shares insights from the site editor work and discusses plans to improve the admin dashboard’s structure by changing how pages load and connect. Using advancements from the performance team on speculative loading and view transitions, as well as various new libraries, should help the admin page load more quickly and smoothly and improve the developer experience for contributors as well as 3rd-party product builders.
The challenging aspect is ensuring backward compatibility in WordPress so that thousands of plugins continue to function well while creating a new, faster foundation.
All three GitHub issues are ready to be discussed with the larger site builder and developer community. It’s the moment to take part in the next iteration of the admin design by providing feedback and sharing use cases.
In this week’s podcast episode, Tammie Lister makes a case to developers to work with the current iteration of DataViews and Data Form for plugins to become familiar with the approaches, develop muscle memory, and provide feedback on what doesn’t work yet to make sure it’s included in the following iterations of the Admin Design work.
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #124 – Gutenberg 22.0 and WordPress 6.9 with Ellen Bauer, project lead at Automattic.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode Site Builders and Owners
Wes Theron, Automattic, published a new video to teach you how to use the Group Block. Besides adding a Group block to your canvas, he covered how you can nest multiple Group blocks and control them via the ListView. He also has tips on styling a group block, organizing your layout, and previewing it on mobile devices or locking it against accidental changes.
Simon Cooke from Human Made put out an interesting piece called Full Site Editing vs. Leading Page Builders: A Strategic Comparison. He explains why going with Full Site Editing can be a game changer—it’s built right into the WordPress core. This means it’s generally faster, more secure, and way easier to manage when things get big. On the flip side, page builders can really bog things down and cause a headache with plugins, especially for larger teams.
The View Transitions plugin by Felix Arntz played the main character in Jamie Marsland’s video This FREE WordPress Plugin Is a Must-Have for Every Website! It makes your WordPress site to feel faster, smoother, and more like a modern app. Marsland feels that anyone’s hardly talking about it.
Joe Simpson Jr. gave a talk at WordCamp Monclair: A Journey from Page Builders to Blocks in WordPress and it now available on WordPressTV.
If you’re still hanging on to the Classic Editor or those tried-and-true theme methods, you’re not alone—and this session is right up your alley. Simpson takes a leisurely stroll through a real-world site rebuild, sharing the bumps and surprises that come with moving from classic setups or page builders to full site editing with blocks. He’ll talk through how to pick the right tools for your needs, compare the different ways to build a site these days, and help you figure out when it might finally be time to make the switch. Simpson also even looks back at how Gutenberg has evolved over the years. Whether you’re new to WordPress or just a bit slow to embrace the changes, there’s something here for you.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Cloudways’ Abdul Rehman set out to explain WordPress Hybrid Themes: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Build One in 2025. He found
Hybrid WordPress themes are the best of both worlds—they mix old-school classic theme structure with cool new block features. You get more design freedom without ditching your old plugins or custom code. Perfect if you want flexibility but aren’t ready for a full block theme leap.
At WordCamp Montclair, Beth Soderberg—who’s been using blocks since the early days—shared how she builds custom WordPress themes in 2025. She walked us through her current process of building a block theme. She talked about choosing base themes and explained how her tools and workflow have changed. Soderberg also broke down how she decides when to use the editor and when it’s better to dive into code, plus showed how blocks can handle page structure instead of relying on old-school templates. She wrapped up with some tips on setting up the site editor so it’s easy for anyone to manage a block-based site.
Building Blocks and tools for the block editor
If you found last week’s four-hour Block Development Cookbook video was a little too much to get started, Ryan Welcher began the work of slicing up the cookbook into individual recipes videos. Here is his announcement video and first recipe: Save Time With This Block Binding Trick!
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