WordPress.org

Twenty Twenty-Two, the new default theme coming in WordPress 5.9, was unveiled today on WordPress.org. The design goes full steam ahead in support of full site editing and new customization capabilities.

Like its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-One, the new default theme makes some bold design choices wrapped around a central theme. In this case it’s bird illustrations, complemented by Source Serif Pro for headlines, and a delicious array of patterns for limitless combinations.

Image Credit: Introducing Twenty Twenty-Two

The theme will be developed on GitHub until it’s ready to be merged into core. Kjell Reigstad, an Automattic sponsored full-time design contributor to WordPress.org, is leading the design with Jeff Ong leading development. In the announcement he sets expectations high for users to be able to make the theme their own.

“With the advent of Full Site Editing and Global Styles, themes are changing structurally and functionally to enable far more avenues for customization than users have come to expect in the past,” Reigstad said. “To take advantage of these new abilities, Twenty Twenty-Two has been designed to be the most flexible default theme ever created for WordPress.”  

In addition to the wide variety of patterns expected to ship with this theme, Twenty Twenty-Two will offer a lively selection of six pre-designed color palettes. Reigstad shared a video preview of how they instantly change the character of the theme. (see below) Combine this with the promise of being able to manipulate every aspect of the theme’s appearance through global styles, and users are in for a treat with WordPress 5.9.

“Twenty Twenty-Two will take advantage of a wide network of page templates, headers, footers, and other patterns so that users can easily make the theme their own,” Reigstad said. “In another nod to the behavior of birds everywhere, these will offer a balance between fun and utility: some are irregular and unpredictable, while others are straightforward and traditional. Together, these patterns will act as a window into all of the possibilities that the theme enables.”

The design preview for Twenty Twenty-Two has received overwhelming positive feedback on Twitter and in the comments of the announcement. Many users were excited to see a default theme that can be quickly transformed for so many applications. Too many default themes have only been applicable to a narrow set of use cases. In the past, users had little hope of being able to change things around to make the design work for their needs. Unrelenting progress on the block editor and full site editing has made it possible for Twenty Twenty-Two to become the most user-empowering default theme in WordPress’ history.

Reigstad said the theme will be “built for Full Site Editig first,” with as little CSS as possible, and all theme styles configurable through theme.json wherever possible, so users can edit them through Global Styles.

“Twenty Twenty-Two is designed with the acknowledgement that its default appearance is not most people’s endpoint,” Reigstad said. “Everyone deserves a truly unique website, built on a solid, well-designed foundation, and Twenty Twenty-Two aims to help them achieve that.”

WordCamp US took place online last Friday. Organizers pulled off a successful one-day event with an engaging group of speakers who highlighted timely and important topics. There were 3,608 people registered for the event and the livestream had as many as 400 concurrent viewers at a time.

“Online events are notoriously difficult to get attendee stats for, particularly an event like WCUS 2021 where the audience is global and spans so many time zones,” WCUS organizer Cate DeRosia said. “Many people will watch what they can and catch the rest in their own time.

“We really love this as it makes for not only a more accessible event, but a more educational experience as it’s so easy to rewatch a session as many times as an individual needs.”

When asked on Twitter why the event’s organizers didn’t opt to use a more interactive event platform like Hopin or Veertly, organizer Jen Swisher said some of the platforms they looked into had accessibility issues or prohibitive costs.

As part of the leadership trio for WCUS, Swisher said the team had three issues they focused on when choosing a virtual venue: cost, accessibility, and time for implementation.

“We had a $30K budget,” Swisher said. “To use one of these platforms would have doubled it minimum. There was also a strong chance we would have faced additional costs from our production company for our resources through them to learn this new platform and connect it with their equipment.

“This would have resulted in additional time and resources spent on fundraising or increasing the costs of our sponsor packages. This would have forced the volunteers on the sponsors team to do twice as much work to get the sponsorship necessary to fund other platforms.”

Even with the simple setup of two YouTube livestreams, organizers provided a high energy, welcoming reception to attendees. They managed to bring some levity during these challenging times apart from one another. Swisher highlighted a few deliberate choices organizers made to give this year’s event a more lightweight feeling:

“We didn’t try to replicate the in person experience,” she said. “Making the choice to actively recognize that this isn’t like in person events in any way gave everyone permission to think about this event differently. By throwing out ‘the book,’ and starting from scratch, we were able to really ‘dream’ for the event, instead of what it could have been.”

Instead of planning a big multi-day event, organizers opted for a single day focusing on a smaller subset of topics. They also selected chat moderators and emcees that would bring enthusiasm to the event and gave them the autonomy to make decisions on the fly.

“The team agreed that a big event with multiple days and large numbers of tracks would be exhausting to plan and exhausting for attendees to sit through,” Swisher said.

After WordCamp US 2020 was cancelled due to pandemic stress and online event fatigue, the organizing team needed to make some changes to avoid the pitfalls of the previous year. Organizers were drained, spread thin, and frustrated by delayed tasks and external stressors. The WCUS 2021 team turned this around to make it a more healthy culture for volunteers.

“We fostered an atmosphere where stepping back to take care of yourself was strongly encouraged,” Swisher said. “This resulted in a team of folks that was well rested and able to handle the extra responsibility that comes with planning a WordCamp.”

“We gave the teams the autonomy necessary to get their work done. Decision making was done democratically, but decisions that didn’t impact the whole team didn’t involve the whole team, making it possible to move more agilely.”

The speaker selection was outstanding this year and the recorded sessions will soon be available on WordPress.tv after the production team finishes uploading them. In the meantime, if you are eager to watch or re-watch sessions now, one attendee, Marcus Burnette, has published a post with direct links to session recordings from the livestream.

About this episode.

On the podcast today we have Lee Shadle.

Lee is a WordPress developer at WP Draft, and by his own admission is obsessed with building block based themes, plugins and websites. He’s been using WordPress for many years and as soon as the Gutenberg project was announced, he decided he was going to explore it and learn how it worked.

He runs a small agency building sites with blocks as well as with 3rd party page builders.

I first saw Lee when he presented at WordCamp Europe earlier in 2021, and his passion for working with blocks and React was obvious. It’s pretty clear that, right from the start, he’s embraced the possibilities that blocks offer, both now and in the future.

At the time of recording this podcast, many are still unsure about what blocks are for, and what they will be able to do down the road, but Lee has thrown himself into figuring out what’s possible, and it might come as a surprise just how powerful they are.

We start our conversation by addressing whether Gutenberg was something that the WordPress project actually needed. Was it necessary to build a new tool which would require people to learn new skills and new techniques?

We then get into some concrete examples of how blocks will add new capabilities to websites. Some of the examples show that complex operations can be handled within single blocks. These possibilities were once the domain of plugins and shortcodes, and now they can be deployed and configured by anyone who edits content.

We talk about the obstacles which Lee encountered whilst learning how to build blocks. In his case, he worked on projects which he knew he would enjoy. We also touch upon some resources he used to assist in his learning.

There’s also a discussion about the commercial landscape for block developers and how blocks might become a new way of generating revenue. Although we’re not there yet, it might well be that in the future, WordPress users will be on the lookout to purchase blocks in the same way that they now buy plugins and themes. Perhaps there’s even scope for a market of inexpensive blocks which have limited functionality.

As you’ll hear, Lee is very optimistic about the future of WordPress, with blocks at it’s core.

Useful links.

Lee’s Twitter account

Stimulus Benefits – Lee’s calculator block

Aino

Block Visibility

Newsletter Glue

React for beginners

GenerateBlocks

Nick Diego

Mike Oliver

Brian Gardner

Transcript

After deciding not to hold the event in 2020, WordCamp US 2021 returned for a single day on October 1st. The entire event was planned in eight weeks — which was not widely known until mentioned by lead organizer Jen Swifter during closing remarks. This marks the first WordCamp US without Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word,” although due to the event being virtual it’s presumed Matt will be holding the SotW as a separate virtual “event” closer to the end of the year — similar to last year.

The two track event still brought fresh content and had what could be argued as one of the most diverse speaker lineups for a single day at WordCamp US — at least when it comes to “new to WCUS” speakers. New faces — even on screens rather than a stage — are welcome to see.

The event sold over 3000 tickets, which for a WordCamp US and a virtual event with limited marketing time is quite good. Of course not everyone might have showed up but I could easily get the feeling that this was a large event from the activity in the online chat and from Twitter.

Update: WordCamp US released an official response when asked about registered and attending members.

“We had 3608 people register for the event and had as many as 400 concurrent viewers at one time.

Online events are notoriously difficult to get attendee stats for, particularly an event like WCUS 2021 where the audience is global and spans so many time zones. Many people will watch what they can and catch the rest in their own time.

We really love this as it makes for not only a more accessible event, but a more educational experience as it’s so easy to rewatch a session as many times as an individual needs.“

It is difficult to give highlights of the talks since I was part of the programming team that helped add these talks to the program. I decided not to watch pre-recorded presentations prior to the day of WordCamp US to make the experience as similar to a regular attendee’s experience as possible. For that reason, I couldn’t cover all the talks live, and there are still a few talks I need to go back and watch. But I can cover some highlights and point out some notable presentations.

Note: Until WCUS talks are published on WordPress.tv, you can use this guide to view them timestamped in the live stream on YouTube thanks to Marcus Burnette.

Bet Hannon’s talk on accessibility was well received by the audience at the start of the event. Bet noted that “25% of all adults in the US have a permanent or temporary disability,” so the subject material should apply to many site builders. Jill Binder came afterwards to give an inspirational story about her journey to being a diversity team leader for a team that in 2020 exists in 71 cities across 17 countries.

Meanwhile, Cory Webb and Rich Tabor delivered what could be caled the “introduction” and “showcase” talks related to the block editor. Most talks in this particular track had some connection to the block editor or the latest major enhancements in WordPress.

There were lightning talks after a very entertaining “musical break” — or what would be considered lunch for an in-person event. I wasn’t able to fully digest them all, but many of these performers featured rarely seen or new faces in the WordPress community:

Sienna Svob covered sustainability, recommending that WordPress designers use fewer resources when possible and lean on hosts that use renewable energy. 

Lesley Sim of Newsletter Glue offered a no-slide presentation on how to make friends with early customers, and she reminded product builders to “create the expectation you’re helpful and easy to reach.” Lesley also reminded us that “anything you do for the first time [in business and marketing] is going to be awkward.” 

If you are running an ecommerce site, Lax Mariappan’s talk is a good one to watch. In a similar vein, if you are running a community or are a WordCamp / Meetup organizer I would recommend Shusei Toda‘s talk on lessons learned from WordCamp Tokyo 2021.

Another presentation for designers and theme developers would be Tammie Lister’s “Let Themes Be Themes” talk which will likely find a special place in the heart of those yearning for inspiration as we head into the next-generation of WordPress themes with full site editing and the block editor.

For entertainment, Taco Verdonschot scored some points for using his own green screen in his talk on recharging your social batteries. This was a timely talk when many of us still work almost completely remotely via Zoom and Slack.

The second half of WordCamp US seemed to go by quickly. Two key talks about WordPress.org contributions were featured in one track. The first by members of the WordPress Training team focused on the Learn.WordPress.org resource. Support for Leearn will make a big impact in the coming days — we’ll do a deeper dive into this subject in the future — and I do agree that one day visiting a WordPress.org profile might be key part of the hiring process by companies looking for WordPress professionals.

The other key talk was given by AmyJune Hineline who covered how many ways you can contribute and reviewed all the available groups at make.wordpress.org.

Developers got a treat when Helen Hou-Sandi showed how the new White House site was built in six weeks with WordPress and over a dozen custom blocks. 

“[10up] did 12 weeks work of hours in 6. Q&A; as we went. People were trusted to Q&A; their own work, no additional layers. We did have external help and always kept moving.” 

While mostly inspirational, she did show off some React code and revealed the entire talk including the live coding was done in the browser (thanks in part to Github’s Codespaces). Another treat was seeing the experiments that Kjell Reigstad showcased in his talk about block styles.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy closed out the conference with a brief talk on “finding your own voice” with a fireside chat with Michelle Fran. Some tidbits:

• On acquisitions in the WordPress space: Josepha overall favors them and sees acquisitions as part of a maturing market ,but it’s not all about the money: “Sometimes companies being acquired need guidance. Large companies can provide advice and funds for the smaller company to get further. Mergers and acquisitions shouldn’t be looked at something that decreases the diversity in the ecosystem.”
• On diversity: “WordPress can be used by anybody ,so it should be able to be built by anybody.” However, Jospeha acknowledges that ventures similar to the all-womens release team (which took almost 2 years to plan) might not be happening anytime soon so it doesn’t turn into a “gimmick” and can be used more effectively to attract more diverse audiences to contribute. 
• On individual vs. corporate contributions: “Always important to me in terms of volume, we aim for 2/3 contribution from individuals and 1/3 that are corporately sponsored,” although right now the numbers are closer to 50/50.
• On increasing openness and transparency: For decision making in WordPress and the posts on make.wordpress.org (including her updates), Josepha said: “Even if people aren’t reading what goes into the decisions of WordPress, it’s just as important for people to go back and read that content than it is to read more traditional documentation.”

I’m biased, but I think overall the event was well done. Apart from Matt’s absence, it seemed to have a flavor of a WordCamp US throughout, complete with conversations happening on YouTube chat, Post Status Slack, and Twitter.

Get Involved in WordPress!

The GiveWP team announced an extension of its flagship donation plugin for allowing peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising in late September. The solution should make the project even more appealing than before for those looking to break from third-party donation services and go the self-hosted route. The first version rolls out individual and team fundraising pages, leaderboards, campaign sponsor support, and more.

In the past, GiveWP offered a simple solution for setting up donations on a website. People could use it for everything from nonprofit organizations to fundraising smalltown baseball team jerseys. However, any efforts to raise money fell squarely on the site owner’s shoulders.

The Peer-to-Peer add-on changes that by allowing people who support a particular cause to be both an evangelist and a fundraiser for the project.

“Peer-to-Peer is a unique form of fundraising,” said GiveWP co-founder Matt Cromwell. “To date, GiveWP has been focused primarily on the single donation form. But Peer-to-Peer is about grouping individual fundraisers into teams, each with their own form and campaign goal.”

Campaign fundraising page.

The extension allows site owners to create an overarching campaign while breaking it down into smaller individual or team-led sub-goals. For example, a campaign can have a donation goal of $100,00, but teams can reach for smaller chunks of that, such as $10,000. Ultimately, all donations are pooled together into the campaign total.

“This is a type of fundraiser that nonprofits use to raise significant funds,” said Cromwell. “These aren’t one-off simple fundraisers typically.”

The extension adds a bit of gamification to fundraising campaigns. Individuals and teams are both added to separate leaderboards, showing their rank among their peers.

Campaign leaderboards.

Individuals and teams can do more than just compete for the top rank on a campaign. They can customize their own fundraising page. It is this social element that helps bring a bit more humanity to a project.

“Examples of this type of fundraising are the Susan G Komen ‘Race for the Cure’ or the Boston Marathon,” said Cromwell. “Individuals sign up to be team captains, they recruit team members. Members have goals that lead to the team goal. All teams together go toward the total campaign goal.”

There are times when some fundraising efforts can feel a bit faceless, almost corporate-like entities asking for donations. When you start adding people from outside an organization to do some legwork, they may feel like part of something bigger.

Custom team page.

“Of course, we consulted with our customers, we held a Town Hall to get their input and feedback,” said Cromwell. “Our customers have been asking to do this type of fundraising for years. We have a lot of input on this in our feedback system. The human element is part and parcel to the success of this popular form of fundraising.”

A P2P solution was the top-voted feature request through the GiveWP feedback system. As for the future of the add-on plugin, it is easy to see what the GiveWP’s users are asking for through its own feedback channel. Currently, there is no shortage of ideas.

“We are dedicating at least two developers per development cycle over the next few cycles to continue to improve and enhance P2P based on the ongoing feedback we get from our users,” said Cromwell.

He did not give any specific details about other projects the GiveWP team is working on. However, he did note that they are excited about providing more solutions for nonprofits.

“We’d love to see our team providing more solutions outside of only the donation form side of things,” he said. “Nonprofits need stable, beautiful, and performant websites, and we think we can help on that front now too.”

There’s a lot of tolerance in open source software for shipping slightly imperfect work. And that’s good. When we ship software that’s a little bit imperfect, it makes it clear how everyone can participate, how everyone could participate, if they could find this WordPress community that supports the CMS.

That was Josepha Haden on the “A Sneak Peek at WordPress 5.9” episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, talking about what goes into a WordPress release like version 5.9. Read on to find out more about updates on the latest release and the latest WordPress news from September 2021.

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WordPress Translation Day 2021 Celebrations ran for 30 days

WordPress Contributor teams, led by the Polyglots and Marketing teams, organized WordPress Translation Day celebrations for the entire month of September. Contributors from across the world joined the celebrations by translating WordPress into their own languages. Additionally, the team organized a host of global and local events. Translation sprints were organized by the Community and Training teams, as well as local groups.

As part of the celebrations, nominations were invited for contributors who had made a significant impact on the translation of WordPress and its availability in so many languages worldwide. More than 30 notable polyglot contributors were nominated for their contributions. They will be featured in the coming month on the WP Translation Day website, together with event recaps and more news.

Read the latest People of WordPress feature on polyglots contributor Yordan Soares, from South America.

WordPress Release updates

• WordPress security and maintenance release – Version 5.8.1 came out on September 9, 2021. The release fixes three major issues and includes 60 bug fixes. You can update to the latest version directly from your WordPress dashboard or by downloading it from WordPress.org. The 5.8.2 release has been deferred and if needed a minor release will be added before 5.9. 
• Work is progressing towards WordPress 5.9, and the team released a planning round-up along with a call for release leads. October 14 is the go/no-go date of the release, which is planned to be launched on December 14, 2021.

Want to contribute to WordPress core? Join the #core channel, follow the Core Team blog, and check out the team handbook. Don’t miss the Core Team chats on Wednesdays at 5 AM and 8 PM UTC. 

Say hi to Gutenberg Versions 11.4 and 11.5

We launched Gutenberg version 11.4 and version 11.5 this month. Version 11.4 adds image blocks to the gallery block, duotone filters for featured images, and padding support for Button Blocks. Version 11.5 adds flex layout support to the group and social icon blocks along with widget group blocks. It will support the addition of a site logo or title directly into menus.

Want to get involved in developing Gutenberg? Follow the Core Team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Make WordPress Slack. The What’s next in Gutenberg post gives details on the latest updates.

New Guidelines for in-person WordCamps

The Community Team published new guidelines for returning to in-person WordCamps in regions where in-person events are allowed by the local public health authorities. 

Community members can now organize in-person WordCamps for fully vaccinated, recently tested negative, or recently recovered folks (in the last three months) — provided their region passes the in-person safety checklist OR if vaccines and/or COVID testing are accessible to all. Organizers can continue to plan online WordCamps if their region does not meet the guideline. 

New guidelines are also available on the return of in-person do_action hackathons.

Want to get involved in the Community Team and help bring back in-person WordPress events? Follow the Community Team blog and join the #community-events channel in the Make WordPress Slack! Check out the following upcoming WordCamps and meetups.

Important Team announcements/updates

• The Polyglots Team opened sign-ups for their new monthly newsletter. The first edition goes out on October 15!
• The Five for the Future program is being revisited to identify opportunities for growth. 
• The Docs Team formally launched a new repository for tracking issues with WordPress documentation: https://github.com/WordPress/Documentation-Issue-Tracker
• The Plugins Team reduced the time period to complete active review requests for plugins from six to three months.
• The Community Team started work on the 2022 Global Sponsorship program.
• The Design Team is working on a redesign proposal of the Inspector sidebar in the WordPress post/page editor.
• The Themes Team announced the results of the six-week Theme author survey.
• The Training Team also shared results of a third-party needs assessment exercise for Learn WordPress which offers some excellent insights. 

Feedback/Testing requests from Contributor Teams

• Version 18.3 of WordPress for iOS and Android are now available for testing!
• Join the 10th challenge of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program – “Pattern Party”. Check out the announcement post for testing instructions and join the fun in the #fse-outreach-experiment Slack channel. Deadline: October 13, 2021
• The Training Team is requesting feedback on:
  • Strategies to ensure high-quality video contributions for Learn WordPress. Deadline: October 6, 2021
  • Learner achievements on profiles: no current deadline
• Help the Test Team reach out to extenders to check if their test suites are compatible with the modernization of the WordPress Core PHP Test Suites. Information on what the changes mean and step-by-step instructions are available over in the following post: Changes to the WordPress Core PHP Test Suite.
• The Polyglots Team is exploring two different mechanisms on translating user-submitted block patterns: GlotPress v/s forking patterns to locales and is requesting feedback from community members.

WordPress Events updates

• WordCamp Galicia 2021 was held from September 30 – October 2, 2021 and WordCamp US 2021 ran on October 1.
• Don’t miss these upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Nicaragua 2021 (October 8-9, 2021) and WordCamp Italia 2021 (October 22-23, 2021) 
• The Diverse Speakers Training group (#WPDiversity) of the Community Team organized an allyship workshop, along with dedicated workshops focused on India in September.
• The Test Team organized a Hallway Hangout on adoption pathways for Full Site Editing where attendees mentioned how they use FSE and shared ideas for improvement. 

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Further reading

• The Hosting Team recommended that all web hosts test and push the WordPress 5.8.1 security update through to their users as soon as possible.
• The Training Team clarified GPL compliance guidelines for Learn WordPress contributions, and the guidelines for workshop presenters are available in the handbook.
• The codebase for Openverse, a search engine for openly-licensed media,  is now available for translation.
• The Core Team implemented a Webfonts API in WordPress core for simplifying the process of enqueuing external fonts on WordPress sites. 
• The Test Team rescheduled the End-to-End (e2e) Test working strategy session to October 6. More details in the announcement post.

Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Please submit it using this form. 

The following folks contributed to September’s Month in WordPress: @webcommsat, @chaion07, @dansoschin, @harishanker, @meher, and @tobifjellner

Facebook, Workplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down today for roughly six hours due to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) configuration error. Cloudflare describes BGP as “the postal service of the Internet.” It is responsible for routing Facebook’s traffic and making all of its domains accessible to visitors.

At first glance, the outage appeared to be a malicious attack following a Facebook whistleblower’s revelations on 60 Minutes Sunday evening. BGP routing can be hijacked, but so far there is no evidence to suggest that it’s anything other than an ill-timed configuration error.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,”  former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen told 60 Minutes.

Haugen copied tens of thousands of documents of internal research before leaving, one which stated: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.”

Haugen’s interview with 60 Minutes had already made Facebook’s lack of ethical compass a hot topic at media outlets before all of its web properties went down earlier today. This outage is one of the most severe in the company’s 17-year history, due to the cascading effects of Facebook’s infrastructure being tied into so many aspects of every day life. According to The Independent, reports of problems at internet and phone companies started rolling in, as Facebook and its related apps are often confused with the internet.

The whistleblower’s evidence of the pernicious nature of Facebook’s algorithms, combined with the widespread outage of the company’s network of services, has sparked a renewed call for people and businesses to return to the open web.

These kinds of outages disrupt those who have built their communications and commerce on top of Facebook’s products. Businesses put themselves in a vulnerable place when they rely on a walled garden to deliver audience engagement, especially when that garden’s algorithms promote divisive discourse and misinformation. Business owners should take recent events as a wakeup call and revoke all the permissions given to unaccountable platforms for short-term gains. It’s time to invest in the long-term health of your online presence by building on the open web.

As good people work to expose the inner workings of companies that have abandoned principles in pursuit of profit, I am hopeful the web will right itself and applications will become more open and adept at helping people navigate these turbulent times. For those today who are remembering what it’s like to have a breath of fresh air in Facebook’s absence, challenge yourself to start creating content on your own site. Make your website the original source of your work and distribute it out to social networks where you want to extend your reach.

Last week, under its news section, The Next Web published what could only be described as a hit piece: Developers hate WordPress — and so should marketers. The claim was that, despite its current 40% market share, folks should start looking at alternatives for a better experience.

The first developer interviewed for this piece was the CEO of Storyblok, Dominik Angerer. Storyblok is a headless CMS, a competitor to WordPress.

The second person interviewed for the article was Doeke Leeuwis, the founder and technical director for Story of AMS. The agency focuses on headless eCommerce. What is one of the three platforms it uses? If you guessed Storyblok, you would have gotten it right. Bonus points if you predicted it was listed first of the three in their marketing material.

The third developer interviewed was Mitchel van Bever, who also works for Story of AMS. The company has been featured multiple times on the Storyblok blog and is a featured case study.

Are you starting to see a pattern yet?

If you read through the rest of the article, you will note that the post was sponsored by Storyblok. At least they were honest about it.

Somehow I believe most readers would have skipped the article if that was posted before the content.

It is easy to find developers who dislike WordPress. But, you lose credibility when writing a piece that features interviewees who are either directly sponsoring or benefitting from the story.

The centerpiece for the entire story hinged on the 2019 and 2020 Stack Overflow annual developer survey. There is a lot to glean from the data provided by over 65,000 workers in the field. However, the article merely focused on a single point: WordPress was voted the most dreaded language or technology at 67% in the last year. Everything else centered on what those with a vested interest in Storyblok had to say.

We could talk about scalability, but with WordPress.com as a prime example of running the WordPress software at scale, do we really need to?

We could talk about flexibility, but when WordPress has more free third-party plugins (59,000+) than Storyblok has in total live websites (500+ according to BuiltWith), is it really worth diving into?

As a writer in the WordPress sphere, you may think I am entirely biased. That is at least partially true. However, I have worked with multiple systems. Laravel is one of my favorites, but its beautiful architecture does not always translate to quickly getting a job done in the same way as WordPress. I have helped friends and family launch projects on several non-WordPress services. It all depends on what the best tool for the job is.

I have even created my own custom CMS for my personal blog. I felt like WordPress was overkill for what I needed. It is OK to use another tool even when you typically prefer working with something else. My custom blogging system was built just for me, but it now runs on two websites. I had another developer friend crazy enough to try it.

My love for WordPress is not absolute. It is not unconditional.

But I still love it. There are 1,000s of others who love working with it too, and these developers are more likely to tell you what the actual issues with the platform are. We can criticize it honestly because we are down in the trenches, working with the platform every day. We know it is not always the ideal programming experience. We know it has some legacy baggage. Despite its warts, we have built something that most others only dream of doing. We have created a vast community.

If you thought it was all about who had the shiniest code, you would be wrong.

It is about business competitors willing to communicate and even help others in their space.

It is about Five for the Future, a program where WordPress-related companies contribute to free software.

It is about support forum volunteers lending a helping hand.

It is about the 100s of folks on the Make WordPress teams who contribute to various aspects of the project, everything from code reviews to translations.

It is about sharing a drink with a years-long friend you just met IRL for the first time at a WordCamp, albeit mostly virtual for the last couple of years.

It is about the podcasts that people produce for the love of the platform and its surrounding projects.

It is about quitting your nine-to-five to launch a new business as a plugin developer.

It is about taking part in a movement that has allowed millions to publish on the web.

No, not every developer who participates in the annual Stack Overflow survey loves WordPress. Most of them may dread working with the platform, and that trend may very well continue. What we have is bigger. WordPress is its community.

This smells like just another hit piece from a WordPress competitor like we have seen before. At least some of the Wix videos were funny (come on, you know you laughed at at least one or two of them), and folks got free headphones from the deal. This Storyblok-sponsored post just leaves a sour taste.

Like my grandma — probably everyone’s grandma — used to say, “You catch more flies with honey.” This was an opportunity to sell potential users on Storyblok’s features. Maybe bashing competitors brings traffic, but I doubt it brings any goodwill or long-lasting benefits.

In episode 17 of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflects on her WordCamp US keynote and digs into how participating in open source projects can help you learn 21st Century Skills. 

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to [email protected], either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

• Editor: Dustin Hartzler
• Logo: Beatriz Fialho
• Production: Chloé Bringmann
• Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

WordPress 5.9 Planning

5.9 Target Features

WordCamp US 2021

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. See, here we go!

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:42

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about the digital divide, where it is, maybe a bit of where it’s headed, and which parts of the WordPress open source project and CMS can help. This is a focused look, though, so I won’t touch on some of the hurdles that everyone is aware of when you get outside of in-person environments, things like parental modeling or supervision, education on the relevance of technology, etc. This is a follow-up to the conversation that I had at WordCamp US last week—and so doing a little bit of a deeper dive here. And we’re gonna start with what exactly is the digital divide. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:23

So the digital divide is considered those who benefit from the digital age versus those who don’t; that feels like a really big concept. And the current discussion is primarily about access, or for years that has been about access anyway, especially physical access. So those who have computers versus those who do not have internet in their homes versus those who do not. But I don’t necessarily agree with that particular, really focused definition of the problem. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:59

If the only problem we see is access, then the solution becomes to get cheap devices and internet to everyone, which certainly has led to more people being connected than ever before.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:12

With this proliferation of devices that are considered both smart and mobile (mobile in this context, meaning handheld or pocket-sized), the discussion over the last few years has been shifting. It’s been shifting into more of a discussion around the education around the relevance of internet access, discussions around the quality of access to the Internet, and also discussions around Wi-Fi and dial-up and the surprising cost of data.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:42

But from my perspective, there are a number of really dangerous assumptions that we make when we boil it all the way down to who has access and the quality of that kind of access. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:54

The first dangerous assumption is that we run the risk of conflating being tech-savvy with being digitally literate, and they’re not really the same things. The second assumption that we run the risk of is assuming that access to cellular data equals access to the internet through any other means. And also assuming that cost is always the determining factor.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  03:19

And the final fairly dangerous assumption that we’re making there is that we allow ourselves the ability to mark the digital divide is fixed in our minds. Once we get enough access to everyone, we’re just done. There is no more divide. But as a way of illustration, if you think about access, not in the context of technology, like high technology, digital technology, and in the context of like writing, you probably own a writing utensil, and you probably have access to paper of some sort, which is great. But just because you have like a pencil and a piece of paper doesn’t mean that I can send you home right now – I guess most of you are listening at home.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:07

It doesn’t mean that I can send you to your desk right now. And consider you prepared to write a best-selling novel, right? Because giving you physical tools no more makes you a novelist than handing me a computer when I was a teen made me digitally literate. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:24

So let’s talk about what it takes to be digitally literate. I’ve lumped the following skills into three groups. It’s broadly defined as 21st-century skills, but the groups that I have them in is not a comprehensive list of those 21st-century skills. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:41

The first group that is a large component of digital literacy is critical thinking skills. So computational thinking and problem-solving. That particular one is not new, exactly. But the computational thinking part certainly is. Not all problems are solved with code, but the basis for thinking through things procedurally is increasingly important. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:04

The second one in that set is communication through multiple media, consuming communications or content through Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or any other format, but also creating the things that communicate—writing blogs, creating videos, both calls and standalone, and forums, things like that. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:27

The third set in that group of critical thinking skills is around collaboration, which some people will say is more about communication. But I find that collaboration both online and in-person is a skill set all to its own. Communication only gets you so far when you’re learning to cook to collaborate with people that you don’t normally work with. And so, I have lumped that into critical thinking skills. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:54

The second big bucket for digital literacy is actually literally digital literacy. So I have three, three things in here as well. Evaluating information is obviously incredibly important in the environment that we’re in right now, for just information’s sake. But then things like understanding the differences between copyright versus copyleft licenses, understanding the difference between an .org ending URL and a .com ending URL, and evaluating the general veracity of sources that you’re finding on the web.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  06:32

The second part of that group is media use and creation, understanding the difference between folks who consume and folks who create the content we have, how to find information online, and the most sensible places to keep information online. And the third area of digital literacy that I find to be vitally important is the ethics of licenses both around use and access. So again, things like copyright vs. Copy, copyleft. And specifically for WordPress, that means understanding things like the Creative Commons licenses, GPL, MIT, but then also copyright is its own complicated question unto itself. But the other things that show up for us for WordPress that show up for us with technology are also things like open access versus proprietary information and sources. And things like plagiarism versus sampling.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  07:33

And our third big bucket, which has become increasingly complex, but the third big bucket for digital literacy to my mind is actually considered something that I call life skills. So things like self-direction, knowing what you want to do next, and how to get it done. Time management is also in there, knowing how much time something will take and being able to make sure that you are getting things done over time, as opposed to trying to accomplish everything at the last second. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  08:03

A big part of these life skills is cross-cultural and social communication. The internet is tricky, right? Because it’s simultaneously incredibly insular and increasingly global. Like you can if you wanted only ever read things that already confirm your existing biases. But the very nature of the internet, the very nature of the web, means that the world is much smaller. We have more ready access faster to everyone everywhere in the world than we used to have. This means, of course, that cultural awareness is an absolute must now more than ever. This is for what it’s worth the time of year when I give this talk. And that’s because of this last part of the life skills section, which is digital citizenship. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  08:54

Digital citizenship generally is the second week of October 2 or the third week of October. And it’s one of my favorite weeks because it is something that comes up all the time in our ecosystem. It comes up all the time and open source in general, but certainly for WordPress. So those are our three big buckets of digital literacy, a subset of 21st-century skills as a whole.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  09:22

That’s a lot of stuff, I know. And it’s also really hard to figure out how you can learn any of those skills, and from my experience, I really believe that WordPress as an open source project can help people learn those things.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  09:43

Once upon a time, ages and ages ago, my mother told me that in order for me to become a better writer, I would have to read and in order to become a better communicator, it would probably help if I spent a little bit more time writing, and I have always felt that the same must be true for all the things that we learn, you find a positive example and study it to become better. Or, depending on what you’re learning and how you’re trying to learn it, you find a passive example of something that you want to be able to do better from an active standpoint and participate in that so that your active production of the other part is better.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  10:24

Here are a few parts of the WordPress project and WordPress itself that can help with this.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  10:31

So there are first a few really specific teams; if you’re contributing to a team like Themes, or Plugins, or Core, the three areas of those digital literacy skills that you have an opportunity to learn there. For critical thinking, you’re going to run into problem-solving and computational thinking. You’re also going to run into distributed collaboration, which was really important as just a concept when I first wrote this talk. And now it is currently really important as a reality because we have a bunch of companies that are going to either remote work or partially distributed or fully distributed. And that’s the way that WordPress has worked for a pretty long time.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  11:19

So I’ve always felt like it was important because it was important to WordPress, but it’s also becoming increasingly an important part of just how to exist in the world at the moment. For those three teams, the things that you can really tap into and practice for the life skill section are digital literacy, nope, digital citizenship, self-direction, and time management obviously comes up in any open source project because you are volunteering your time and it is up to you to kind of decide how much you can commit or not various other parts of time management and directing one’s own project. Now, but you also get the opportunity to test and practice your cross-cultural communication, social communication and learning what it means to collaborate across cultures in that way.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  12:15

On the digital literacy side, you also get a little bit of that information evaluation and synthesis for what it’s worth. And then obviously get to learn more about the ethics of various types of licenses and how use and access relate to those things.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  12:35

We also have a team or two; these are not really teams or twos. These are things that you can do that are either solo activities or group activities. One is working or checking out the support forums, and the other is blogging. We’ll start with support forums. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  12:52

If you’re doing this as a group activity, there are a couple of extra things that that you can practice here. But suppose you’re doing it as a solo, just way to give back to the project sort of thing or way to learn some of these skills sort of thing. In that case, you can get almost all of these digital literacy skills woven into working in the support forums, depending on what’s happening in the moment and the questions people have brought up. But for critical thinking, obviously, you get some problem solving in there, not as much the computational thinking as the procedural thinking part. But you certainly also get to tap into communication with multiple types of media, collaboration in person and online, depending on whether you’re doing this as a solo effort or a group effort. And then, of course, research, which I didn’t really bring up in any of those groupings for digital literacy, is certainly a very important part of it.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  13:49

For the digital literacy grouping of skills related to digital literacy, you get to work on evaluating information and, depending on how complicated an answer might be. You can also get that opportunity to practice synthesizing complex information and research, a digital literacy skill. And then, once people have responded to a topic you’ve answered, you also get to tap into that life skill section. You get to be you get the opportunity to practice digital citizenship related to synchronous or asynchronous conversation. You also get to see more about how cross-cultural communication and collaboration works and social communication across those various boundaries that naturally show up when we’re working across cultures that way. And as I mentioned previously, information synthesis, as well.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  14:53

The second one that I have mentioned can be like a solo effort or a group effort, depending on what you do. Blogging, for most people who use WordPress, is probably the most common application of how WordPress can help you do stuff. So I often see it as the most relevant and the most immediately accessible to anyone. But you know, you got to meet people where they are. So, I would strongly believe that this is our best way to help people learn these things. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  15:30

So blogging for the critical thinking sorts of things, you have an opportunity to practice communication across mediums. You will probably get an opportunity to practice your research skills, chances are, you’re going to get the opportunity to practice some problem solving, and honestly, like if you’re hosting your site, problem-solving is going to come up when using WordPress as soon as you add in plugins and themes, because you sometimes kind of have to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and what’s playing nicely with other things and what’s not. It’s possible that with blogging, you’re also going to have an opportunity to get to practice some distributed collaboration. But that’s probably going to depend on what you’re doing with your site as well.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  16:30

Licenses and how they apply to the thing that you’re using feel a bit different when you are the one who’s creating. And so learning about how those things work and don’t work and how they can best suit what you’re trying to do. Blogging is absolutely an excellent opportunity to dig into that a bit and learn a bit more about that. As far as your life skills go,

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  16:56

that’s where you, again, get to practice some digital citizenship by figuring out who your audiences are and also when you have to communicate with them via the comments or any other way that you have built up a feedback mechanism there. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  17:11

Self-direction obviously will come into this, maybe time management if you are blogging on, I was gonna say on a paid basis, but that’s not really I don’t know, on a project basis, like some of us are students and have to write things based on deadlines. And so, you know, self-direction, potentially time management, always cross-cultural communication, social communication, research, all of these things show up in there.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  17:41

And, you know, I really believe in this concept of how blogging and bringing people into maintaining a website can teach you all of these skills. Because when I was younger, I was a bad communicator. And now, I am across the board known for my effective communication and my ability to work across cultures. And so the defining moment, which was like a four-year moment, and so not necessarily a moment, but the thing that really made all the difference was when my mom challenged me to write every single day. She had noted that I was not necessarily great at getting from one point to the next. I wasn’t necessarily great at building my arguments when I had to explain something to people. And she suggested that writing every day would help me tap into this big thing about communication and working with other people collaboration, all of that. And as an adult on the other side of it. Like, I thought she was super wrong when I was younger, because don’t we all think our parents are wrong when we’re younger. But as an adult on the other side of it, not only was that an opportunity for me to literally learn how to communicate better. But it also, when I look at it, gave me access to opportunities to practice all sorts of 21st-century skills and digital literacy skills in an environment that was relatively safe. And so, I am a big proponent of this particular one.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  19:26

Another team that helps us tap into and practice a lot of our digital literacy skills is the Documentation team. I recommend that you let this be a supervised activity if you’re doing this with students because, you know, it’s a wiki. You can put weird things in there on accident or just inaccurate things. So for critical thinking, the primary skill that you’re going to be able to practice if you’re working on documentation is collaboration. You would think that it was also like information synthesis and information evaluation. But for a lot of the work that we’re doing, the documentation exists. And what we’re looking at is trying to figure out where it no longer matches what is currently in the CMS, or currently in the project or currently in the team, whatever it is that you’re working on at that moment. And so, it’s a strong collaborative effort in the WordPress project. You have to have done the general work to figure out what needs to be changed in the documentation. But a lot of times, you need to figure out who has access to make the changes, what has prevented us from making changes in the past, and things like that. And so I say, collaboration is the only one to learn and critical thinking, but it’s actually a really big one and can take a fair amount of effort in this particular context.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  20:49

From the digital literacy aspect, of course, there is evaluating information. But this particular type of information evaluation is a little different for documentation. And this actually is true for the Documentation team, for the Training team, and also for the new Learn team. This question is true for all of them. There is a huge difference between presentation versus application of information. The way you present information for people who already know it and just need confirmation of something or are using it for reference material is really different from when people are looking at a piece of documentation that should be telling them how to accomplish something. And they try to apply it either to their own processes at the moment or apply it to teaching other people. And so evaluating information to make sure that what is presented can be applied, and all of the ways that that very complicated journey with managing information can kind of work or not, depending on how things are going in your section of the open source project at the moment.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  21:59

The third group of skills that you can really dig into in those teams, again, is digital citizenship, basically, everything is digital citizenship in WordPress because we’re just people online.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  22:24

And this final grouping that we have this final team and group of skills. So the Community team is a substantial and far-ranging team; they have many things that fall into their area of expertise. And so this has traditionally kind of functioned as a linchpin around education and ensuring that that was all relevant for users and attendees of events. The Community team will remain pivotal to so many things that we do now. But now that we have really awakened the Learn team and re-enlivened that Training team, this will shift a little over time. But yes, so that grain of salt that depending on when you listen to this, if you listen to it in 2050, maybe it’s not accurate anymore. Hopefully, most of what I say is not accurate in 2050. But you know, still.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  23:27

 Anyway! Critical thinking that’s where we were. So the critical thinking group of skills inside the Community team, you are going to have an opportunity to practice problem-solving. And frequently also procedural thinking, depending on what you’re working on in that team. Multimedia communication is absolutely true. And that’s true, whether you contribute to the team itself and make sure that the team is functioning and doing their basic tasks. Or if you are organizing an entire event, whether it’s online or offline or however that is being accomplished. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  24:07

Multimedia communication for this particular team is constant for all of their work and something that everyone who works on there gets to practice all the time. For digital literacy, this comes up a lot if what you’re doing is working through any sort of like programming plans, making sure that what we have in place for events is really excellent. It’s a really excellent opportunity for practicing the evaluation of information, learning more about media use and creation, and then naturally, everything to do with licenses copyright copyleft, not only for everything that we produce but then also for everyone in the ecosystem. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  24:55

This team helps so many plugins, authors and theme developers, and other groups who participate in the ecosystem understand the nuances of the GPL and why it matters so much to WordPress. And then in the life skill section, there’s the obvious life skill section, life skills that have come up for all of them—so digital citizenship, cross-cultural and social communication. But also you have the opportunity to tap into that self-direction and time management practice, which probably should also be considered in all of these teams. But, you know, things change as we go. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  25:45

Those are the most likely digital literacy skills that you would end up practicing in the Community team, depending on how you are participating in the Community team at that moment.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  25:59

So I said that we would talk a little bit about where this is all headed and what to do next. And like I just said, when I got lost in my own reverie, they’re like, hopefully, everything that I’ve shared here is out of date by 2050. Like, if we can come back to this particular podcast, or this presentation, or anything I’ve ever said, about digital literacy over my time with WordPress. And if we could come back to that in 2050, or, you know, I was going to say, 20 years from now, 2041 feels really close. But, you know, come back to it in the future, and say, that was all really excellent information to know at the moment. And we did do those things. And now, WordPress has proven that open source contribution and collaboration can teach all of the necessary 21st-century skills that anyone would need to survive in the world. And we did do it, that would be really cool. But I don’t think that that’s where we’re headed. Not because I don’t think people believe in what I’m saying or care about what I’m saying. But because it’s very easy to kind of let these things go at some point.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  27:20

Even if you at some point, were proficient in all of what is considered 21st-century skills, sometimes our skills don’t get used very much. And so we lose track of them. And we don’t know, or we don’t know how to teach them to other people and various ways to do that. So I hope that when we revisit this in the time capsule of the internet 20 years from now, we can say that was a great explanation. And we learned so much. And we made so many changes in such progress that now we need a new version of this. That’s really all we can do, always striving to leave the world in a better position than when we found it.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  28:07

All right, that brings us to our small list of big things. I don’t have a ton to share with you today. But what I do have to share with you is a really big deal. So we are about a week away from the Go/No-Go point of WordPress 5.9. That is the final release of the year. And as soon as we know what is a go or a no go from that meeting on October 12th,  everyone is going just to hit the ground running. And so, if you are interested in contributing to that release, either by being a participant in the release squad or leading some part of the release squad. Absolutely. Drop by and let me know because I am interested to know who wants to learn more about doing that. And this is actually something that has gone by. I mentioned at the top that I spoke at WordCamp US.  That is still true; I did do it. And so did a bunch of other really excellent presenters. If you missed WordCamp US on Friday, for whatever reason, because you know, life is complicated. Pretty soon, we will have the videos. We’ll have all the videos up with captions quickly and have those available for everyone to watch and learn more from as their schedule allows and as their attention allows. And that is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphos, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Howdy!

Did you get to watch the fantastic presentations about the block-editor at WordCamp US? No? I am sure they will be posted on WordPress TV in no time. I’ll keep and eye out. The best presentations from my perspective?

• Helen Hou-Sandi talked about the adventure building WhiteHouse.gov site within 6 weeks. Her look behind the scenes and the thoughts behind the front page header block build, was a great case study, why to use blocks and not ACF. (Recording on YouTube)
• Kjell Reigstad showed some wonderful creative examples how you could use Block Styles for some funky and new way to display blocks. Most with no JavaScript, all in CSS. (Recording on YouTube)
• Rich Tabor did a phenomenal job diving into the seven realms of Full-Site Editing and Theme building, with an exponentially spruced up slide deck and a very soothing voice. We were all more relaxed about the huge changes to come. (Recording on YouTube)

That was only one day, yesterday, but more things happened in Gutenberg land. What have you been working on? I want to know. Hit reply and tell me:-)

We have some great posts and videos for you. Did I miss one or two? Let me know that too.

I’m excited to see you next week at our Live Q & A on theme building.

If you are not a theme builder, maybe you are interested in our upcoming Live Q & A on block building with members of the BuddyPress team.

Be well, 💕

Birgit

PS: Huge Thank you to Rob Cairns for a conversation among friends about my start at Automattic, the beginning of the Gutenberg Times and catch-up on Full Site Editing. Listen to Episode #154 of The SDM Show by Stunning Digital Marketing.

PPS: Monday, 10/4 at 9am EDT / 2pm UK Time, I’ll join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette and Rob Cairns on the WPBuilds‘ This Week in WordPress Show. It will be live streamed on YouTube.

PPS: Don’t miss the fantastic Page Builder Summit! Oct 18 – 22, 2021 – Schedule below.

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Gutenberg Development and Team updates

Gutenberg 11.6 was released. Now you can lock certain blocks, edit the site logo image file within the Site Logo block (yay!) and child themes have now basic support for full-site editing and Global Styles. Nik Tsekouras has the details for you in his release post: What’s new in Gutenberg 11.6 (29 September).

• Justin Tadlock gave the new version a spin for his article Gutenberg 11.6 Improves the Global Styles UI, Adds Child Theme Support.
• Sarah Gooding expanded on the New API for Locking Blocks.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.

Kelly Hoffman posted about the upcoming improvements to the Gallery block. The silent video loops through many variations of how you can now configure the images in the gallery block. The total revamped Gallery Block is built from individual image blocks, that bring their features into the gallery: you can style each image differently, link each single image to a different URL, apply different duotone filters per image and crop images to fit into a pattern and more.

You can enable this Gallery block from the Gutenberg plugin’s Experiments page. If you want to see what happens when your existing gallery change into the new Gallery Block, you click on “Update” button of the the Block’s Toolbar (new in 11.6).

The refactored Gallery block is slated to come to WordPress with the 5.9 release. If you are a plugin or theme developer, Glen Davies published a Dev Note last month.

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Maggie Cabrera publish the 67th Gutenberg + Themes Round-up post from the Themes team with a list of ongoing discussions on Full-Site Editing, Global Styles, and Design Tools. Just as examples:

• A discussion on Implicit Text, Hover, Focus Colors as Part of Color Palette, or
• Whether to allow targeting settings that are specific to the block in theme.json file.
• You can also follow along the progress of the Global Style Interface via this overview issues.

There are quite a few more aspects listed, and they all could use your thoughts and ideas. It’s the place to be part of the discussion and influence development and designs.

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Shaun Andrews posted the recording and summary of the Design team’s Show & Tell meeting. The meeting is mostly meant to catch up all design contributors on various stages of their work.

In this meeting

• Tammie Lister talked about Block Support and how it is handled for individual blocks, in theme.json and block.json
• Javier Arce shared his designs for editing background in an image block images, and
• Channing Ritter discussed her exploration around Theme switching in the Site Editor.

Full Site Editing and Themes

There are now many conversations about Full-Site Editing and how can site builders, agencies, designers and freelancers get a handle on the various pieces, that make up Full-Site Editing. Anne McCarthy published a longer post on Sharing Approaches for Adoption of Full-Site Editing in the WordPress ecosystem. She suggested a gradual adoption with increasing levels of complexity and maturity”. Quite an interesting read.

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Andres Noren published and introduction to his new block-based Theme “Tove” in which he lets you look behind the scenes. I found remarkable the comparison of this new theme with his latest classic theme:

“Tove contains a theme.json file that specifies supported settings and styles, HTML template files and template parts used by the Site Editor, a couple of stylesheets, placeholder image assets, a folder with block patterns, and a functions.php file to enqueue assets and register block patterns and styles. That’s Tove. Not a single line of JavaScript, and other than the functions.php file and a empty index.php file, no PHP either.

Compare that to Eksell, my latest (and probably last?) free classic theme. Eksell has 1 700 lines of PHP in its functions.php and template-tags.php files, five PHP classes in five files, and over 1 000 lines of JavaScript (not counting the CSS variables ponyfill). “

You will get an opportunity to connect with Anders Noren on Thursday together with Ellen Bauer and Carolina Nymark when we discuss going from classic themes to Block-based Themes on our Live Q & A. Get your seat now!

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WPBlockPatterns.com is a site where you can compare, how the Patterns available in the WordPress.org directory perform with each Full Site Editing theme. On the first page of the site, you see the list of the block patterns from the directory. Once you click on the name of the pattern a new window opens, and you can then select the theme from a drop-down box on the top right.

Andrew Starr, owner of UX Themes and author of the Hansen theme, created the site and Justin Tadlock connected with him for more details: Preview WordPress Block Pattern and Theme Combinations via New Site.

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Tammie Lister started a new project: A Block Pattern a Day. On her new site, Patternspiration, she will publish a new pattern every day to explore all the possibilities with Block Patterns, and to get an idea on what tooling would be needed around it. Definitely a place to watch.

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Anne McCarthy published the 10th call for testing out of the Full-site editing outreach program and calls you to join the Pattern Party, too! You are invited to test all the Theme Blocks, some already in WordPress 5.8 and some to come in WordPress 5.9 and create patterns with them. “This test is focused on pushing these lovely Theme Blocks to their limits to better determine what to prioritize and what features might remain to be documented. “ McCarthy wrote.

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Developing for the new wave of WordPress experience On Tuesday, Oct 5 at 01:30 PM CST, join Post Status CEO, Cory Miller, as he interviews Rich Tabor, Head of Product at Extendify, about the future of publishing with WordPress. Definitely a show worth watching!

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WordPress Meetup London met this week, and during their 2nd hour they held a Roundtable on Full-Site Editing hosted by Dan Maby guest Paul Lacey, Diane Wallace and Anne McCarthy.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

Using Gutenberg as Content Creator

Istiak Rayhan shared with you the 10 Interesting Gutenberg Features You May Not Know About. Rayhan pointed out most of my favorite features of the Block editor. He is also one of the authors of the Ultimate Blocks plugins, so it’s not a surprise to see it listed.

Instead of the Document information page, I would pick the List View next to it as the more useful tool for your workflow. You can identify blocks from their nested view and drag and drop them at a different spot of your post.

Rayhan followed up with a Beginner’s Guide for Gutenberg. I bookmarked his post to share it with others looking to get started with the block-editor.

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Page Builder Summit

Page Builder Summit is coming back and will be happening October 18 – 22, 2021. Nathan Wrigley and Anchen Le Roux just published the schedule

Here is the list of Gutenberg / Block-editor presentations

• Forging the Future with Full Site Editing with Anne McCarthy (10/18 – 9am EDT)
• The Future of Building WordPress Websites with Brian Gardner (10/18 – 12pm EDT)
• What does Full Site Editing Mean for Page Builders? with Joe Casabona (10/19/ 9am EDT)
• Customizing WordPress Block Editor for Client Projects with Birgit Pauli-Haack (10/19/ – 10 am EDT)
• Mastering modern WordPress with Full-site Editing & Custom Blocks with Rob Stinson (10/20/ – 5am EDT)
• How to Build Any Page Layout Using Kadence Blocks with Jake Pfohl (10/20/ – 12pm EDT)
• Building a Custom Blog Archive with Blocks with Mike Oliver (10/21/ 11am EDT)
• RIP Page Builders with Chris Lubkert (10/19 – 1pm EDT)

The schedule is not out yet. Sign-up for the waitlist to receive notifications.

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Featured image: “Fire wood” by rossbelmont is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Launched by Ralph Morris and Steve Burge in June this year, Logtivity is a plugin and service that allows site owners to track everything that happens on their WordPress installs. The duo has made continual updates to the plugin since. In the past couple of months, they have added deep integration with Easy Digital Downloads. They are also planning to build around more eCommerce-related plugins.

Burge mentioned that using the Logtivity service allows site owners to track and log activity at scale. While small sites could get by with an on-site solution, it can be harder to do while growing. “This offers a strong alternative to using a plugin because you don’t need to store huge amounts of data on your own server,” he said.

The service provides graphs so that end-users can visualize their data, but they can also dive directly into the logs and look at specific actions. Users can also set up unlimited alert notifications through email or Slack and download reports as CSV files.

Site dashboard showing different chart types.

The Logitivity WordPress plugin is free to download and install, but it merely serves as a bridge to the commercial service. The pricing page has three tiers that start at $9.50/month and run to $49.50. The rates primarily differ on the number of logs generated, user access, and length of data retention. However, each tier can be used on an unlimited number of sites.

I have been running the service on WP Tavern for a couple of weeks. There are not many things I would want to track specific to this site other than posts published and commenting numbers. The short-term data has not told me much that I did not know already. However, I could see how these logs could come in handy over months or years. If we were running an eCommerce website, the information could be invaluable.

Viewing a specific set of logs based on an action.

Users can create reports of specific logs and display them as either bar or line charts. These can be generated based on an action, such as “Post Published” or “Comment Created.” Users can also add a specific context, such as a post ID. For example, a user could display a chart for each product file download through the plugin’s deep integration with Easy Digital Downloads.

This is the type of thing that the team has in mind at the moment. The primary use case since launch has been logging eCommerce activity.

“People who run eCommerce sites need to track registrations, subscription changes, file downloads, license key activations, login activity, and more,” said Burge. “eCommerce site owners need this for customer support and also to deal with refund requests and chargebacks.”

Currently, each of the service’s features is handled via the Logtivity site. The team has plans to bring them into the WordPress admin interface. However, it could be late 2021 or early 2022 before the integration happens.

“We’d love to bring Logtivity data directly into WordPress,” said Burge. “And because there’s no need to worry about Logtivity slowing down your site, we have some interesting ideas for how and where user activity can be displayed in the WordPress admin area.”

How It Started and Where It Is Going

Burge serves as the marketing brains behind the project. His primary WordPress-related business is PublishPress, but his customers had asked for a project like Logitivity for several years.

“Ralph Morris started Logtivity for a customer at the web dev agency he works at,” said Burge. “The customer’s site has around 100,000 users and gets a great deal of activity every day, from new registrations and subscriptions to resources being downloaded and cancellations. They were using a WordPress plugin to track customer activity, but as the number of logs grew, this process took longer and longer and became more clunky to perform. The final straw was when they were unable to perform the CSV exports, as it would keep timing out. Ralph scratched the itch and built a little MVP. After a few weeks, he showed it to his colleagues and got permission from his boss to offer it to the client to be the first user, and a little while later, the first paying customer.”

He said the two connected thanks to Iain Poulson, who recently co-launched the acquisitions marketplace FlipWP.

“Ralph lives really close to where I grew up in Hampshire, England,” said Burge. “We got our heads together and decided on a partnership: Ralph as the developer and myself as the marketer.”

Outside of integrating more directly with the WordPress admin, the Logtivity team has a roadmap that will keep them busy for a while. Topping that list are more integrations with third-party plugins.

“Our primary use-case is eCommerce sites, so WooCommerce is central to our plans,” said Burge. “But we also plan deeper integrations with more plugins that WordPress eCommerce sites use, including LearnDash, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, and more.”

Several players in the space are moving toward broad integrations across the ecosystem. Chris Lema talked about it being a vital strategy for business growth with StellarWP’s recent acquisition of LearnDash.

Burge also noted that his team plans to continue improving the service’s alert system. “In future versions of Logtivity, you’ll be able to send more flexible alerts to more channels. We also plan to provide SMS alerts for your most important notifications.”

Version 4.2.1 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update contains a fix for a bug in version 4.2 that could cause AMP validation errors on some sites, depending on the template they were using.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Gutenberg 11.6 was released this week with a new API for managing lock control at the block-type level. When defining a block, developers can now use the lock attribute to designate whether a block can be moved or removed. The PR introduces parts of the locking support mechanisms proposed by Matias Ventura in a separate issue earlier this year.

Ventura explained that while the editor already has template locking support to prevent inserting or moving blocks (i.e. for custom post type templates), it doesn’t yet offer much granular control or a UI for the different locking states. He identified block themes as an important use case for establishing a new block-level API for representing lock status. Block themes may necessitate the ability to lock down key elements, such as preventing the removal of the post-content for a single post template. If you have ever played around with the template editor then you have likely discovered how easy it is to remove important elements by accident.

“Another use case that we’re building for is having a Checkout Block with different blocks that act as fundamental steps,” WooCommerce and Gutenberg engineer Seghir Nadir said. “We don’t want people to delete or move those steps since they’re fundamental and their order is also important, but we want to allow people to select them, access settings, and insert blocks in between them.”

During this week’s core editor chat, Paal Joachim Romdahl highlighted the need for a locking mechanism for Reusable blocks.

“At the moment it is too easy to make an accidental change to a Reusable block,” Romdahl said. “I worry that only having the hover overlay and the initial click [to] select the parent Reusable block is just not good enough, that we soon should get a lock mechanism in place. There is a lot of feedback from users who have accidentally deleted the inner contents of the blocks and wondered what happened.”

Romdahl has created several issues about to the possibility of adding a locking mechanism to the inline toolbar for reusable blocks, where users would need to unlock to edit the contents.

Now that the foundational infrastructure is in place for managing lock control at the block-type level, contributors can begin building a UI to control it, as outlined in the Locking and TemplateLocking issue. Ventura said future iterations should include a UI that indicates which blocks are user-editable and also display block status in the list view and block inspector.

Gutenberg 11.6 landed yesterday. Contributors added dozens of enhancements and bug fixes. Admittedly, there was not a whole lot that excited me as a user about this release.

Typography options for the Post Title block. Nice.

Cropping for the Site Logo. A necessary addition.

Toolbar button for converting old Gallery blocks to the new — still experimental — format. Sweet.

For the most part, the release felt like a slew of routine enhancements that have been in the pipeline for those of us closely following the plugin’s development. Almost boring. And that is not a bad thing at all. Less excitement and smaller doses of iterative improvements can be healthy for the project and its developers. We do not always need to feel like we are chasing the next big thing. This is a well-rounded release that polishes many areas, from navigation to widgets to general block enhancements.

There were two features that I am happy to see movement on. That is the site editor’s Global Styles system and child theme support.

Global Styles Updates

Default site editor look with Global Styles panel open.

Global Styles is the system that will truly connect end-users to theme developers and vice versa for the first time in WordPress history. We have made some attempts at this, such as the customizer. However, this feature will handle it on top of the standardized block system.

Essentially, themes will talk to WordPress through their theme.json files, and users will speak the same language through the Global Styles panel.

For example, imagine a theme author sets up the default text color as black and the background as white. This will appear on the front end of the site but also be reflected in the site editor. The Global Styles interface allows users to change those two colors to something they prefer. They can also see of a preview of their color and typography styles in the box at the top of the panel.

Updating colors, preview shown in editor and at top of panel.

And, it does not stop at a couple of simple colors. Users can modify all sorts of design aspects like typography and spacing at the root and block levels.

Gutenberg 11.6 adds a navigation component to the Global Styles sidebar. Overall, it feels much smoother working through the top and sub-levels while editing my theme’s styles.

Updating the global padding for the Code block.

This is sort of a small but vital step toward overhauling the overall Global Styles interface. There is still much work to be done, but I am eager to see where the Gutenberg contributors take this component in the coming weeks and months.

I did run into one snag. Clicking on the Typography tab at the root level produces an error. However, it works at the block level.

Contributors also updated the old “Aa” icon representing the Global Styles panel with a half-dark-half-light circle button. My immediate reaction was that it was for switching between light and dark modes.

This was a sentiment shared by a user (from a now-deleted account) in the GitHub ticket.

Global Styles is not a new system disconnected from styles and themes, indeed is an improvement to the current themes system. If we were to consider the strength of WordPress’ past and present, we would perceive that on the dashboard, indeed a brush icon has been developed for years in people’s memory as an association with appearance, themes, styles, personalization. Therefore, the icon that would be most comprehensible in people’s memory regarding the new Customizer remains a brush. I say new and better Customizer, because this is how common people manifest what they understand about Global Styles. Departing from a pencil brush to yin-yang, moon, or water drop, I have not tested yet with public, but from past experience I assure you people are going to find this new icon unrelated and confusing.

Block Child Theme Support

As one of the pioneers of child theming in WordPress, using them long before they were officially supported, this is something near and dear to my heart. I created my first theme shop on this foundation. I have loads of ideas about how the block paradigm can reshape the theme space, and child themes are at the center of many of them.

However, all of the components of Full Site Editing have not entirely supported child themes until now. There are still a few pieces left to fit into the puzzle, but the system should work, mostly.

Templates, template parts, and theme.json files from a child theme should now completely overrule those from the parent. These changes work on both the front end and in the site editor.

Some open questions are being worked through in a related GitHub ticket. The most crucial development is still to come, which will handle merging values between the parent and child theme.json files. For example, it makes sense that child themes should be able to overwrite colors and typography while skipping definitions for layout-related values, falling back to the parent.

Once that is in place, designers will have an easy-yet-powerful way to realize the original vision behind CSS Zen Garden, a project that at least partially inspired child theming’s adoption by WordPress.

Version 4.2 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available. It contains the following changes:

• Improved compatibility with the most popular contact form plugins, which should lead to improved accuracy.
• Added links to additional information on API usage notifications.
• Reduced the number of network requests required on a comment page when running Akismet.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Howdy, friend!

Today’s weekend edition is a double-feature, so to speak. I’ll skip next week because of traveling overseas. First trip in 20 months. I am so excited and also busy to get ready. I will be back into your inbox on August 7th, 2021.

This week was an exciting week for the WordPress open-source project and its many hundreds of contributors. One release after another! Just wow! Let’s dive right in.

Stay well and keep safe!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

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WordPress open-source project Releases in July 2021

WordPress 5.8

Five hundred thirty awesome contributors worked on WordPress 5.8 and the release team let it loose on Tuesday as Tatum, after Art Tatum, a renown American jazz pianist.

Need to catch up on all the features in this new version?

• Milana Cap assembled all the Developer Notes into the WordPress 5.8 Field Guide
• Carlo Daniele published a comprehensive run down on Kinsta,
• Courtney Robertson on GoDaddy wrote about what the release means for your clients’ sites.

BuddyPress 9.0

In time for the block-based widget editor, the BuddyPress team released their block widgets in their 9.0 version this week. The new BP Widget Blocks are Legacy Widgets, rebuilt as BP Blocks. You can also access them in the Block Editor for use in your posts or pages!

• Sarah Gooding has the background on the planning of this update.
• Gooding also wrote BuddyPress 9.0.0 Transforms Legacy Widgets Into Blocks

WordPress Pattern Directory

The Meta Team has been collaborating with the Design team and designers in the community on the first version of the WordPress Pattern Directory. They released it officially on Tuesday night. Justin Tadlock has the skinny.

I found a few to add to my favorites. What are your favorite block patterns? These initial 80+ patterns are also a great inspiration for theme builders who look to include themes styled patterns in their themes.

If you are interested in creating block patterns from scratch, browse through this list of resources around block patterns.

Gutenberg Plugin Version 11.1

The Gutenberg Team released another version of the Gutenberg plugin, version 11.1.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I discussed its many of the changes on 48th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog

Justin Tadlock wrote: Gutenberg 11.1 Adds Drag-and-Drop Support for List View and Upgrades Block Borders

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

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Theme building for Full-Site Editing

Tammie Lister shares here theme design journey on the site Ephemeral Themes. This week, she posted “Tips for creating a theme in the site editor” and explained the importance of testing early and often. Well worth your time!

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

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Kjell Reigstad has the weekly round-up of issues, updates and discussions around Gutenberg and Themes for you. In this post Reigstad covered the most recent PR on FSE Blocks, General theme building and Global Styles. The list of overview issues is a great start if you need to catch up on the overall concepts and ideas.

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Carolina Nymark, team rep on the Theme Review Team, ask for your comments on the newly proposed Theme requirements for inclusion into the Theme directory on WordPress.org. You can also read them in more details on GitHub issue #12 on the Theme Requirements repository of the Theme Review team.

Deadline for the first round of comments is July 26th, 2021.

On July 28th, 2pm CET. The team will conduct a Zoom interview with theme authors about the requirements. Spots are already full. Hopefully, the interviews will be recorded to educate more than a few theme developers about the requirements.

Justin Tadlock provides background and more context as to the initiative via his post Next Phase of the WordPress Theme Review Overhaul.

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Rich Tabor published The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Block Templates in Gutenberg and provides a comprehensive tutorial on how block-based theme template fit into WordPress template hierarchy and how they help WordPress users controls their site. Tabor also provided details instructions on how to build block-based templates and leverage them in your theme.

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In his post Universal Themes: Customization on ThemeShaper, Ben Dwyer explored about how to make Global Styles and the Customizer work together. Dwyer looks at how to use classic WordPress tools (in this case the Customizer) to customize a block theme, while saving these changes in Global Styles – making a universal theme!

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Developing Blocks and Plugins for the block editor

Last month, Dmitry Mayorov, Senior Front-End Engineer at 10up, published a crash-course in WordPress Block Filters. Mayorov shows you how to extend core blocks with filters. He also helps you with the decision between extending a core or build a custom block instead.

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Michael LaRoy wrote a tutorial on creating blocks with Advanced Custom Fields. He wrote: “By providing a PHP solution to block creation, a developer already familiar with ACF can efficiently create new custom blocks without writing any JavaScript.”

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Bill Erickson has a tutorial on how to use Inner Blocks with ACF Blocks, to expand on the usefulness of the plugin for more complex layouts.

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Alex Standiford explained in his post “How Gutenberg Blocks Work the basic concepts of how the block-editor stores content, why HTML comments and how is it rendered.

Business Case for Gutenberg

Artur Grabowski, co-founder of Extendify, a Gutenberg first product start-up, was Joe Howard‘s guest on episode 153 of WPMRR Podcast: Going Big by Solving WordPress’ Biggest Roadblock. Grabowski, like many other business development people in the WordPress space, regards the missing new user onboarding experience as the biggest roadblock for even bigger growth of the WordPress ecosystem. Howard and Grabowski had an honest and nuanced conversation about the business case for Gutenberg First approach to WordPress products.

Grabowski took a historic view to the ongoing debate about Gutenberg being the right path for WordPress. Back in 2016, while working with Adobe and its product Spark, Grabowski became aware of many innovative web building tools. They were all block-based. It is only a fairly new concept for WordPress. “There is a lot less unknown here about the end state than some people realize.” If you are interested in the WordPress product space, I recommend you follow the link and dive into the details of things.

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Artur Grabowski

Incidentally, Cory Miller, Post Status partner and Jeff Meziere talked to Chris Lubkert, also co-founder of Extendify, on their Webinar for the Business Value Academy. Webinar: Mergers & Acquisitions with Chris Lubkert

Before co-founding Extendify, Chris Lubkert and Artur Grabowski worked in the Merger & Aquisitions department of Automattic. Tammie Lister also joined Extendify as their head of design. Extendify is the new home for a series of block-editor plugins and tools: Editor Plus, Redux Framework, Editors Kit, Gutenberg Hub, Gutenberg Forms, ACF Blocks, and Block Slider to name a few.

Episode #48 is now available with transcript.
Next recording August 6th, 2021

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A few people ask about WordPress Themes that are already working with the Full-Site Editing system and the new Site Editor. Here is a List as of July 2021.

The Themes are all built while Full-Site Editing is under active development and many features are experimental. Do not use in production or live site. Expect the themes to be wonky at times, until developers have a chance to update the themes for new Gutenberg plugin version. In short: There will be Dragons! 🐉

Oh, yes. You also need to install the Gutenberg plugin.

For the lastest updates pre-release, use the Gutenberg Nightly

Themes for Full-Site Editing in the WordPress repository

I only used TT1 Blocks Theme for FSE-Testing. I rely mostly on Justin Tadlock or others to provide more insights on the various themes. The articles are linked with the theme header.

Armando by Carolyn Newmark

Armando WordPress Theme Provides Insight Into the Current State of Full Site Editing

Block Base by Automattic

Using Blockbase for a theme experiment (ThemeShaper) by Kjell Reigstad

The Automattic Theme Team Announces Blockbase, Its New Block Parent Theme (WordPress Tavern) by Justin Tadlock

Blockbase: A parent theme for block themes (ThemeShaper) by Ben Dwyer

Child themes of Block Base

Mayland Blocks by Automattic

Seedlet Blocks by Automattic

Automattic Launches Mayland Blocks, Its Second FSE Theme on WordPress.org

Block-Based Bosco by Fränk Klein

What I Learned Building a Full-Site Editing Theme

Implementing Global Styles in Block-Based Bosco

Block-Based Bosco, Second Full-Site Editing Theme Lands in the WordPress Directory

Clove by Anariel Design

Clove: A Showcase of Block Patterns by Anariel Design (WPTavern)

Hansen by Uxl Themes

Build a Full WordPress Site via Block Patterns With the Hansen Theme

Naledi by Anariel Design

Anariel Design Launches Naledi, a Block-Based WordPress Theme (WordPress Tavern)

Q by Ari Stathopoulos

Exploring Full-Site Editing With the Q WordPress Theme

Rick by WPEntire

TT1 Blocks by WordPress contributors

This is the FSE sibling of the Twenty-Twenty-One Theme

If you find any theme missing in this list, let me know.

WordPress Themes team resources

The themes team share their experiments on GitHub. Some listed themes made it as stand-alone theme into the repository listed above.

Contributors also included a script to generate a theme with the minimum necessary to build your own block theme: php new-empty-theme.php.

Every other week, the themes team meets discussion Block-based themes: 2nd and 4th Tuesday at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT) wp-slack channel #themereview

Every week, the Themes team published a roundup post about newly merged changes, and what is discussed on the GitHub repo for Gutenberg. The post also has a few overview issues so you can always catch up on what is in the works. Follow the #gutenberg-themes-roundup tag on the make-blog/themes

Anne McCarthy, developer relations and program manage for the FSE outreach published a post on ThemeShaper with more Resources for block theme development

DevNotes for WordPress 5.8

• Introducing theme.json in WordPress 5.8
• On layout and content width in WordPress 5.8
• Introducing the template editor in WordPress 5.8
• Block-styles loading enhancements in WordPress 5.8
• Blocks in an iframed (template) editor
• Bundled themes changes in WordPress 5.8

Developer Documentation

• Block Theme Overview
• Create a Block Theme
• Global Settings (theme.json)
• Theme Support

Courses and Tutorials

• Caroline Nymark: Full-site editing For Developers
• Fränk Klein: Building Block-Based Themes
• Tammie Lister: Creating a Theme
• Rich Tabor: The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Block Templates in Gutenberg

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Updated 7/21 to add Rich Tabor’s article on Block Templates

Howdy, my friends!

WordPress 5.8 will be release next week. Are you ready? Well, if you didn’t get any chance to test things, you should still be alright. If you know your customers will be fiddling with their site’s widget section, do yourself a favor and install the Classic Widget plugin, so there are no surprises.

For last-minute testing, use the Release Candidate number 4. The final release is scheduled for Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The Field Guide covers all changes.

Wishing you all the best for the upgrade! Holler if you need any help!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Gutenberg and the Future of WordPress

In this week’s Jukebox episode, host Nathan Wrigley discussed with Robert Jacobi the Future of WordPress in the era of Gutenberg. Jacobi explained why he is persuing a Gutenberg first approach. You can listen on WordPress Tavern or your favorite podcast app.

From the section “Neither Gutenberg nor WordPress News”: I am excited about the acquisition of Pocket Casts by Automattic. I tested many other podcast apps, but Pocket Casts has been my favorite for many, many years.

Nathan da Silva, founder of Silva Web Designs, wrote about the Future of Page Builders and concludes, there are still pieces missing before Gutenberg makes 3rd Party page builders obsolete. Da Silva mentions, Full-Site Editing is not there yet and there are not as many add-on available as Elementor or Beaver Builder provide for their site builders workflow.

Episode #47 is now available with transcript.
Next recording July 23, 2021

Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast
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Block-editor for Content Creators

On July 29th, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. UTC. WordPress VIP will hold a webinar with the title Gutenberg Full-Site Editing: Unlocking Agility for Enterprise WordPress. James Proctor will share lessons from the cutting edge of implementation. “By taking Gutenberg blocks beyond the post editor, these new features allow content creators unprecedented agility and control over the entire site experience. “ Any site owner and agency will be able to take advantage of the knowledge shared at scale.

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Deborah Edwards-Onoro posted a great tutorial on how to Manage your Block Editor preferences and increase productivity and comfort.

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WordPress 5.8 brings Duotone Filters to images of the block editor. Justin Tadlock takes you on a tour of this fabulous new feature: Duotone Filters: WordPress 5.8 Puts a Powerful Image-Editing Tool Into Users’ Hands‘.

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Developing Plugins for the Block Editor

After the Primer last week, Rich Tabor posted How to Build & Publish Gutenberg Block Plugins to the WordPress Block Directory. Tabor guides you through the process from create block scaffolding and running the block plugin checker to uploading your block to WordPress repository and get it approved for the Block Directory.

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Marcus Kazmierczak wrote a series of posts on how to Conditionally Load Block Assets when building block plugins. There are quite a few different ways to skin that proverbial cat. Start at the latest post, explaining the new WordPress 5.8 way to handle this. Kazmierczak also provides a video walk through.

This helped me to understand the feature Ari Stathopoulos worked on and described in his Dev Note: Block-styles loading enhancements in WordPress 5.8

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Riad Benguella has a few more Miscellaneous block editor API additions in WordPress 5.8 – it covers:

• Contextual patterns for easier creation and block transformations
• Pattern Registration API
• BlockControls group prop

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

Gutenberg and Themes

Jason Crist published this week’s Gutenberg + Themes roundup. Two issues caught my eye:

• Should it be possible to overwrite properties via PHP or should the properties in the theme.json come after PHP properties are set. What do you think?
• Is there a case for dynamic template parts? Discuss!

There is of course, much more going on. Another great round-up post from the Theme Team!

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Anne McCarthy shared Resources for block theme development on ThemeShaper. She wrote: “Whether you’re just starting out or already deep in the block theme world, the following resources should help you be aware of what’s to come and how to get involved in shaping the future.”

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Tammie Lister published here process on how to create a theme and what she encountered. She wrote: “I am still like many discovering how I create themes using site editing, but I wanted to share my current process and some observations I’ve made along the way. “

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Nick Diego collected three small fixes to his theme to change the breakpoint for the column block to become responsive, how to change the order of the mobile columns and how to disable responsive columns completely. For the latter, Diego uses a solution by Andy Serong, that is already merged to Gutenberg and will be released with the plugin version 11.2 on July 21st, 2021. Details in Disable Responsive Columns in Gutenberg and Other Tips

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Rob Stinson posted about WordPress 5.8 Widgets Changes and How they Impact the Genesis Framework. He wrote: “To help navigate this for the 100,000’s of sites that run on the Genesis Framework we have implemented an opt-in experience in version 3.3.4 for whenever anyone updates to WordPress 5.8.”

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

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Subscribe

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Howdy,

For a few days, we enjoyed non-humid weather in Florida as Hurricane Elsa sucked all the moisture out of the air and took it with it. Sorry, Northern friends.

For some fun summer reading, I can highly recommend the WordPress 5.8 DevNotes, all handily assembled into a massive Field Guide by Milana Cap.

After the publishing rush around the WordPress 5.8 release last week, this week is certainly a lot calmer. Although I know that behind the scenes, contributors are working hard on getting Block Editor End-User documentation ready, too. 🐝

Hopefully, you have been busy testing plugins and themes for compatibility with the new widget block-editor. July 20th is only 10 days away. WordPress 5.8 RC 2 is out and could use your eagle eyes to spot last-minute bugs and quirks.

What else has happened in the WordPress Gutenberg space last week? I have a few more links for you. As always, you don’t have to consume them all in one sitting, you can always come back during the week.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend and start into your next week!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Gutenberg Development

Gutenberg 11.0 was released and Dave Smith compiled the release notes for the team. This time in the release cycle of the next WordPress release, it’s all about bug fixing. Justin Tadlock highlights a few enhancements in his post. Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I recorded the 47th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog on Friday. Listen in and get a few more ideas of what’s in this Gutenberg 11.0 release. the audio should be available over the weekend.

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Matias Ventura updated scope for site editing projects to help the team and the community to track upcoming tasks around the main site editing projects. There are a few separate tracking issues for covering some general improvements and then some broader projects. It covers some general UI features that need to be iterated on, mentioned a Browse mode for the site editor, and lists Infrastructure, Patterns, Styling and the Navigation Block.

Gutenberg and Themes

Carolina Nymark summarized all the Theme features that will come to a WordPress instance near you with WordPress 5.8. It’s the Cliff Notes with actionable code snippets for opt-in and opt-out decisions.

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Daisy Olson posted a summary and the recording of this week’s Hallway Hangout Discussion the Theme.json.

The Theme.json Call for testing is still open until July 14, 2021. It has instructions for beginners, Intermediate and advanced WordPress theme developers. It’s a fabulous way to learn and share your feedback.

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Maggie Cabrera created an outstanding weekly round-up (#56) post with theme related recently merged PRs, what is discussed and again a great list of overview git hub issues that are waiting for your comments and ideas!

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A couple of weeks ago, we had Daisy Olsen, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong on a Live Q & A. First we have a short introduction demo on how to work with theme.json and a discussion on how this new way to organize the settings and styles for your theme change how themes work in WordPress. We also answered interesting questions from the audience. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it here with transcript and resources.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

Block Editor for Content creators

This is a first in the almost three-year history of the Block editor! 🙌 🎉
Thanks to the indefatigable Anne McCarthy, content creators can review End-user documentation for the new features before they are released.

• How to use the List View (former Block Navigator)
• The Query Loop Block
• Block-Based Widget Editor
• Template Editor

Now it’s all still a work in progress and there is still time until July 20th.

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Anne McCarthy‘s Block-based Widget Editor Demo is now available on WordPress TV. Check it out to seen what’s coming to WordPress 5.8.
Yep, as Grzegorz Ziolkowski said yesterday, Anne McCarthy is everywhere!

Query Loop Block

Even if you are not familiar with the developer term Query Loop, once you look at the examples you’ll instantly realize that this is about the layout of a list of posts you might want to include on your pages, templates or posts. You can change the layout for post title, featured image, excerpt and link. An early version of this was the Latest Post Block.

The design team also implemented a series of Block Patterns of a few nice variations to display a post list on templates, post and pages. It’s a fun feature, and it has taken quite a long time to build. The wait was definitely worth it.

It is mighty and could be the most powerful feature in 5.8 as Justin Tadlock headlined his post Query Loop: The Ins and Outs.

Allison Rivers over the Torque Magazine also published an article What is the Query Loop Block? with lots of great insights and examples. Rivers also has a list of plugins that implemented some advanced features the WordPress version is still missing with its first iteration.

Block Building and Plugins

Reading throught the release notes for Gutenberg 11, I found great gem posted by Riad Benguella. It’s a flow graphic that explains the relationship between the packages that make the post editor.

Partial view of Riad Benguella’s schema

I find this very helpful to keep in mind when to use which package at which stage or the user interactions.

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Rich Tabor, Senior Product Manager, WordPress Experience GoDaddy published A Primer on Gutenberg Block Plugins for the WordPress Block Directory in which he walks you through the process of submit your plugin to the WordPress Directory, as he went through when submitting his Markdown Comment block to the repository.

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In the same space, Ella van Durpe published a plugin for private note-taking in WordPress called Hypernotes. Justin Tadlock reviewed it for the WordPress Tavern. Van Durpe explain her comment to the article’s, that the plugin uses some experimental PWA capabilities she introduced to the Gutenberg plugin for WP-Admin.

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Alex Standiford, developer at Sandhills Development (makers of the EDD plugin) published a tutorial about API Fetch – The WordPress Library You Didn’t Know You Needed with code snippets and plenty of theory to with them, too.

Standiford also started the WPAcademy with the course WordPress Plugin Development Course, with 37 videos teaching you how to make a beer custom post type, customize the Gutenberg editor, create a new block, and create WP-CLI commands to make testing fast and easy.

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Justin Tadlock shared his experience in Taking the Leap: Building My First WordPress Block Plugin. He built a breadcrumbs block as a dynamic block that’s rendered server side.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

Upcoming WordPress Events

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita

• 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 20 UTC – FSE: What’s Coming to 5.8 & the Story of the Outreach Program w/ Anne McCarthy
• 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 21 UTC – How Theme Developers Should Approach Full Site Editing w/ Joe Casabona
• 3pm PT / 6pm ET / 22 UTC – Rapid Landing Page Creation With the WordPress Block Editor w/ Daisy Olsen

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress

• July 22 – 10 PM EDT / 2 UTC – Learn to Build Blocks with Advanced Custom Fields w/ Cameron Jones
• July 23 – 3:20 pm EDT / 19:20 UTC How to Create a Fast Loading Stylish Homepage with Blocks & CSS w/ Davinder Singh Kainth

August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”

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Howdy,

July is the month celebrating North American Independence (for white people) and the start of the French Revolution.

Happy 154th Birthday, Canada 🇨🇦 (July 1st).
Happy 245th Birthday, USA 🇺🇸 (July 4th)
Happy 232nd Bastille Day, France 🇫🇷 (July 14th)

There are many more countries celebrating Independence Day in July, though. Here is the list. Take a look! 🌐

July 20th, WordPress 5.8 will be released and there are a ton of block editor related dev notes for themes and plugin developers. Use this week’s RC 1 version to test your sites, plugins and themes!

Be well! Have a great weekend, wherever you are located!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

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WordPress 5.8 Dev Notes for Block editor features

This week was also the deadline to published Developer Notes around the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release.

Block-styles loading enhancements by Ari Stathopoulos – Ari has the details on how the two new features – Load styles only for rendered blocks and Inline small styles – work and how theme developers and block builders can tap into it.

Blocks in an iframed (template) editor by Ella van Durpe – The new Template editor is the first block editor loaded in an iframe and isolate it from the rest of the admin screen. Ella has the benefits for you as well as the details on how to adjust your blocks if you rely on document or window and provides code fixes for your ReactJS blocks. There is more. Definitely worth a read if you are deep in plugin development. Ella’s post compliments Grzegorz Ziolkowski’s post: Block Editor API Changes to Support Multiple Admin Screens

On layout and content width by Riad Benguella – This is a shorter post, introducing the Settings for layout and content width and how you can adjust your theme to take advantage of them.

Block-based Widgets Editor by Robert Anderson. He wrote: “WordPress 5.8 introduces a new block-based widgets editor to the Widgets screen (Appearance → Widgets) and Customizer (Appearance → Customize → Widgets).” and continues to explain the three methods (including the Classic Widget plugin) of opting out. You might find interesting to learn how the Legacy Widget block helps with the backward compatibility for existing widgets and widget areas.

Various Block Editor API removals by Riad Benguella has the details on the removal of EditorGlobalKeyboardShortcuts, hasUploadPermissions and their alternatives. Also, the block “Subheading” has been removed, too.

Timothy Jacobs‘ post lists all the REST API Changes necessary for the Widget Block Editor. He also shows how to adjust Legacy widgets, so they are seen and handled by it. Timothy illustrates the changes with extensive code snippets, that should help you get up to speed fast.

And if that isn’t enough already, Milana Cap lists Miscellaneous developer focused changes in her dev note. The team removed support for IE 11 from build and test tools and gives you more control and consistency for the document title. WordPress 5.8 also brings a consistent type for integer properties of WP_Post, WP_Term, WP_User and a bookmark object and better caching of post/page IDs for subsequent request. There are quite a few more goodies in this upcoming release. Take a look!

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

User-facing changes in WordPress 5.8

Timothy Jacobs gave a detailed preview of What’s coming to the Block editor in WordPress 5.8 to the members of the WordPress NYC meetup. You can see a demo of Duotone for image & cover, Single Column color and spacing settings, Table block updates, and reusable block changes. He spent a few more minutes on the new Widget Screen as well as the Post Template Editor and the new Query Block.

Courtney Robertson wrote in What WordPress 5.8 means for your clients’ websites “This release expands the role of the block editor to include nearly every area of WordPress. You’ll want to check out all the updates to discover what WordPress 5.8, Full Site Editing, and Block-Based Themes mean for your clients’ websites.”. The post is a fabulous comprehensive list of what is new in WordPress 5.8 with short videos and the relevant details.

Block-Based Widget in WP Admin and Customizer

You can also watch Anne McCarthy Exploring the Block Widgets Editor in WP Admin and Customizer on YouTube. She wrote in the description: “This video seeks to give an initial look at this feature and answer some top questions people might have. Shout out to Channing Ritter who put together the demo portion!”.

Eric Karkovack also did a deep dive into the block-based Widget Screen for you: The WordPress Widgets Screen Joins the Gutenberg Era and provides you with a great tutorial on how to use the new screens with screenshot and all.

Diving Into WordPress 5.8’s New Widgets Screen by Justin Tadlock. He is a fan of the new feature and glad it made it into the WordPress core for this upcoming release. While the WPAdmin Widget screen feels like a good block editor, he wrote about the block widgets in the Customizer: “Customizer support for block widgets is light years ahead of where it was just a few short months ago. However, it feels awkward at best. There is a deep feeling of not belonging. While it was a remarkable programming feat to make the two features work together, the user experiences are nearly a decade apart.”

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

Plugins for the Block Editor

This week, I found quite a few people sharing their experiences with block editor plugins.

Chris Lema compared in his post Content Visibility for Gutenberg three plugins that allow you to control the visibility of single blocks on your page or posts. We mentioned two of them here multiple times. Chris tested the pro version for his purposes:

Episode #46 is now available with transcript.
Next recording July 9th, 2021

Send questions, comments or news to [email protected]

Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast
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• Block Visibility by Nick Diego
• Conditional Blocks Pro by Morgan Hvidt
• Content Visibility by Rich Tape

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Rich Tabor released Markdown Comment Block in the WordPress plugin repository. He wrote in his description: “Having the ability to add, and keep, any relevant editing comments within my posts, without rendering them on the front-end, means that I am freed up to mentally jot any idea down without thinking about it. It is simply natural and convenient.” Justin Tadlock gave it a review in Add Editor-Only Notes via the Markdown Comment Block WordPress Plugin

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Thanks to Remkus De Vries’ new newsletter “Remkus Ramblings“, I learned about two more plugins for the block editor:

Highlight and Share by Ronald Huereca – “It’s a social sharing plugin that allows you to highlight text and and share among several social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more,” Remkus said. I wished I had this plugin when I ran a social media marketing agency….

The second one is Block Editor Colors by MotoPress – Remkus wrote: “(…)which allows you to edit default Gutenberg block editor colors or the ones registered in a theme, as well as add your colors!”

Remkus de Vries, Head of Partner & Customer Relationship at ServeBolt, started his newsletter last month, and he uses – you probably guessed it – my favorite newsletter plugin: Newsletter Glue. 👋 Waving at Lesley Sim

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I got quite excited when I learned about Automattic’s Sketch plugin, a plugin that allows its users to sketch within the editor and show it immediately on the front end. Based on perfect-hand library, it is the product of a collaboration between Matias Ventura, Pablo Honey and Oscar Lopez. It’s one of Automattic’s Block Experiments.

• Jamie Marsland of PootlePress created a video to share some thoughts on how you can use it creatively on your site and he also has a few suggestions for version 2 of the Sketch block.
• Justin Tadlock, also took it out for a spin and shared his experience on the WordPress Tavern.

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Building Blocks

Ben Gillbanks shows you how to get a list of all blocks in the editor of a post or page. He wrote: “It’s particularly handy for WordPress plugin developers, but will also be useful when setting properties in theme.json a new feature that is part of the upcoming Full Site Editing functionality of WordPress.”

Fabian Kägy‘s WordCamp Europe presentation Building great experiences in the new editor is now available on WordPress TV. He wrote in his session description “Starting out building blocks or experiences for the WordPress block editor can be a bit daunting. Where do I start? Custom blocks, block patterns or just styling core blocks. In this talk, I will walk through the different options and share the benefits and downsides of each while talking about overall good practices for building great editorial experiences.”

If you are looking for other talks, you might have missed, 23 WordCamp Europe 2021 talks are now available on WordPress TV

Upcoming WordPress Event

July 7th, 2021 -1pm EDT / 17:00 UTC
Hallway Hangout: FSE Testing call #8 theme.json with Daisy Olson

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita

• 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 20 UTC – FSE: What’s Coming to 5.8 & the Story of the Outreach Program w/ Anne McCarthy
• 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 21 UTC – How Theme Developers Should Approach Full Site Editing w/ Joe Casabona
• 3pm PT / 6pm ET / 22 UTC – Rapid Landing Page Creation With the WordPress Block Editor w/ Daisy Olsen

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress

• July 22 – 10 PM EDT / 2 UTC – Learn to Build Blocks with Advanced Custom Fields w/ Cameron Jones
• July 23 – 3:20 pm EDT / 19:20 UTC How to Create a Fast Loading Stylish Homepage with Blocks & CSS w/ Davinder Singh Kainth

August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”

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On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.

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Howdy,

We enjoy cooling off at the community pool after our lunch walks. It’s the simple things, right?

I learned so much in this week’s Live Q & A! You might too. Jeff prepared a insightful demo of the basics. Thank you to all those watching and asking great questions! It was a pleasure and honor to have Daisy Olson, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong on the show. The recording is available here. So are the links to the shared resources and the transcript.

What else happened this week in WordPress? Amazingly plenty. Get yourself your favorite beverage and start reading and watching.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Release week at WordPress

WordPress is such a fantastic open-source project. I admire the team and the people in it so much!

The public Slack channel of the release squad helped me understand more of the complexities behind making software that is used by many millions of people all over the world. If you ever get a chance to spend a few minutes scrolling through the discussions on slack, on trac or GitHub, do it. Meet the people, who bring the work of hundreds of contributors over the finish line. Meet the contributors.

WordPress 5.8 Beta 4 is out and ready for your testing. WordPress 5.8 RC 1 is scheduled for June 29th, 2021. That comes with a hard string freeze, and the Polyglot teams get into high gear with translations. It’s also the deadline for DevNotes of the more significant changes coming with this release.

Gutenberg 10.9 and 10.9.1 were released. Some bug fixes will be ported back to be included in the WordPress 5.8. Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I recorded the Gutenberg Changelog #46 yesterday, and it will be published on Monday. Our editor, Sandy, is on a well-deserved break over the weekend. Justin Tadlock took 10.9 for a spin at the WPTavern.

— Gutenberg Changelog #46 is now available — 6/27

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

Theme.json Resources

You can read an Introducing theme.json in WordPress 5.8 by Andre Maneiro on the Core Make blog.

You can read up on the details specifications in the Block Editor Handbook: Global Settings & Styles (theme.json).

Another fantastic way to get your feet wet is to heed the Call for Testing #8 out of the FSE outreach program. Anne McCarthy has some interesting tasks for you. Justin Tadlock has more for you on the WordPress Tavern

Tammie Lister started a new project “Ephemeral Themes” and shared her thoughts on theme.json and why she is excited again for theme development. Theme.json inspires

The Gutenberg team is in ongoing discussion about various topics. Two were raised during the Live Q & A. Both could use your opinion and ideas.

• Default Colors, Theme Colors, and Custom Colors
• Responsive Global Styles as a work in progress

A good way to get started and see the configuration in action is to study the themes available in the Theme Experiments repository on GitHub.

Full Site Editing

Another theme by Ana Segota, built for the Site editor will come to the WordPress directory. Justin Tadlock took it for a spin. Clove: A Showcase of Block Patterns by Anariel Design.

Anne McCarthy published FSE Program Polished Portfolios Summary with the updated feedback from a great group of participants.

On her personal blog, Anne McCarthy also published On Future Outreach Program Models in the WordPress Community. She shared some of her learn lessons on running the FSE outreach program and what needs to happen to make this a permanent contributor activity within WordPress.

Here is the Upcoming FSE Outreach Program Schedule

Ben Dwyer on ThemeShaper posted Some Ideas for Universal Themes. He wrote: “A universal theme would work in both editing modes.  A user should be able to build a site in classic mode and switch to FSE mode when the Site Editor is more mature or when they are ready to try all the extra tools that Full Site Editing will bring. Changes to a theme in classic mode should be reflected when I enable the Site Editor.” and goes into more details on how that could work. At Automattic, they experiment with the Quadrat theme.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

Block Patterns

About 80 Patterns have been published in the Pattern Directory on WordPress.org, Kjell Reigstad reported in his Update: Initial Patterns for the Patterns Directory over the last two weeks, Kjell, Mel Choyce and Beatriz Fialho were fielding community submissions and working with the designers. There are wonderful and useful patterns, you can use for your site.

The discussion about Block Patterns on the WordPress Tavern has readers ruminating about Theme Lock-In, Silos, and the Block System. In a Post Status discussion, Tammie Lister thought the opposite is true. “it’s going to be easier, not harder, to switch with the newer set up.” And then she continues: “Try swapping between themes now. It’s not a picnic. It’s often a sad rained on picnic with soggy sandwiches of sadness, even with the best hope.” 🌧️ I might steal that metaphor from Tammie 💕

Speaking of Block Patterns, the design team also brought Block Patterns to all WordPress Twenty themes, all the way back to Twenty-Ten. They will be released with WordPress 5.8. Milana Cap published about these Bundled themes changes in WordPress 5.8. They are a great inspiration for designer on what can be possible with Block Patterns now. Justin Tadlock at the WordPress Tavern also took the new patterns out for a spin.

In Theme patterns for the Site Editor Kjell Reigstad show off a new UI to handle the display of different patterns for a header. It is an expansion of the block pattern display for Query Loop for various Post list layouts. He also shared his code and a short tutorial. Kjell also used the Quadrat theme from the Automattic repository

Header Patterns in Quadrat Theme / Automattic

Block Development and Plugins

For block builders, the Core-editor team published two DevNotes this week.

Block API Enhancements in WordPress 5.8 by Grzegorz Ziolkowski, encouraging plugins developers to using the block.json metadata file. He lists under the benefits:

• code sharing between JavaScript and PHP and other languages,
• optimized enqueuing of assets on the frontend to support performance increases.
• Allows listing of the block on the Block Type REST API endpoint
• It’s a requirement for blocks to be included in the WordPress Plugin Directory

Block supports API updates for WordPress 5.8  by Daisy Olsen, which outlines and additional support options for color, duotone, fontSize, lineHeight, spacing options for blocks and themes.

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Featured Image: “File:Lego Color Bricks.jpg” by Alan Chia is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

On June 24th, we hosted Gutenberg Times Live Q & A on the topic “Theme.json for Theme Authors – Getting started with theme development for Full-site Editing” It was a great pleasure and privilege to have Daisy Olson, developer advocate at Automattic, Tammie Lister, design lead at Extendify and Jeff Ong, code wrangler at Automattic on the show.

Jeff Ong prepared a demo for us, and then attendees had some interesting questions our panelists answered. You can read the transcript below.

WordPress 5.8 will come with the infrastructure and foundation to control the block editor and theme settings via the configuration file theme.json. JSON is a universal data format that is readable to PHP and JavaScript alike.

Themes no longer have to pretend that they’re plugins.

Tammie Lister

Resources about theme.json and themes for Full-site editing

During the show, we mentioned a few places where you can dive in and learn more about theme.json.

You can read an Introducing theme.json in WordPress 5.8 by Andre Maneiro on the Core Make blog.

You can read up on the details specifications in the Block Editor Handbook: Global Settings & Styles (theme.json).

A good way to get started and see the configuration in action is to study the themes available in the Theme Experiments repository on GitHub.

Another fantastic way to get your feet wet is to heed the Call for Testing #8 out of the FSE outreach program. Anne McCarthy has some interesting tasks for you.

Tammie Lister started a new blog and shared her thoughts on theme.json and why she is excited again for theme development. Theme.json inspires

The Gutenberg team is in ongoing discussion about various topics. Two were raised during the Live Q & A. Both could use your opinion and ideas.

• Default Colors, Theme Colors, and Custom Colors
• Responsive Global Styles as a work in progress

Themes for Full-site Editing in the WordPress.org repository

• Block Base by Automattic
• Naledi by Anariel Design
• TT1 Blocks by WordPress contributors, the FSE sibling of the Twenty-Twenty-One Theme
• Block-Based Bosco by Fränk Klein
• Armando by Carolyn Newmark
• Q by Ari Stathopoulos
• Hansen by Uxl Themes

Transcript

This transcript is still a work in progress – Birgit

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, and then we can start the webinar here. The webinar is now live and welcome to our 28th Gutenberg live Q and A on this June 24th. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack and I am your host for today’s discussion. Thank you all for watching, and it’s great to have you. And while you all come in, use the chat window to tell us where you are and where you’re watching from. 

And today we will discuss a new way to configure themes, that is black themes, with global styles and settings file theme.json. And it will enable theme developers to centralize all the block-based settings, color palettes, font sizes, and other block-based customizations. This way you will also control which of the other block features the theme supports or does not support. 

So that’s my simple mind’s description of the new features and I’m so thrilled to have three experts on the show to go beyond this simple explanation and help theme developers to get started. I’m extremely honored to have Daisy Olsen, developer advocate at Automatic and WordPress contributor. Hey, good to have you. Also Jeff Ong, code wrangler at Automatic.

Jeff Ong: Hello.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thanks for being here. And at last but not at least Tammie Lister, design lead at Extendify.

Tammie Lister: Hello.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We’ll do some proper introduction in less than a minute. I just have a few housekeeping notes. So after the introduction, we’ll have a first round robin question and then we see a demo. Jeff was working really hard on it and I think he was the only one repairing hard for this live Q and A. And then we’ll discuss the different angles and how they get started. And then, of course, answer your question.

Speaking of questions, how do you pose your questions? There’s a Q and A on the bottom of the screen, a kind of icon. You click on that and write your question. And for those watching on YouTube use the chat window next to the video player. And so saying hi. Hi, Victor. From Buenos Aires in Argentina. Awesome. Thank you for being here. All right. When you do comments and questions, so please be kind even if you disagree. 

This is a family endeavor. All right. Well, I’m thrilled you all agreed dear panelists to come on the show and I get an hour to talk with you about your work. So, Daisy, tell us a little bit about you, where are you’re located and what is it that you do as developer advocate on the purpose project and at Automatic?

Daisy Olsen: Yeah. I’m Daisy Olsen and I live in New Hampshire in the United States. It’s a beautiful day here right now unlike some parts of this country that are really hot. We got the cool weather over here this week. So as a developer advocate, I talk about WordPress a lot.

I get out and do workshops, teach classes, write documentation and just stay involved and close to the projects development so that I know what’s going on theoretically and can share that out particularly with plugin and theme developers as well as agencies and freelancers and things like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. So glad you’re here. Thank you. So, Tammie, thank you for coming back to the show. It’s been over three years. The last time you were on the show was just after Gutenberg was merged into Core and you were one of the three leads with Matias Ventura and Joen Asmussen. 

And you shared a lot about the journey of Gutenberg and the philosophy behind it. So I will put the link to the show into the show notes for you who have been coming later to Gutenberg. But this year you joined the WordPress product company Extendify. So what do you do there?

Tammie Lister: First of all, has it been three years? That goodness. Time flies. So in Extendify I focus on design. So our solutions extend the editor. And then the aim is to make it even more usable for people’s purpose that they want to use it for. And I’m really, really excited about that.

So it means that people can have the best experience from the content they’re creating, to the layout, the patterns, the styles, whatever that the editor enables, that’s really what I’m focusing on. So it’s a interesting new challenge to do. And you have blew my brain with that time span. You really have. That’s awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s also over three years that Gutenberg times us. So I’ve been part of that journey so for so long.

Tammie Lister: Congrats.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nothing really held my attention for so long. And normally I get really bored. Well, I’m also really happy that Extendify took over Editor Plus from Munir Kumal and the EditorsKit from Jeffrey Carandang. So, those have a more sustainable way now to access because both Munir and Jeffrey seem to have… Munir joined you, but Jeffrey moved on to be a consultant at , I think, 10up.

Tammie Lister: It’s so really exciting. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I imagine. So thank you also to Jeff Ong for joining us today as well. You’re a code wrangler in Automatic and what have you been working on lately except for the demo. I know about that.

Jeff Ong: Well, first, thank you for having me and hosting this. Awesome to be here. I feel very honored to be with three on-time contributors. So super cool. At Automattic, I’ve been working on theme development, pretty solely focused on that for the last year. And my background is not in WordPress. 

So it’s kind of been an interesting journey to transition and learn about the ecosystem and really coming at a transitory time figuring out how do we kind of move into this new block-based paradigm? How do we make themes that work with the block editor really well and can hopefully unlock more creativity for just really great design. And I can tell you what sites again. Well, making new themes and figuring out how to do that with the latest version of Gutenberg, which turns out every day.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the viewers follow Jeff Ong, he’s going to teach you how to do things with the Block Editor. And we will soon see a little demo of that. It’s what Daisy said, “What you did in five minutes, I taught a course on that in three hours.” So it’s going to be a little fast paced today. 

What will change most for the theme developers when building themes for full-site editing?

But before we head into media’s raised, I would like to ask each of you, so what do you think will change most for the theme developers when building themes? These are for agency building custom themes for the clients or for theme shops rolling out new themes to sell. Do you want to start, Tammie?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. That’s interesting because I think perhaps it’s a change if you wanted to be a change. Because lots of this is an opt-in, as is the way. WordPress, the best way to opt-in. I go back to a lot of times that this is a freeing of things and I think it brings an opportunity that has pros and cons, ups and downs with opportunities.

But plug-ins themes no longer have to pretend that they’re plugins and they no longer have to be everything and have to be things that they weren’t intended to be in the first. So I think that that is a challenge in itself because there’s a certain way that you maybe thought you had to do things and now you don’t have to work around things. We often have to work around things in WordPress. 

And if you don’t have to work around it, it can feel a little bit peculiar, but once you realize you don’t have to do that, it’s actually really awesome. But you have to realize you don’t have to and that WordPress was getting in the way. I also think as a result there’s going to be a space for more creativity, and this can also be really to challenging because maybe you were limited to what you could do creativity wise because of just the confinements of the space and the confinements of what you could do before. 

And it’s going to open things again to a lot more people. And a lot more people who maybe didn’t have access to a theme developer with experience who knew the exact ins and outs of it. So I think that’s a challenge because new people in this space, new creativity. But honestly I think it’s a good thing. It’s just if you want to and you’re open to it and you can kind of explore those new ways, but I don’t think it’s a change that you have to make. I think that’s the thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Thank you. Daisy, what do you think?

Daisy Olsen: So I think I would agree with Tammie that the barrier of entry for a new theme designer. And I think that’s one of the key things is it’s bringing the design back to theming. Theming over time became very functional. We had a lot of theme companies that were trying to make their themes as flexible, powerful and feature-ful as possible to reach a wide variety of people.

And I think that we can see some opportunity for vertically oriented designs coming out where you have a theme that is geared towards a restaurant or geared towards, I don’t know, a salon or a certain kind of a business or even a personal site.

And I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to be able to have a lot of variety out there in the marketplace so that when someone asks you inevitable question, because this was probably the most common question when I was working for a thing company is which theme is best for this? 

I’m doing this kind of a site, which themes should I use. And it could make it so, well, here are five that are really geared towards what you’re trying to do instead of, oh, you can use any of them. You just have to do all this work to get it to look bright.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s a good point. Thank you. Jeff?.

Jeff Ong: Definitely, from a design perspective, it’s super exciting. I want to highlight maybe a little bit more from the development side. This seems like the biggest opportunity or clearest opportunity to ensure that your theme is integrated with the editor. That the things that you’re doing with the editor and your ability to customize it to control what presets and options are available there to the users of the theme, this is the theme [inaudible 00:12:27].

It’s a unifying kind of idea and single point of truth. Talking about theme.json and even just this whole concept of how do we bring the experience together. I think we have an opportunity to do that and that’s going to change even in some small level. Even if your theme.json cloud just as a few settings. You can take it slow like Tammie was saying. Incorporate parts of it because to me you have this new contract now that can really unify things and bring things together from a lot of disparate parts and pieces.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Lots to think about. And I agree with all of you. I had this pleasure last year that I took over themes from agencies and they were so powerful and all the things that normally a plug-in will do, custom post types and rigid and all that. It’s all in one place and we won’t be able to change a theme at all. 

So now this is definitely going to make life a lot easier for site owners as well So lots to think about and listening to you is quite inspiring to kind of think, oh, well how many direction can my brain go now? But, Jeff, are you ready for your demo? I think it would be helpful for all the people here on the call to see what it’s all about and how it kind of gets started.

Jeff Ong: Yes. We have 10 minutes roughly. Yes. Can you see my screen? 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We can see your screen. Yes.

Demo: Configuring the block editor with theme.json file

14.02

Jeff Ong: So we have a blank theme here and I just want to kind of go over some, not going to cover everything, but some of the key parts of that theme.json introduces and show how that impacts a blank theme and also the editor. So hopping over to my code editor. I have my theme.JSON here. This is a really basic, simple theme and nothing going on yet. 

In here I’m going to go ahead and the first thing I want to talk about are the settings of your theme.JSON. Settings are kind of what control or give you the ability to configure the editor and what kind of customization options are present to a user and the theme. The only thing I have right now is the layout, which we’ll get to in a second. But let’s say I want to add some color options here.

Previously it would be done in the functions PHP. I have kind of a few sheets over here. Sorry. I need to hide these meeting control. I’m going to copy a color palette from this. I’m going to set a palette that’s going to become available to me in my theme. I go to edit the same post. In here I see my cornso, my orange, red, and color blue that’s become available to me. 

What’s pretty interesting about this is before you would have had to kind of go into functions at this whole palette and then also define the class name, something like this to actually apply those styles. Let’s say I want this heading to be orange, update it. Show it here. I get all this cool stuff for free. This class was generated for me by Gutenberg using this preset and that I have defined meeting controls defined here in my palette options. 

Another cool thing or interesting about the possibility here is within the same configuration. Let’s say I’m the theme designer. I have the option right now to change the color to kind of anything I want. The powerful thing about theme.json at this time is it can actually turn something like this off. I actually don’t want people or my users to be able to change anything, change the color palette.

But let’s go ahead and reset this back here. Turned off custom colors within theme.json. And then back here you’ll see that option has disappeared. So inaccessible color combinations or just color combinations that you don’t want to be available. You can turn that off. This is just one of the options that are available. Color is just one of the options that you can customize.

You can also take a look at something like typography. I think I can find some font sizes here. Refresh. I can see now that those presets were available, are now available to me. I can do the same thing again here too. Say I don’t actually want people to be able to change all sides here. As a designer I know it’s best and I don’t want people putting in random font sizes. 

So disable that and now only my presets are available too. Oh, by the way, this content is just kind of some standard block-based content. Again, I’m getting all of this kind of for free or for free in a way by just applying some preset values here. Well, I think the next thing that I wanted to cover is going into the last thing. I’ll cover it within the settings because you can actually change these per block. 

Remember we were looking at color before. I could add a color key to the paragraph block and actually say, just kidding. I want to allow you to be able to change the color of paragraph blocks. Just the paragraph blocks. I can open up the whole thing. So within here now I can see, oh, I can actually change just for paragraph blocks. I go up to my heading. This custom color is not available. This color option is not available. 

If you want to I could also supply a custom palette. I’m not going to do that, but could say if you wanted a specific palette that’s just applied for paragraph blocks. That would be how you do it. So I think that’s it for settings. I’m going to go ahead and collapse this now and move on to the styles key of our theme.json. And now within here I can start to define some files. 

Remember our colors from up here from the palette. I can go ahead and because I know that WordPress is generating CSS variables based on these palettes, I can go ahead and start to use those within the styles application of the style section of my theme.json. So with the preset color, put orange red. See what else do. These are going to apply at the top level. So this is going to apply to everything.

Say I only wanted, for instance, my headings to be… Let’s make this. Do the same thing in here and say, ah, I just want, actually, let’s just make my paragraph colors black. So, again, what I’ve done here is I’ve set my global kind of text color to this orange red was preset, which was provided by WordPress and generated here to the entire text. And then actually I can go in and target specific block, set the settings for that as well. 

I think we are close. I just want to show, well, if you’re editing this, something that’s also probably going to happen and mess this up. It should throw some kind of an error here yet. Notice there when decoding theme.json. So that’ll let you know there’s something going on because it’s pretty easy tip something up here. 

And I think that’s just a small note is we’ll likely encounter that if you’re configuring keys and nested objects trying to figure out how each of those apply. You pause here for a second. I guess the last thing I want to cover too is the concept of elements. So within here, any h2 that I have is going to be applied a specific style here. So I have the same because [inaudible 00:24:24] can appear outside of blocks or links, for example.

These are restricted to a specific set at the moment. So let’s just say text. So, again, because this is not actually rendered as a pocket and an element and that can appear anywhere. That’s something that I can target with this kind of top level elements select here. Everything else here you can target with the name of the block. 

That is most of what I wanted to cover pretty fast, but again all of the settings that you can find here or that I’m going over, there’s way more than just color. There’s spacing, typography and all of that can be found in documentation that Birgit, I think she shared it here. So that I want to open it up. And I guess there are questions. If there are specific parts that anyone would want to go into in a little more detail. Happy to do that.

Daisy Olsen: Thank you, Jeff. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you, Jeff. This was awesome. Do you want to just say something?

Daisy Olsen: Yeah. I just wanted to say that maybe we could just talk about layout real quick because I think that’s going to be a big one for 5.8.

Jeff Ong: Yeah. And I kind of skipped over. It was the first thing that was in here. Yes. Layout key is a way for you to quickly define the default, the width of your content within WordPress or within here. So if you see here, if I don’t define this layout, a lot of my content is just going to be full width by default. 

You can supply two values here. Content size, it’s just going to be the default width. You can also define, I think it’s, what is it? Wide size. Wide width. Nothing happened there because I hadn’t provided it. Maybe there’s a better way to show that with cover block. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. I like it. 

Jeff Ong: Pretty cool. You can, I mean, alignment coming together and within a unified system reliably layout content with starting here is pretty powerful stuff I’d say.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Awesome. So I shared in the chat window, if you haven’t seen it, the documentation link where you can read up about the theme.json as a whole. When you say, Daisy, that that’s the layout will be important for 5.8, which part of it would be, where does it come into play?

Daisy Olsen: So with 5.8 with the custom template functionality that’s coming where you can basically create a custom template for an entire page or a post that would cover your header as well as your content. If you need to have these setting set for the width, especially the content size for it but preferably also wide so that your site knows how wide it should be. 

Otherwise you get kind of the facts that Jeff showed where it was the full width of the page. It didn’t have anything to contain it down to the width that you want. So for any theme that wants to use the template editor would benefit from having a theme.json file that even if it only has the one thing in it, it would be good way to take advantage of it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s an excellent tip. Thank you, Daisy. You heard it here first. So we already got some questions in our Q and A, but I just wanted to have one question for Jeff before. That’s my prerogative as a host, I get the first question. So if I understood it correctly, so until now, theme.json comes into play I had to create many different places or touch many different places to make a color palette work.

So, I had to put it in my functions.php and then I also have to put it in my style sheet. Is [inaudible 00:30:04] that I don’t have to do this anymore, or do I still have to put it into my style sheet, or is it automatically created with when I put the color palette in the theme.json?

Jeff Ong: It is wonderful question. It is automatically created. This is all that that style sheet looks like since this is one of the big very exciting aspects of a theme.json. It’s that it’s managing this for you. And then also I think more down the line by providing colors and styles in this way. And then also by applying the styles here you can guarantee that those blocks are going to integrate properly.

It’s like the styles for those blocks are going to be more closely tied and actually in how the block is implemented. So no more writing styles that are overwriting that we’re having to target specific nested blocks. And so there’s tons of complications to this and there’s a lot more room to mature and develop, but I think that’s one of the parts I’m most excited about. To your point, there’s one place now where I can define my palette and show how it should be applied. I don’t have to go into two different places to do it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Well, let’s go to the questions. Victor Kane, from the beginning of the show has already put them in and he’s particular interested in finding out about the workflow using them theme.json. So one is the best editing alternative for VS Code formatting, and then the second one was the possibility for exporting interactive selections to clipboard and code. I’m not quite sure I understand the question. Maybe you understand it, Jeff Daisy, Tammie.

Tammie Lister: Personally. So I think this is a personal choice. I’m going to start with an answer and then go to… I use VS Code, so I may not be able to give the right answer there. I would be curious to know what you don’t want in VS Code, and I think that that’s the thing. This opens up personal… I’m going to be really bad at reading the response in chat whilst talking. So I’m going to be a little bit pertinent and kind of speak first. I’m sorry, I’ll get back to it.

It’s your personal choice how you write and then you can kind of go back to it. So the thing that I did, this was my workflow, it has been my workflow so far, and I think this is the thing, we’re all finding our own new workflows with these new toys that we’re playing with. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been using theme.json. 

I’ve actually been setting up variables using SAS that have been then pulling in root variables into my theme.json so that I can pull them through. That’s a weird way to do it. That’s strange, but the reason being, it means I can reuse and keep things separately. But I’m sure that everybody on this call has their own little workflows that they are kind of working from.

Daisy Olsen: My approach to that was actually the opposite that I was using my theme.json to set all of my variables so that I didn’t need SAS, which I think for those that never quite got their head wrapped around preprocessed CSS, it might be a way to simplify things for those that prefer it that way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. 

Tammie Lister: I think it’s what you’re cozy with, right? And I think that’s the thing. This can adapt to what was your cozy blanket of coding, and you don’t have to lose that yet, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So Victor commented on that. If I get the results, I want interactively with the global settings panel on the right-hand side of the editor, can I export that to a theme.json format?

Daisy Olsen: The answer is not right now. I think there’s discussion in the teams about maybe building it, but it hasn’t been the highest priority because everything needs to work first before we start working on an exporter. But there are other parts of that can be exported in that full site editing experience that can be exported. So I think it would be a natural progression to add the ability to do a theme.json export.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Definitely there will be.

Tammie Lister: From the very beginning, there were designs in global style. Sorry. The reason I know is that was one thing I did partake on. There was exporting. So I have a feeling if we all wanted to play some little happy bets, there will be exploiting at some point.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But if we all bet on the same thing, it’s not really bet, right? Victor, as always, you’re a little bit ahead of the time. So and from Jan Horna, from the Czech Republic, it’s very hot by now there. 

He has two questions as a theme developer, one, is the theme.json supposed to include all the styling, formatting definitions and replaced the CSS style? And I think we’d take it one at a time. So we talked a little bit about it from my question, but would it replace? You could still do all those styling in the style sheets as you want, right?

Daisy Olsen: And I think there are some things that will remain in other styling, but you could use the variables that you set or the properties that you set in your theme.json in your CSS. So they can work together. But I don’t think that theme.json, at least right now, will not completely replace an entire site’s design, especially if you have a very complex design.

Why do we want to rewrite CSS in JSON

Jeff Ong: Yeah. And this was one of my first questions and honestly, skepticism early on of the proposal around this, is CSS is great. Why do we want to rewrite CSS in JSON. And then it slowly, I mean, other people are obviously smarter than me understood this quickly. It’s not about rewriting all of CSS. There’s definitely going to be aspects of your site, especially if you have taking, like you’re saying, more complicated designs that will remain in CSS. 

But this is about creating, I think, more of the foundational elements and understanding how the blocks will interact with your styles and having that single point of contact, I think is most important. So I think for me, at least it’s more about the foundational elements that are going to be placed and managed this way than replacing your entirety of your styles. Because this great. 

Things like animations and transformation, and this is all really powerful stuff that I don’t imagine, really, at least in the super near future, having a big part of theme.json. To the question about, will you be able to save an export a theme.json from global styles? I think this is a really important thing to keep in mind is what I just showed you is kind of unnatural. I don’t imagine a future necessarily where theme developers are writing raw JSON.

It’s really, there’s not a great experience for it. It’s a configuration file. And so the more, to points that have already been raised, it’s about we’re in this phase now because we need to kind of identify and get it to work, and then we can kind of build an ecosystem around what would a really cool UI look like to generate one of these files? Is it native directly to global styles? How do we start to imagine those interfaces so the theme developers or theme designers can really get to the core of this experience too?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Well, thank you. Good point. You wanted to say something.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. I was just going to say over time, CSS has gained so much. So I didn’t know about anyone else, but I had a block.css file that was getting bigger and bigger of supporting blocks and doing things. And something I’ve noticed that I can do is throw that file away, and I couldn’t be happier because what I can do now is lean into these defaults. I’m still going to have some lines of CSS, the output by whatever, a preprocessor, whatever, my happy little whatever. 

Because everyone has got their own way and we should have our own way of doing it. But it’s a foundation, and it means that we’re not having to work around the editor or find different ways of doing it. I set up naturally a hack file for the editor out of habit. I haven’t filled it with anything yet in the latest theme I’ve been working on. 

I’m delighted if I never fill that up with anything on the next theme, because it means that the new way we’re doing things hasn’t had me to work around that. I can just use the foundation and create a really awesome experience on top of it. And that’s what we should be doing. We should be working with the editor, not having to work around it, or using not important like it was going out of fashion to go over control of it. It was this awkward middle ground we were working in trying to make things fit that paradigm. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I think that fits right into the next question from Jan Horna again, and he says so as a block theme developer, should I focus from a strategic point of view on theme.json block styles, or block patterns. In other words, how do I differentiate? It’s kind of a high-level question there.

Daisy Olsen: I would say all of the above. They’re all important things. And your block styles are part of theme.json, I would say. But block patterns are really a powerful partner to the theme.json, that you can create building blocks for a site where you’ve got some really amazing very specific designed elements that could be used for different things on a site. So if you’re creating a commercial application that’s going to go out to a wide audience, they can be more generic. 

But if you have a client and you’re working as a freelancer or in an agency where you have a site that needs to have access to these things that they’re going to use more than once, patterns are a fantastic way to do that, where most of the work is done for them. They don’t have to reconfigure everything from the ground up every time they want to create something similar to what they’ve done before.

What happens when you update the color palette? Will saved blocks have the new colors?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. And Spencer McCormick in the chat had a question. So what happens when you update the color palette or similar, for example, if you have a primary and secondary colors, when you update and change the palette colors, will saved blocks have the new colors? That’s an interesting question. Thank you, Spenser.

Daisy Olsen: I can answer that to some extent. If you think of your palette as named colors, if you give the different hex code to the same name, it should apply to the site. But if you give it a new name, then that’s a new element, and it won’t apply to anything that already had an old name attached to it.

Jeff Ong: There is a hefty discussion related to this question on the naming of colors in the way that Gutenberg wants to supply a default palette or a default set of named colors so that you could reliably… What we’re seeing I think is that I think patterns have been wanting to rely on specific colors across kind of, so you can guarantee oh, when corn flour shows up it’s always going to be corn flour. 

It’s always going to be available. There’s a lot of complication and nuance around it. But if, I think today, to answer your question, like Daisy is saying, today, if I were to supply a value or a named value here and then change it or take it out of my palette, then that would break the experience or it would no longer be applied to that.

And that’s part of the challenge, how do we reliably solve for that? How do we give theme office the tools to figure that out. But now if they set a custom color, if you set a custom color on an element or a block, then that will remain because it’s a specific X value, but the class names will go away though, if they’re supplied by the theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So great discussions. And I’m probably going to share, and if it’s one issue where that discuss the theme team every week kind of shares all the things that are discussed and that need input from the community or other theme developers on their make blog. 

So that is definitely a place to go to chime in and we’ll find all the discussions that are happening. And then chime in in the ones that you find important and that you are worried about. So Tim Bowen has the question, how does the theme.json handle responsive sizes for font sizes especially. Responsive sizes.

Daisy Olsen: By default, I’m not sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’ve stomped the panelists. Yes, we did it.

Tammie Lister: I mean, you can use not just pixel values for your fonts, so-

Daisy Olsen: That’s what I was going to say. 

Tammie Lister: … that helps. And I think it’s a work in progress. So things like responsive and breakpoints. But the now answer is you don’t have to just use pixels. And Jeff just gave a great leak.

Jeff Ong: I just dropped the issue in that has not seen a lot of activity around it, but the idea of media. So the first part of your question on font sizes, there are ways of calculating this where they’re not pixel values tied to specific viewports. You could supply a calculated value, for example, in your small… that is based on a viewport size. 

So it’s kind of a paradigm shift or design paradigm shift of getting away from you must be 12 pixels under below 600 pixel viewport width, to more of are we okay with kind of a fluid typography kind of system? That being said, there are instances where you need media queries, and that is not currently… I don’t know how actively that’s being worked on right now. But a wonderful thing open to contributors.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Patty has a comment and a question after that, Patty O’Hara, I most often develop custom themes for clients and hand them off for the clients to update the content. And playing around with new tools, I’m excited to start using them, but don’t want to give access to global standards to anyone with admin access. Will the granularity of permissions changes so that I can block access to changing fonts and colors from within the admin?

Tammie Lister: I think this amazing thing happens in where also Jeff showed some of the control you can do. So in the demo, there was some control that you can do. But my process is a history of configurability and being able to do that be it in code, or be it in a plugin. But I honestly think we need to be a little bit cautious. This is my personal opinion here, and we need to maybe embrace allowing people to do styling. 

You can set boundaries, you can set branding boundaries, you can set pallets, you can set topography. But we need to move away a little bit from having such pixel fixated control in that sense and think about safely within boundaries, expression of these tools. And that people can create really amazing things, and you can maintain branding that way, and it can empower someone. 

These themes are becoming style guides, and that’s something that is known in the corporate world and used within that space as well. It’s a term, but it’s kind of democratizing design in that sense in giving people all these tools to play with, and I think it’s a huge change in the way that we’ve done things, but I think it’s really, really important and really, really empowering to the people that are using our themes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a good advocacy for set it free. Thank you.

Tammie Lister: But you’re allowed to have boundaries. I think you can set it free, but be comfortable about some boundaries. I think sometimes when we say set it free, it can be scary because we don’t say you’re allowed to have some boundaries, but with pallets and with these style guides, that’s what you’re saying. You’re saying I’m making these good decisions for you and you can choose from this platform of good decisions. And that’s kind of awesome. I think,

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I like the plea for block patterns that Daisy just a couple of minutes had that block patterns also give you the possibility or the option to actually provide different facets of how a section can be organized or styled within the style design system that you build with the block add on. 

And so I think that there is a lot of creativity that will come from that as well. So Tim Bowen is brave and contemplating, is it safe to use the theme.json now for a project launching in August? Would we just activate the Gutenberg plugin and add JSON file? Or is there more to it? I would love to move away from our functions in Editor.js method probably as soon as possible. So what would we say to Tim?

Daisy Olsen: The theme is not a block theme, as in it doesn’t use HTML templates, then I probably wouldn’t put the Gutenberg plugin on a production website, unless you are ready to deal with unexpected things happening. But placing your theme.json file in your classic theme on the 5.8 beta or release candidate that will be coming, I would start testing there and see if the things that you’re putting in your theme.json file work with 5.8 on a classic theme. That’d be my suggestion.

Tammie Lister: I think if it’s launching in August, that means 5.8 should be out. She tries to check her mental calendar. So I think tests. I, personally, am okay. I would consider it if it was going into a site, but I would also want to know how many users were using it, what their levels was, what they were doing, what they were going to create, and how they were going to do it. So it’s a… this is not legal advice. I feel that there should be [inaudible 00:50:36] advice that I can be. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Don’t try this at home. 

Tammie Lister: But by then, 5.8 should be out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. 5.8 comes out July 20th, that’s at least the schedule for that. So we ran out of questions right now one the Q and A sessions here. Well, you’re welcome, Tim. Good luck with that, and let us know. Is there more to the setting it up besides just activating the plugin or adding the JSON file. Well, back to kind of using it and editing. 

When there are already themes available in the theme repository that use the full set up for full site editing and use all the template parts and templates with the blocks, and header blocks, and photo blocks, and all that. But I’m not quite sure of that yet. Be careful about the using the Gutenberg plugin in production. It always has a few hiccups there.

So it wasn’t the first time ever that I retreated to the last version when I had one and had to wait till one, two, or three point releases to come out. So I’m hesitant to say do it in production. Test it as much as possible. So I have a lot of things on my screen, but not the right thing. Here, so it is. Oh, Ryan, we are pretty good time wise. 

So, I don’t have an additional… So, when we say how to get started, what was the first thing most difficult part for you for learning, or was there a mind shift until it clicked? Just to kind of get away from a fear of learning something new, and was there something when you go back ages on the theme.json thing.

Tammie Lister: So for me, it was realizing it wasn’t as hard as I maybe mentally thought it was. It was just the same with learning anything. You always think it’s going to be super hard, or at least with me, I read like dev doc and I’m like… My brain makes that noise. And then I just letting my theme be lighter. Letting it take the weight of that, giving up control, which as someone that’s maybe a bit of an old themer, giving up control of things, that’s an interesting process to go through. 

But it’s really important embracing those foundations. And when you do, there’s that mind shift of creating in the editor. That was the moment that… And I’m still going through the process. I think it’s a process, and it’s a process as these tools are evolving. We’re talking about be gentle, they’re in production. These tools are still evolving and working. 

If you are using these tools now before it’s released, then you’re going to hit bugs and report them. But that’s the thing. This theme.json also… the moment I kind of, the Jenga box, the blocks fell in my brain was I stopped seeing it as global stars. And I knew it wasn’t just global stars, but I felt it wasn’t just global stars and this felt like it could be the backbone of my theme, and it felt like it wasn’t everything in my theme, but it felt like it could be the backbone, is the best way I can describe it. 

And I could hang my theme from it. And we’ve hung our theme from functions.php wrongly, I think. So it was just that change from PHP to doing it all in the editor and creating and seeing that JSON. It just was free, and it’s more in line with how things are made outside WordPress, which I think is delightful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Any comments from you that you want to add, Daisy?

Daisy Olsen: So when I first started working with a theme.json file, I found that I had to… So there’s a whole section called styles, and I had to realign my thinking about what that meant, because what it’s saying is there are style settings in your blocks or for your site level depending on how it’s being applied, and what you’re doing is configuring the defaults for it. 

So if I think of the theme.json file as a default file, then it helped me frame it so that I’m not necessarily replacing my CSS depending on… I mean, I’m letting theme.json do the heavy lifting, kind of like Tammie said, but then I can take it further if I feel like I need to, or I want to. So I like thinking of it as a configuration file or a defaults file.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a good point. Jeff, do you have any stories how I came about?

Jeff Ong: It’s been really helpful to pair on it with people, to work on a theme with someone. I think if my team at Automattic. It’s a very culture of collaboration, and if you have the opportunity to say, “I’m having trouble with this. Would you want to work on this?” With someone like that, because this definitely can be a head bashing kind of why is this not being applied? 

I literally just wrote color green. Why is it not green? It can be so frustrating dealing with that. So to have someone just to look at your code and be like “Oh, you missed a comma or actually you need an extra key there” is really, really helpful for something like this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah. So well, I think we’re coming to the end of our show. This has been very interesting and inspiring. So thank you all so much. And for those who want to dive into at a guided kind of testing session, Anne McCarthy, who, as you might know, runs the Full Site Editing Outreach program, she’s about to post the eighth call for testing, and it will all be about the theme.json file.

So as soon as it’s out, I will share a link in the show notes. And of course, also if you subscribed to our Gutenberg Times newsletter, you will definitely be informed about that. So at this point, I only have two more questions for our panelists. So do you have any announcements that you couldn’t get out before and you want the people to keep in mind? And if people want to get in touch with you, what would be the best way. Tammie, you want to start?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I’m comatose in all the things. I’m pretty easy to find in a good way. And I love chatting to people. So please do. I think my thing to say would be remember all of what happening now you can help shape. Just because we’ve sat here talking about it doesn’t mean we know anything more than you? It just means we’ve poked it and we’ve played around with the code. 

So do that. Start exploring it. And it’s a lot more accessible than it ever was. It’s starting to be more accessible. There’s more documentation than there ever was coming out. And if you care about what happens with themes or you ever cared about what happens to themes, and maybe you could have that reignited, start to join the conversation. And I guess my final point would be, I think my hope is to see this experimentation come back to themes. 

I think we forgot about that a little bit and we need to have some fun again in these. We used to have so much fun in WordPress themes, and I look forward to not just themes to have a purpose, but just themes that are art, themes that are just wacky experiments, and start enjoying theming and make some art. I’m really excited to see what things people create and use them just for one day even. That’d be amazing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So Jeff, anything you want to have people keep in mind, and how to get in contact with you.

Jeff Ong: Yeah. Contact at J-F-F-N-G. And I guess keeping in mind, I’m just building on the last thing Tammie said, perhaps find a way to have fun with it and get curious about it, and try it. There’s really to me, a fundamental tendance of learning about something or you just have, how do I get curious about this thing? How do I play with it and have fun? And that’s going to be the most important thing to keep in at the center.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you, Jeff, and thank you so much for the audio work on the demo. Daisy.

Daisy Olsen: I’m Daisy Olsen on most things, Olsen with an E, and I would say that as far as what you can do as the next step if you’re interested in learning more about this, is go to… I’m pretty sure that Birgit has a link to this somewhere, the theme experiments repository on GitHub in the WordPress space has things that other people have done or are working on. 

So I love to see examples of something in action to help me learn more about it and to see what other people have done. So I would say go check out something.json files in there and see what people have come up with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Thank you so much. So big thank you to Daisy, Jeff, and Tammie to come today and make your time. A big thank you also for the viewers with all your great questions. I think we got a great array of it. And if you have more questions, you can always send them to me via email to [email protected], and I’ll get you the answers.

And the recording of the show will be available in a few minutes on our YouTube channel. And I’ll share all the links then also in the video description. And within a few days, we will have also a transcript that we will publish on the Gutenbergtimes.com. So be well, good-bye, and good luck. That was fun. Thank you.

Jeff Ong: Thank you, everyone.

Howdy,

Lots happening in the larger WordPress space! More aquisitions and a new service for WordPress plugin business, flippantly named FlipWP.

WordPress 5.8 Beta 2, Gutenberg 10.9 RC released and the first dev notes dropped for the upcoming release. More on that below.

Don’t miss next week’s Live Q & A on June 24, 2021, at 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC on theme.json for Theme Authors with our panelists Daisy Olson, Tammie Lister and Jeff Ong. Learn and discuss How to get started with building themes for Full-site editing.

What are you working on? Creativity is mushrooming around the WordPress ecosystem and I want to learn from you! Hit reply and let me know! I loved your notes in my inbox! Thank you.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

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WordPress 5.8 DevNotes and more

Grzegorz Ziolkowski posted the article Block Editor API Changes to Support Multiple Admin Screens. “WordPress 5.8 is the first core release where the post editor is no longer the only admin screen that uses the block editor. The updated widgets editor screen will also support blocks.”, he wrote. It’s quite technical and developers will appreciate it as it opens the doors to use the bock editor on other admin screen, for instance for plugin dashboards and features. It makes my long time wish possible: replace the “Quick Draft” widget with an instance of the block editor and have writers start writing immediately after login, instead of having to open yet another screen.

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Riad Benguella introduces us to the Template Editor coming to WordPress in its 5.8 release. It comes with a series of new blocks to accommodate Site-wide information, like Site Title or Site Logo as well as post parts for the Query Block, like Post Title, Post Excerpt, Feature Image. In total, 13 Blocks that replace some template parts in conventional themes. Some blocks will be made available also for classic Themes to accommodate hybrid themes and to support the gradual adoption of block-based themes.

Justin Tadlock wrote about it on the WPTavern, too.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2021” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

For Site owners and Content Creators

Hari Shanker from the community team published Talking points for WordPress 5.8 of Meetup organizer, that also helps agency owners and freelancers to quickly get an overview of what is coming in the new version. Hari clusters the upcoming changes per WordPress stakeholders. You’ll find a section for Publishers and users, and another one for site builders and developers. If you want to read just one article, this would be it. 🚀

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Chris Lema makes a strong case for Embracing Gutenberg Completely. Out of necessity, he decided to rebuild his site with Gutenberg blocks. All site metrics tools suggested reducing the DOM size of his Landing pages build with 3rd party page builders. With this switch, Chris realized, what he needs and doesn’t need for a highly performing website. His five observations put a few things in perspective for him as a daily writer, he came to appreciate the tools and blocks that come with the block editor.

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The team at PublishPress posted a short tutorial on How to Use Nested Blocks in the Gutenberg Editor, as it’s still a little confusing for content creators to navigate, especially Column blocks. The persistent list view coming to WordPress 5.8 will help with this, though.

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Javier Acre from the WordPress design team published a Walk through of possible enhancements for the Table Block. He showcases update to the placeholder state, multicell selection, the sidebar, the toolbar and icon improvements. You’ll see mock-ups for each. It’s quite exciting to see, as we probably can all agree that the Table block needs so TLC, 🙂 You can leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments of the post.

Mockup of Toolbor for the Table block

Theme builders

Dave Smith has notes on how to test the new Widget Editor that will come with WordPress 5.8. He followed Andrei Draganescu call for testing and logged his experience. To test for backwards compatibility for your existing widgets, you can first create some with the new widget editor disabled using the Classic Widget plugin, and then deactivate the plugins and try to manage and edit the widgets with the block-based editor. You have only a month to make sure your sites won’t run into trouble. WordPress 5.8 will be released on July 20th, 2021.

Maggie Cabrera posted the Gutenberg + Themes: Week of June 18, 2021, roundup of relevant discussions, issue and PRs for Theme builders. She covered Full-Site Editing, Global Styles and block-based Themes. Chime on on the discussion and test the new releases. If you are a theme developer trying to catch up with what’s happening with Gutenberg, the Overview / Tracking issues section should get you started. You’ll find links to documentation and tutorials as well.

Episode #45 is now available with transcript.
Next recording June 25th, 2021

Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast
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Plugin Developers

Dave Smith published a tutorial on Mocking @wordpress/api-fetch in Gutenberg unit tests. During development you don’t want to hit an external API everytime you run a unit test, these instructions show you how to mock data coming from an API call in your block or site.

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Genesis Custom Blocks, (former Block Lab plugin) are a nifty tool to create blocks without going through the pain of learning modern JavaScript. You use the UI to create Field Groups and then add the PHP display code to your theme template. But what if you want to separate the newly create blocks from the theme? Then you could install it on multiple sites, and it would survive a site owners decision to switch themes without loosing content. Rob Stinson has a two-part tutorial for you on How to package up your custom blocks in a plugin.

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Jeffery Carandang, a Gutenberg adopter of the first hour, found a new home for his Gutenberg entities: Extendify. Jeffery has been pushing the envelope on what is possible with Gutenberg since it first came out in 2017. CoBlocks, co-authored with Rich Tabor and later sold to GoDaddy, was a favorite block plugin for additional blocks. EditorsKit extended blocks with additional tools. We mentioned his Share a Block directory on multiple episodes of the podcast. After starting at 10up, he didn’t find much time anymore for his love projects, especially the very useful EditorsKit plugin hasn’t seen updates for the last nine months. It now found a home at Extendify.
See also:

• Arthor Grabowski: Extendify is Adopting the EditorsKit plugin
• Justin Tadlock: Extendify Adopts EditorsKit, Increasing Its Block Plugin Collection

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s main (trunk) branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.
Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.

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Featured Image: Miami at Night by Birgit Pauli-Haack

Howdy,

After three and a half years, it was time to replace the WordPress theme on the Gutenberg Times. The trigger: I wrote about Core Web Vitals for a different project and used the Gutenberg Times as a test project, using Google’s Lighthouse via an incognito browser window. The desktop version performed very well, all circles in the green range, but the mobile version really crawled over the Internet, ranking in the low 40ties.

Google announced earlier this year that they start rolling out new page experience update in this month, and start using Web Vitals as another ranking factor for organic search results. I also noticed that GT had a very high number of visitors via the desktop, but not many on mobile, which I found odd. Now I know why.

Anders Noren’s Eksell is our new theme. I love the typography, the clean design. and its graphics. I just started exploring it. Nothing gets things done faster than working on the live site. 😊

The content mostly converted well, except there are no widget areas, so I would need to add the widget via the Legacy widget block. It was hit-and-miss. This exercise turned out to be a great test for the new block-based Widget screen, which will come to a WordPress instance near you in the 5.8 release on July 20th, 2021.

From the discussions, I learned that the Gutenberg team is leaning towards an opt-out rather than an opt-in implementation. Testing sites with this week’s WordPress 5.8 Beta 1, is definitely recommended. If you don’t have time to test all the site you are working on, rest easy, there is a Classic Widget plugin you can install to keep the old Widget screen.

What else happened this week? WordCamp Europe! It was a great virtual conference. Kudos to the organizers, speakers, sponsors and attendees! If you missed it, you can watch the recordings on YouTube.

The video with the Gutenberg Highlights is available for those of use who missed the Conversation with Matt Mullenweg. Matias Ventura wrote: “The video is wonderfully narrated by Beatriz Fialho, and it was a great opportunity to celebrate all the incredible work that contributors are doing around the globe to improve the editing and customization experience of WordPress”. I will update my earlier WCEU post with links to videos and resources over the course of next week.

As always, I am so glad you are here, reading the eNews every week. Thank you!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

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WordPress 5.8 Release Cycle

WordPress 5.8 Beta 1 was release on Tuesday. You can use the official Beta Tester Plugin to test this version. If you haven’t used it before, the Core Team share information and instructions in their handbook.

You can read more about the development cycle of WordPress 5.8 here. Feature Freeze for this upcoming version was May 25. We are right now in the beta phase of the cycle. It will be used for testing and to fix bugs. That is to last until June 29, 2021, when the first Release Candidate will be released. That’s also the deadline for Dev Notes and Field Guide. It also comes with a hard-string freeze. That’s the moment the Polyglots team starts with translations.

Features and updates for WordPress 5.8

Speaking of DevNotes, the Gutenberg team tracks their progress on the DevNotes via this GitHub issue. You can get a head start on “Block API Enhancements” by Grzegorz Ziolkowski or “Contextual patterns for easier creation and block transformations” by Nik Tsekouras before they are published on the Make Core blog.

Anne McCarthy posted about other Block Editor Enhancements:

• Contextual patterns for easier creation and
• How to improve your workflow with List View, the former Block Navigator feature.

On the WordPress News Blog, you found earlier: Coloring Your Images With Duotone Filters by Alex Lende. Yes, I am in love with it, that’s why I mentioned it again. Gutenberg 10.7 also brought the methods to disable duotone via the theme.json file. The details are in this Lende’s PR.

Adam Silverstein published WordPress 5.8 adds WebP support dev note. It’s not directly a block editor update but crucial for content creators and developers alike, especially in context of the Core Web Vitals when speed is becomes of the essence.

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Gutenberg Changelog

It’s been two years since Mark Uraine and I started the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, and he was my co-host for the first 40 episodes. Grzegorz Ziolkowski joined me as co-host with episode 41. In February 2021, we celebrated the first 10,000 downloads. Now four months later, we passed the 26,000 mark of downloads. For such a narrow niche show, these are mind-boggling numbers. It is very humbling. We are very grateful for our faithful listeners! Thank you all very much.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski is back from vacation, and we recorded episode 45. We covered Gutenberg 10.7 and 10.8 releases, WordCamp Europe and WordPress 5.8. It will be published later this weekend. The similar t-shirts? Mere coincidence!

Gutenberg 10.8

Gutenberg 10.8 was released this week. It had quite a few enhancements, and a ton of bug fixes and underlying code change for quality and tooling. Sandip Mondal work on his first release and published the release notes: What’s new in Gutenberg 10.8? (9 June).

Justin Tadlock has more details Gutenberg 10.8 Adds New Typography Controls and Block Previews

The enhancements for full-site editing and theme design controls are already for the next WordPress release (5.9) in December and require more testing before they are available for WordPress Core.

Block Patterns

Kjell Reigstad posted an invitation for the WordPress community to submit Block Patterns to the official WordPress directory. In his post Initial Patterns for the WordPress.org Patterns Directory, he explained the details of the submission process.

Justin Tadlock, a big fan of block patterns, wrote about the invitation on the WordPress Tavern and showcased some of his creations. Ana Segota, co-founder of Anariel Design shared her submissions via Twitter.

You can review the list of submissions on GitHub and learn from the comments on by the design team. Brian Gardner, Tammie Lister, Mel Choyce, Kjell Reigstad and Beatriz Fialho also contributed patterns to the directory.

Block Patterns on WordPress.org submitted by members of the design team and from the WordPress community.

In total, I counted 54 block patterns available to WordPress users. What a great start!

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Full Site Editing

At WordCamp Europe 2021, the Panelist Danielle Zarcaro, Grzegorz Ziółkowski, Koen Van den Wijngaert and Milana Cap discussed Full Site editing and what it means for the broader WordPress community. We have the recording and the transcript for you

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We added the Blockbase Theme to the list of available FSE themes last week. Kjell Reigstad published Using Blockbase for a theme experiment on the ThemeShaper blog and take you on a journey on creating a child theme of Blockbase. He wrote “Overall, I found that the benefit to using Blockbase was peace of mind. Compared to starting fresh or using emptytheme, Blockbase ensured that I had a fully functional block theme immediately.” Kjell also shared his code on GitHub.

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The WPMarmite Team publish the results of their Full Site Editing Study: Will WordPress theme shops embrace this new paradigm? They studied the involvement in the current FSE development of 127 Theme shops.

At first glance, these seemed to be a little premature, considering that only architecture for themes supporting FSE is coming to WordPress at the end of July. It certainly sets the base numbers to see what will happen until December. These are the numbers to watch changing in the next half year, and it will answer the original questions.

• 57% of theme shops feature their Gutenberg compatibility.
• Only 17% of theme shops offer custom Gutenberg blocks.
• 3% of theme shops provide block patterns.

The team also talked to 22 theme shops about their intentions regards full-site editing. You need to read the article to learn more.

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Fränk Klein at WPDeveloper Courses, released his new course: Building Block-Based Themes. If you want to learn how to build a real-life example theme and all the ins and outs for a theme using the full-site editing capabilities and theme.json.

On Fullsiteediting.com, Carolina Nymark has been offering her Full Site editing course for free, but that might change soon.

Joe Casabona at CreatorCourses is also working on an update of his Gutenberg Theme course.

My take-away from the acquisitions of Atomic Blocks, Co Blocks etc. is that early adopters found it quite worth their while to deal with the ever-moving goal posts while developing along site Gutenberg developers. The future is yours!

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Upcoming WordPress Events

June 6, 2021 7:00 pm EDT / 23:00 UTC
WordPress Meetup Philadelphia
Full Site Editing Review and Test-a-thon

June 7 – 9th, 2021
WordCamp Europe
A virtual event and contributor day. Call for sponsors is open.

🎉 Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021

June 10th, 2021
WordPress “Mega Meetup”: Plugins That Keep Websites Running

June 20 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Japan
The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think…

June 24, 2021
WPEngine Summit 2021
The digital breakthrough conference released their schedule. Personally, I am very much looking forward to the Keynote talk with Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms at 12:55 EDT / 16:55 UTC. I also hope to see talks with Rob Stinson, Carrie Dils and Chris Wiegman. There are also deep dive talks listed into Headless WordPress. Enterprise WordPress is definitely heading down that route.

June 24 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Cochabama (Colombia)

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
Calls for speakers ends TODAY!

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress

August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”

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On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.

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Featured Image: Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

It was announced as a discussion panel about the present and future of WordPress with Full Site Editing.

The panelists, highly involved in this new feature, discussed many topics about FSE and how it is going to be a new revolution in the WordPress ecosystem.

The Panelist were Danielle Zarcaro, Grzegorz Ziółkowski, Koen Van den Wijngaert and Milana Cap

Jose Ramon Padron and Lesley Molecke moderated the discussion.

Torque Magazine did an outstanding job live tweeting.

The transcript and table of contents

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José Ramón Padron: Hello, Lesley.

Lesley Molecke: Hey, Moncho.

José Ramón Padron: I’m laughing, because this is the moment my neighbor started to do this at home. I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t sound through the microphone, but I’m hearing a hammer quite hard on that building. I hope it’s not-

Lesley Molecke: I can’t hear anything, but listen, I’m ready for this next session. I can’t believe that we’re already here. It’s already the final session of the day, and it’s going to be a good one. 

Introduction of the topic and the panelists

José Ramón Padron: Yes, it’s true. It’s going to be a good one, because we have a lot of good people talking about a quite good and hot topic inside the WordPress community. One of the things we are going to have, really near in, I don’t know, in 5.8, in the next version of WordPress, full site editing?

Lesley Molecke: Yes. We would like to welcome our panelists. This is a panel presentation, so it should be a good conversation with a number of experts speaking. So they will join us here on stage in just a moment. Hello, hello. Hi, everybody. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: Hello.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Hello, there. 

Lesley Molecke: Will you please introduce yourselves? 

Milana Cap: Which order?

Lesley Molecke: As you wish. 

José Ramón Padron: So let’s start with Milana, just for talking.

Milana Cap: Because I’m the loudest. Well, you said expert. I’m here just for the cookies and to bribe contributors to come to documentation. Also, I’m here as documentation team co-rep. And I’m the docs focus lead for a new release, 5.8. I should be knowing what’s happening, hopefully soon. I’m Milana from Serbia. 

Lesley Molecke: How about you, Danielle?

José Ramón Padron: Thank you so much.

Danielle Zarcaro: Sure. I’m having an issue too. I don’t know whether he’s blowing leaves or mowing the lawn? I don’t know what’s happening. 

Lesley Molecke: We can’t hear it, it’s okay.

Danielle Zarcaro: Good. I’m Danielle. I’m from the US. I am the head of paperback web development. We build custom WordPress websites and maintain them, and maintain existing websites, and all that that comes with. We just launched overnightwebsite.com. So that’s mostly what I deal with is the old and the new of WordPress. So it’s the whole range.

José Ramón Padron: Thanks, Danielle. Let’s go with Koen.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Hey, hi, there. Is this thing on? Hey, Good evening. I’m Koen. I’m a WordCamp and meetup organizer from Belgium. I run my own company called NEOK IT, where I provide software consultancy, partly around WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for a few years now. I like to learn things, as well as challenge myself while doing it. 

So for a while now, I’ve been casually contributing to Gutenberg, as a way of giving back and mostly getting more accustomed to the ins and outs of the project. So that’s me. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: It looks like it’s me now. So my name is Grzegorz Ziółkowski. I live in Oleśnica, Poland, and I work at Automatic, where I spend all time contributing to the WordPress core. My main focus is Gutenberg. I was helping to merge changes from the plugin, Gutenberg plugin to the WordPress core for the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release, which won’t contain all the necessary pieces of the full site editing. However, there is a lot of new goodies coming that will be ready to use on the site. 

Lesley Molecke: Excellent. So Moncho and I have come up with a bunch of questions for you. They go from really basic, and then they work up and get more and more exciting and interesting. So we’re going to start with the first one, which is actually, this is my question, because I don’t know the answer to it yet and hopefully you will educate me. What is full site editing and where did it come from? 

What is full site editing and where did it come from?

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Maybe if I can start, maybe the best thing to say at first is that full site editing is not just a big monolithic heap of a big function. It’s better to think of it as a collection of a lot of features that come with Gutenberg, as part of the second phase of the Gutenberg roadmap. Maybe someone else can pitch in now, so I don’t do a monologue.

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: If you don’t take a bigger picture, so full site editing is part of the Gutenberg project, there are four phases. And we are reaching this year, the end of phase two. The first one was introducing the building blocks for editing content. Now, we will be editing a full canvas of the sites. And the next two phases are collaborative editing. So to let people collaborate when they are changing websites or writing content. And the fourth one is multilingual support.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: What everyone is waiting for, I believe. That’s going to be a big one. 

What problem does Full-Site Editing solve?

José Ramón Padron: Anything else? Anything else? Because one of the things inside of Lesley’s question is, what problem does it solve? Which is, I think, very interesting. What do you think?

Milana Cap: I think that the problem it’s trying to solve is to give the user one unique workflow to edit everything. Because at this moment, you have post, you have page, and you go to block editor. Or if you are not brave enough, you’re still using classic editor and you edit your content there. 

But then you want to change your logo, then you have to go to customizer. But then you have some theme options. And it depends on theme from theme, what will you edit and where? I believe the idea is to release end user from need to know everything about the theme, you just go there and you just edit. 

And if you want to edit footer, and you’re on the post and you’re editing post, and then you realize the menu is not correct, you edit menu. You don’t need to know, because nobody cares is it customizer or whatever? People care to know where it is. And it’s a good thing that you can see how it looks on the front end, which I think was the initial idea for Gutenberg. But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong.

I think that’s a huge problem that will be fixed, and solved with full site editing. For us who are building websites, I know that for every website, I have to create a ton of tutorials and everything, to show clients how to use it. And this will solve all that. So we will be out of job.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: I also like to think that it brings a lot of power and more freedom and flexibility to end users of a website. Because in the traditional way of doing things, there’s a few ways one can have a WordPress website. He can have an agency, have a website built for him. Or he could be using some sort of a theme builder, or he could have installed a theme from the theme directory or maybe it’s even a custom theme.

But now end users are able to have so much more power about editing templates, and editing all sorts of aspects of their website. I think that’s really exciting to look forward to. 

Danielle Zarcaro: I think it solves a couple of problems, to add to that. It takes away some of the ambiguity around how to edit each individual thing. So WordPress’s whole thing is to democratize publishing. There were areas of the websites that were just not available to edit to anyone who doesn’t know code. 

So there’s the ease of use gap that came about, that you can’t edit the 404 page, you can’t edit the header or footer, unless an option is available. Is the theme using the site logo that you upload in WordPress, or you’re going to upload the image and then theme isn’t going to show it. It gets rid of those, however the theme developer decided to do it that day, and it streamlines a lot of that process to do some expected behavior to make it easier for anyone to hop into a site and edit it, and it democratizes publishing on a whole new level. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: That’s a nice way of saying it. Yes. Because right now there’s this huge fragmented world of all different ways of themes that came up with our own way of editing site features and headers and customizing things. But there’s no real standard way of doing that. So it just makes it harder to step out of that particular ecosystem, I think. I’m looking forward to the standardized way of doing theming in WordPress.

José Ramón Padron: Grzegorz, I think you had something. Yes.

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: I wanted to add some more to it. Because I think it’s important to note that it’s not only about unifying everything, but it’s also to giving the power to users to change those little bits that annoy them, like the color of the header, or the font size. 

Before, you would have, or either learn CSS or learn HTML just to edit that. But now you will have tools that will allow that, and you won’t have to call your site administrator to do a simple change. So maybe you could tell that, remove the job from those people who maintain those sites, but on the other hand, they will have more time to work on expanding their offering and improving their own products or services, just to use the time.

So this is something that sounds scary, but on the other hand, it opens a lot of possibilities. Because the idea of blocks also gives you the power that you can create your own blocks that you can use in several websites, and give additional functionality out of the box for your customers.

What happens to websites that are live (in production) when WordPress 5.8 is released?

José Ramón Padron: So regarding that this is something new, something is going to happen from 5.8, as far as I know, what happens to the WordPress websites that are already live and in production? Must they be rebuilt in order to use full site editing? Or they’re going to work in the way they are? 

Milana Cap: They have to be rebuilt completely. It will crash. No, it won’t.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: It will just crash when you update. 

Milana Cap: No, it won’t.

Lesley Molecke:That’s big news. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Oh, we were not supposed to say that, sorry.

Milana Cap: No, they will not be crashed, they will not have to be rebuilt completely. As you all know, WordPress always build in mind with what is already out there, not to crash anything. And in 5.8, not everything will get in. So if I’m wrong, please correct me, but I think that in 5.8, you will have to install a Gutenberg plugin to actually use full site editing. So not everything will be there, but it will be foundation for the next releases when everything else will come in. 

But still, we will have some nice things coming in and nothing will break. You can go part by part and rebuilding it and adapting for a complete editing experience. 

José Ramón Padron: Thanks, Milana. Anything to add ?

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Maybe Grzegorz can do it. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: You can go. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Okay, but you can just… Well, some of the full site editing features will be added to 5.8, I think, but Grzegorz will probably be able to say which one exactly. I’m hearing feedback. 

José Ramón Padron: An echo. There is an echo.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: So it’s not some monolithic feature, like we said before, but it’s more like a collection of features and they won’t be turned off all at once by default, by just upgrading to WordPress 5.8. You do need to have a full site editing team to enable all features, but some of them will also be available for non-block based themes. 

Things like the template editor blocks, the site logo, the tagline, the query blocks, posts, posts related blocks, like post title, post [inaudible 00:14:45], they will all be made available in the post editor. And as well as that, I think it was also possible to also not edit, but with add new templates to a normal theme and edit those in the template editor. It’s pretty awesome. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: So the first step is to allow people to change, use the block-based paradigm on a single page. So think about that, about previously you would have to create a PHP file to change a single page view. And now you will be able to do that to through UI, and that will create an override that you would be able to delete later. But as a user, so it’s more like empowering people who have access to the sites, rather that’s a feature for the team designer.

So that’s one thing. And everything like that is optional, so there will be a flag to disable that. So site owners or theme authors we will say that, “I don’t want that,” and they can remove that. 

The one big change is that not necessarily related to full site editing, but is somehow in the same area is the widget editor, which will be… I don’t know what’s the final decision, but it will be depending on the feedback from the testing, either an opt-in or opt-out.

So the idea would be that you will be able to use the same blogs you use in your content to use also in site, when you would previously use widgets. So that’s a nice change. If you have your own custom blocks, you would be able to put there as well, which will open those new possibilities, and also somehow unify the interface. 

But as you could hear, there is a lot of new blocks coming. But it’s just addition, it’s not something that you have to use. It’s just there if you want to try them out, that will be perfect time to do that after 5.8 is out. And there is a-

Koen Van den Wijngaert: That will be released tomorrow, by the way. So if you want to test it, please do so. It’s by a lot of users that can test and provide feedback on the new update that we can improve upon those things, and decide what can be added and what should be skipped. So go install it tomorrow.

Lesley Molecke:Yes, we should acknowledge that, that everyone here is actually working really hard right now to create the new release, while also attending WordCamp Europe and being here on this panel and contributing on track too, and y’all are everywhere. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your time. 

What does Full Site Editing change for the various WordPress stakeholders

My next question has to do with stakeholders. So obviously, a big change like this to WordPress has multiple stakeholder groups. It has the end users, the users of WordPress websites down the road. It has the editors of WordPress websites. It has the companies who build themes and the companies who build plugins, and the people who contribute, all of these different groups. 

I’m interested in talking about the theme creators who currently primarily rely on offering block patterns with their own header and footer and sidebar management. So how does that work with full site editing?

Danielle Zarcaro: Well, it works the same way. You can offer whatever you want. I think it’s a misconception that by giving the users the ability to do what they want means that they’ll be able to do anything they want. If you are someone like me who’s creating custom sites, you can actually more easy put options and make it so that you don’t have to install a whole extra plugin to add a couple of extra options. You reserve that for the bigger projects that you’re doing.

And it’s up to the theme creators, if they’re creating a theme on a wider scale, instead of just an individual client, that’s up to them to decide how they want it to work. They just opt into stuff, they add stuff, they add their custom options, but it’s all working within the same ecosystem, and we’re all speaking the same language now instead.

So if you don’t want to make it so that your header and your footer and your sidebars are manageable in the block editor or in full site editing, then I guess you don’t have to. You can hard code whatever you want, you can do that now, you don’t have to make any options available. 

But then at some point, you’re going to start to fall behind, in terms of what you’re able to do. So it’s going to work the same way, just with more possibilities. That’s how I go about looking at it. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: You’ll be able to turn off or on, or even tweak some of the configuration options just by providing a single JSON file for those things. But also, I like to think that with full site editing, a theme developer or theme designer can benefit from a more solid foundation that is standardized and optimized for things like accessibility, usability and performance. 

That way more of their time and energy can be spent into building things that actually add value to their customers, all the while benefiting from the existing full site editing features and even tweaking them to their liking. So that’s a big plus, I think. So they don’t have to go and reinvent the wheel every time they build a new website.

José Ramón Padron: There is something related to the last major change we saw in WordPress, when Gutenberg appears, when Gutenberg finally was born in 5.0. And now you can see that there is a plugin that is the old editor. And at this moment, we this kind of legacy, we can call it legacy, but it’s still available there. 

Why will Full-Site Editing be in Core and not a plugin?

My question is about why there are things that can sit in the core, and a different one can be set as a plugin? For example, why put the full site editing in the core when it is something that the majority of users at this moment don’t know? And we hope all of them are going to use it, but as everything that comes new in WordPress, there is always a time for getting used to it. 

So what do you think is the main reason full site editing is in the core and not, for example, in a plugin and people can choose if they want it or not?

Milana Cap: I think that now that we have Gutenberg in core, and full site editing is obviously expansion of what we were using in core by now, I think it would be silly not to have it in core and have it as a plugin, when you can use… This is just a foundation to put all the blocks that you already have. So it’s not like the structure that you still don’t have, you have. There is Gutenberg and now you will just expand it to the whole website.

And there is benefit in having everything standardized, especially for people who are using themes from our repository. So when you switch theme, you have all those available, things to edit, you know where it is, and you have all the blocks available.

José Ramón Padron: Makes sense.

Milana Cap: So that’s a huge benefit. I love that theme in wordpress.org is insisting on idea that people will change themes, and they cannot lose anything. I love that idea. I think this will really help having that. 

So when you have custom themes, and people have different ways of editing right now the header, the footer, or they don’t have it at all, so you’re afraid to change the theme. But with full site editing, you will have all that available.

Now, as far as not knowing how to use it goes, we didn’t know many things, how to use. And the thing that we really need right now is, here comes my pitch, documentation. So we really, really need to document everything good, because when you don’t have documentation, people don’t know how to use it and then they don’t interact with it enough. They don’t find bugs, they don’t contribute. They don’t think ideas how to expand it, and you don’t have contributors, and there is no cycle for open source. So first, we need to do a good documentation. 

We did fail a bit with Gutenberg getting in, and we can still feel it. We can still feel developers who are frustrated and don’t know how to work with it and how to build on that. I’m asking everyone to come and help. While doing documentation, you will actually learn how to do it. 

I’m not afraid of new things. I don’t think anyone should be afraid, especially because this is not a really new thing, like Gutenberg was a new thing. We didn’t know what it was. Now we know, full site editing is what we already know, it’s new, but expanded, so it’s easier to learn. And if we do enough work, and we are doing… people make WordPress themes are doing great job.

Just mentioning few, Anne is doing the testing, great job, and Carolina even have a website for full site editing where you can read everything. So it’s doing better, and we can learn and there are resources, so there’s no need to be afraid of it. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: And if I’m not mistaken, there’s even seven milestones added to the full site editing milestones. It’s called gradual adoption. So that it focuses solely on making sure that full site editing features are being adopted better and more gradual. And that work is being put into actually making sure that the documentation is on par, and that the dev notes are up to date, and all of that kind of thing. So that’s also important. That’s also part of the work that’s now being done after the feature freeze for the 5.8 features. 

Danielle Zarcaro: I think from my perspective, as someone who’s working with it and working with people, no one’s going to use it if you make it optional. People are going to do what they’re going to do, if you let them. 

I think WordPress itself has never, it’s been very transparent about where it’s going. We’ve all been able to use Gutenberg for years now. We’ve been able to install the plugin, and then we’ve been able to use the block editor in core for years now. So it’s like we’ve had this getting used to period.

So we’re just going in the direction that we said we’d go in, and people can still find ways to go backwards. They can still install the classic plugin for sites that need it, they can install the classic plugin for certain things. They cannot enable the block editor for custom post types. There’s all kinds of stuff that you can do to counteract some of that. 

But like I referenced before, and I’ve talked a lot about this in the past, at some point, you have to embrace the tool that you’re using. So you’re either going to embrace the fact that we’re all working towards the same goal, or you’re working against it and basically forking your own version and working on your own, which is fine. But then you can’t offer the latest stuff. 

I think it’s up to you as a developer to, on some level, work with things, and meet WordPress where it is. You have to give up. WordPress is open source. You have to allow yourself to go with the tide a little bit. 

And when you have new users who come into WordPress, who are installing things, they’re not going to know that there was an old WordPress. They’re not going to know that, oh, I have to install this other plugin to enable all of these awesome features. You have to think forward. So you have to allow these new users to start installing it, and use all the cool latest stuff. 

If someone wants to go backwards for a bit, then they can put the work in to do that. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: It’s also worth mentioning that the full site editing, it’s soon to be included in the core, it’s always something that we wanted to have. It’s not something that came, because there was the 5.0 release and the block editor. It’s the other way around.

So we took the smallest step possible to enable people to start using this block paradigm, start learning UI. We got a lot of feedback. And if you look at the iterations that worked, how the editor looked two and a half years ago and how it looks now, it’s a completely different product.

And also the way, how we people started thinking about building content with blocks is different. It’s not longer, building small custom blocks, but rather combining a lot of existing blocks into block patterns, into having UIs, having ways to change a big portion of the page with solutions. Like now it’s coming to the query block that allows you to switch the list of blog posts will be displayed on the page.

So we are constantly trying to make it easier for users to provide the infrastructure, also for plugin authors, for theme authors, so they can build upon that, and have the unified experience. So people, once they learn how to write a post, they will know how to change the template of the page, because it’s exactly the same paradigm. 

It’s even in the same UI interface. You just go from one page to another, without the page reload. Everything can happen, you can go back, you can revisit how it looks when you compose everything together. It’s no longer you need to go to the preview of the page and see another tab to see, oh, it looks good, but now something broke outside of the post content. I need to go find customizers and go to this template, or call the theme author on the support and change that for me. 

So this is a huge project, and has so many layers on top of that. We want to bring as much as possible, I would say, what makes sense to most of the users, but not all of them. Because there is always room for extenders to build their own solutions on top of that, and give this unique perspective and look and feel for the customers.

What will be the role of existing page builders?

Lesley Molecke: I feel like we’re tiptoeing closer and closer to this question. I’m just going to ask it, just get it out there on the table. What do you all feel is the big role for the online page builders, the Divi, the Elementor, these big guys, taking into account that we’re moving into full site editing, block patterns, all of these things that are being built into WordPress core? What is the role of these page builders that so many of us use? 

Danielle Zarcaro: I think that’s up to them. I think ultimately, they were there to push the envelope. They were there to bring us to where we currently are. I think without them, we might not have had this extra push. Maybe it would have taken a few more years to put all this into core. These builders saw this hole and filled it. 

And ultimately, they’re going to have a different UI anyway. So they’re going to do have their fan base, they’re going to have their whatever preference to editing things, maybe certain things are dragging and dropping. Whatever they make available, they’re going to extend WordPress. So that’s up to them to decide how they’re going to go about it. 

So they’re all already currently working with the block editor, all the major ones anyway are. If they’re concerned at all about future proofing themselves, they’ve already looked into how to integrate themselves with the block editor. I think it’s only going to enhance everything to see how they go about integrating themselves into the new ecosystem. 

I really love, as a developer, I love the way Oxygen goes about it, where you can build stuff, and then go and edit it in Gutenberg. So that’s a really cool take on it. And so it’s just a new way to innovate, and they’re going to have their place.

I think it’s cool that we now have these established things. We have these people to look to, to see where are the new holes in WordPress? Where can we go from here? And they’re going to continue to just push the envelope. I love the diversity that’s out there. 

When you talk about builders, there’s at least four that come to mind and that’s awesome. And I hope that it stays that way and grows. And that’s only going to help us. And so hopefully, it’ll take away some of that, Divi does this way and Elementor does this way. So some things are going to hopefully become uniform, and then they’ll branch out in other ways. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Exactly. Because now, there’s a few big ones indeed, and they all seem to have their own ecosystem surrounding them, which is okay, because as you said, they all implement and provide their own stream of users to the WordPress platform. So it’s definitely interesting to look at, and observe how they will interact with WordPress and Gutenberg.

I know most of them already have some sort of a way to either include a new template view or something as a block, or even toggle between Gutenberg and their own editor. But the thing I’m actually quite looking forward to is whether or not they will start using the new default way of doing things. So that they can actually merit from how it is now going to be supposed to be done, and add on top of that their own set of features and new value-adding stuff. 

Like the cadence theme, for example, is doing. In my eyes, it’s quite a nice way of implementing Gutenberg the right way. I’m very interested to see how they will be going to implement full site editing things in the near future, because now it’s all in the customizer, of course. So, interesting. 

What is going to happen with the rest of the open-source solutions like Joomla, Drupal?

José Ramón Padron: We were talking about how full site editing can affect the own WordPress ecosystem, talking about for example, what happens with the builders, builders like Divi, Elementor, et cetera. But what do you think, taking account you are developers, designers, you are on the technical side, contributors, what do you think is going to happen with the rest of the open source solutions like Joomla, Drupal? How do you think it’s going to affect? So it’s going to make WordPress better than the rest, it’s going to be a real advantage in front of the rest, like Wix, like the other ones, not only in the open source reality, but outside WordPress? What do you think is going to happen with full site editing?

Milana Cap: They will all take Gutenberg. Drupal already do it.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: But Drupal also has a [crosstalk 00:37:15]. But there’s not like this CMS is better than the other one. They all serve different purposes. And it’s like using the right tool for the right job. And having more competition in the game is pretty good actually.

I think the biggest reason that we, as WordPress, have the biggest market share to date in the CMS market is because of the low threshold to start building websites. And that’s partly thanks to all of those theme builders. I think it’s important to reach out and make sure that we all keep using WordPress and not just fork off their own version of WordPress, because it’s open source, they can do that. 

So if we all collaborate, we can build pretty nice things, I think. 

Milana Cap: I think we already saw this many times in history, but let’s just take a look at Internet Explorer 6. It was so bad that we got this good Chrome and Firefox. And it was so difficult to create posts for some people in WordPress, that we got page builders. So this is happening. There is always this kind of competition between WordPress and Joomla and Drupal. 

But the truth is, they all have their share. Ours is a little bigger than theirs, but they will continue to exist, and I hope they will push, they will invent something new. And then we will be jealous, and we will do something better, because that’s how it works. Human mind compares. So that’s what we do.

I’m proud that 12 years ago I have selected WordPress and now it’s 40%. I think I’m smart, because I did that. But I don’t like just one way of doing things. I like things messing up. I like people inventing new things. That makes us all better and everything makes better. 

I’m really looking forward to see what other CMSs will do, but also what will page builders do. I have never used page builder, as someone who builds website and some of you uses website. I cannot say anything. 

But I’m seeing in our WordPress Serbia Facebook group, I’m seeing people asking questions about it. I know what they are doing and how, and I really hope to see they invent something insane, so we will have to push Gutenberg again and just pushing forward. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Even better.

Danielle Zarcaro: I think it’s going to blur the line a little bit. Because I just recently had to go into a Wix site and it is no longer Wix or Weebly. It is Wix or Webflow. Webflow popped up as an in between to Weebly and the GoDaddy builder and WordPress.

I think it blurs the line a little bit, where you can now visually edit things and you can now edit those parts, like I said, the 404. All these other things, you can just do now. And so I think it blurs the line and WordPress can now fit into more categories as well.

So maybe it’s not a Squarespace, which is a template machine that you stick a bunch of stuff in and it’s easy, but it does open it up to a whole nother market. Instead of just, oh, you got to have somebody on your side, it now opens the door for more people. And then now they’re ready to grow, and now they come to you and are familiar with WordPress. 

So there’s the three or four other markets that’ll pop up as well. So it blurs a little bit and makes it a little more accessible. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: There’s also one thing that I’m looking forward to, is the blog patterns directory, which should enable a quicker creation of websites, instead of going, changing everything yourself. If you don’t have, like me, skills for designing, you just pick something that someone crafted very carefully. And maybe pay some fee for that and have unique experience for all the use cases you have.

It’s no longer you need to use one theme, and hope that it has all the solutions you need. Instead, you can combine from different sources and build the best experience you need. So that’s one thing.

One thing that I’m looking forward to is how I’m seeing the growth of headless. It’s getting a lot of attention at the conferences in the WordPress community. And that interaction with full site editing, I’m looking forward how that will evolve. Because at the moment, if you want to use headless solutions you need to build from scratch the front end side.

However, if you combine that with what Gutenberg can produce and reach that, that will open a new set of possibilities. And that will bring big companies looking at WordPress, because now they will be able to build completely custom solutions, and also use whatever WordPress provides in its core, rather treating it as a source of the content only.

José Ramón Padron: I’m glad to read that question. 

Lesley Molecke: Koen, you have one final thing to add, before we sign off?

Koen Van den Wijngaert: I was going to say that one obstacle might be that a lot of back end developers have mostly skills in writing PHP and stuff. But most of the new features, you really do benefit more if you have a JavaScript back end. I think we should also focus on helping those developers transition into more and more adopting JavaScript and active development to develop even better new solutions.

Milana Cap: And documentation. 

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Most importantly, of course. 

Lesley Molecke: Yes. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you all for this really interesting conversation. I now know more about full site editing than I do before, thanks to you. But also, I think our audience does as well, which is fantastic.

And again, thank you for taking the time to join us, even though you’re also so, so busy working on the new release, and working on this massive change to WordPress. We’re really grateful to you and your time. Enjoy the rest of the conference. We will see you later and thank you. 

Will you be heading over to the Q&A room to talk with the audience? Does that sound like a familiar thing to you? All right. 

Milana Cap: We can, if there are questions.

José Ramón Padron: There will be.

Lesley Molecke: People can also make meetings with you and see you in other rooms and things.

José Ramón Padron: There will be more content related full site editing during WordCamp Europe, in each day, I think, or also in the number two track. So this is not the last time we are going to talk about full site editing. 

Another thing is to say thank you for accepting our invitation, more or less in the last minute. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Lesley Molecke:Thank you all.

Milana Cap: Thank you, bye. 

Grzegorz Ziółkowski: Thank you.

Koen Van den Wijngaert: Thank you. Very nice to being here. 

José Ramón Padron: See you around. Ta-ta.

Howdy,

It’s the eve of the second virtual WordCamp Europe. Tickets are still available for another awesome three days with talks, workshops and contributor events. This year, the organizer decide to sprinkle contributor event into the rest of the schedule and have for all three days, a mix between techtalk, business talks and contributor presentation and discussions. There are quite a few events around the Block editor, Full-site-editing and block-based themes. I compiled a list for you. And just because I am so focused on Gutenberg, doesn’t mean you have to. 😎 Check out the schedule and get your tickets now.

Hopefully, it will be the last virtual conference and we will see each other at an in-person WordCamp Europe in 2022. I am still hoping for Porto, Portugal. At this state of withdrawal from meeting WordPress friends in person, it doesn’t matter where it will take place, thought. It’ll be a Hug-Fest.

Last week, I mentioned the next Gutenberg Times Live Q & A in the subscribers-only section of this newsletter. Now we have a full panel. Registration is officially open. I am thrileed to host Daisy Olsen, Jeff Ong and Tammie Lister for our show on How to get started on Theme building for Full-site Editing and using the Theme.json file to configure your theme, and its interaction with the block editor. The Theme.json file will be introduced with the release of WordPress 5.8 in July 2021. Get a head start and join us!

Grzegorz (Greg) Ziolkowski will be back from vaction next week and we will record our next Changelog episode on Friday 11, 2021. I am so excited and can’t wait until Grzegorz is back! If you have questions or suggestions or news, you want us to consider, hit reply or send them to [email protected]. We now have consitently 500 – 800 downloads per week. It’s humbling, mind-boggling and inspiring. And if YOU are a listener, Thank You! If you have a minute or two, consider writing a review of the podcast. We’d be grateful and might read it out loud on the next show.

Alright, that’s the news around Gutenberg Times. Below you’ll find what else happened in the Gutenberg universe. Enjoy!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS: Hope to see you at WordCamp Europe. Don’t forget to join the #WCEU channel on WordPress Slack and meet speaker, sponsors, organizer and attendees like you and me.

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Full-Site-Editing & Themes

Anne McCarthy published the Stick the landing (pages) Summary. This post is a summary of the sixth call for testing for the experimental FSE outreach program, which also was translated into Italian to reach more of the non-English audience. Earlier calls were also translated into Japanese. The group of FSE testers is much bigger now, thanks to the persistent efforts by Anne to reach out to the community and stay on top of all the issues around the template editor.

A reminder: You can still join the the seventh call for testing: Polished Portfolios – The deadline for your feedback was extended to June 16th, 2021.

If you read this before Sunday night, you can participate in the Full Site Editing Review and Test-a-thon Sunday, June 6th at 7 – 8:30 pm with the WordPress Meetup group in Philadelphia.

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Reading through the summary, I am stuck on trying to understand the difference between a template built by the site-owner and a theme template. What will happen with their templates when the site-owner decides to change the overall theme of their site? There is still plenty to be figured out. How edited block templates are linked to themes is topic of the discussion on GitHub. The Gutenberg team would appreciate some thoughts from folks familiar with these APIs (theme mods, performance, database).

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Kjell Reigstad posted again acomprehensive list of issues and discussions regarding block-based themes and Full-Site Editing: Gutenberg + Themes: Week of May 31, 2021. Any of the listed items are worth checking out and consider commenting. The more the team knows the better the next iteration of Full-Site editing and block-based themes becomes.

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WordPress 5.8 release preparations

From the meeting notes of this week’s Dev Chat: “Docs needs the most help with end user documentation. For block editor in particular. Some changes from 5.6 and 5.7 are still not published and we had a significant drop in number of contributors due to pandemic situation. Anyone interested in getting involved please ping Milana Cap  (zzap on Slack). 

The summary of needed DevNotes for new features in WordPress 5.8 is available on GitHub and could use contributors. There is also a “needs dev note” label for pull requests.

The widget screen could use some more testing. As a reminder, please read Help Test the Widgets Editor for WordPress 5.8 by Andre Draganescu

Block Patterns

Hector Pietro wrote in his post What’s next in Gutenberg? (June 2021):

“Since Gutenberg 10.7, block patterns displayed in the inserter are fetched from the WordPress.org Pattern Directory. This opens the door to having a big amount of wonderful patterns available in the inserter, which will require iterating on the pattern insertion experience.

For more updates on the Pattern Directory, stay tuned for Block Pattern Directory updates and check the most recent design iterations for the Pattern Directory.”.

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Plugins for the Block Editor

Featured Box Plugin with this plugin “you can highlight a image with your key features” wrote Sumaiya Siddika on WordPress.org. Justin Tadlock took it for a spin.

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JetFormBuilder — Form Builder plugin for Gutenberg from the plugins stable at CrocoBlock. The developers Andrey Shevchenko and Oleksandr Ivanenko also added an extensive Post action hook system that allows you to daisy chain actions and integrated with 3rd party systems. I haven’t tested it yet, but it looks promising. Crocoblock has been building plugins and tools for Elementor and has now started supporing Gutenberg with their products as well.

Another new plugin is the JetEngine for Gutenberg a dynamic content plugin that lets you build a complex websites fast and cost-effectively.

Themes for Full-Site Editing

A few people ask about Themes that are already working with the Full-Site Editing system and Site Editor. So I put a list together of those I know about. Now before you use them, you need to be aware that they are all built while Full-Site Editing is still under active development, hasn’t been released yet and ergo many features are still experimental. Do not use in production or live site.

• Block Base by Automattic
• Naledi by Anariel Design
• TT1 Blocks by WordPress contributors, the FSE sibling of the Twenty-Twenty-One Theme
• Block-Based Bosco by Fränk Klein
• Armando by Carolyn Newmark
• Q by Ari Stathopoulos
• Hansen by Uxl Themes

If you find any missing, let me know.

Gutenberg related Business Updates

This week’s big WordPress business news is the aquisition of Eliots Condon‘s plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) by Delicious Brains. With over more then 1 million active installs ACF is one of the widest used plugins. Thousands for developers depened on it in the last ten years to build complex WordPress sites.

Stepping away from ACF has not been an easy decision to make. The reasoning behind it comes from a place of humility. As the number of installs have grown from thousands to millions, the needs of the product have outgrown my ability to develop solutions. The last thing I want to do to this amazing community is unintentionally hold back the project, so something needed to change.

Elliot Condon, ACF

Early on into the development of the block editor, Candon was also developing a php way to build blocks and integrated it into Advanced Custom Fields Pro starting with the version 5.8. This effort certainly helped developers even more. Now they could use their existing tools and offer their users Gutenberg compatible sites withouth learning ES6 JavaScript or ReactJS.

Delicious Brains also caters to WordPress Developers with products like SpinupWP (💕), WP Migrate DB and more. Their team seems to be the right fit to pick up the torch and put ACF on an even stronger path for future growth.

You can learn more about the aquisition via

• WPTavern (Sarah Gooding),
• Post Status Excerpt (Cory Miller & David Bisset) ,
• A WordPress Announcement of Epic Proportions (Delicious Brain)
• 10 Years of ACF – A truly wonderful time

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Upcoming WordPress Events

June 6, 2021 7:00 pm EDT / 23:00 UTC
WordPress Meetup Philadelphia
Full Site Editing Review and Test-a-thon

June 7 – 9th, 2021
WordCamp Europe
A virtual event and contributor day. Call for sponsors is open.

🎉 Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021

June 10th, 2021
WordPress “Mega Meetup”: Plugins That Keep Websites Running

June 20 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Japan
The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think…

June 24, 2021
WPEngine Summit 2021
The digital breakthrough conference just released their schedule. Personally, I am very much looking forward to the Keynote talk with Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Marchall Plan for Moms at 12:55 EDT / 16:55 UTC. I also hope to see talks with Rob Stinston, Carrie Dils and Chris Wiegman. There are also deep dive talks listed into Headless WordPress. Enterprise WordPress is definitely heading down that route.

June 24 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Cochabama (Colombia)

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
Calls for speakers ends TODAY!

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress

August 6 + 7, 2021
WordCamp Nicaragua

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.”

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On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.

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Featured Image: Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

WordCamp Europe 2021 will be one of the largest virtual WordCamps again and the schedule has some great talks for every WordPress users, developers, site builders, theme designers, DIY site owners and content creators.

We looked through the schedule and spotted very forward-looking Gutenberg related talks, workshops and discussions. Before you study the list, I would recommend the site Time Zone Converter to help you convert the listed times from Central Europe Summer Time (CEST) to your local time. Once in a while I get confused by time zones, and that’s my favorite site to set me straight.

Fabian Kägy, developer at 10up:
Building great experiences in the new editor

Description: Starting out building blocks or experiences for the WordPress block editor can be a bit daunting. Where do I start? Custom blocks, block patterns or just styling core blocks. In this talk, Kägy will walk through the different options and share the benefits and downsides of each while talking about overall good practices for building great editorial experiences.

As a sidenote: Almost exactly a year ago, Fabian Kägy was a presenter at a Gutenberg Times Live Q & A together with Grzegorz Ziolkowski, and demo’d how you can use and extend the official WordPress create-block scaffolding tool.

Monday, June 7th, 2021, at 10am EDT / 14:00 UTC / 16:00 CEST

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Full-Site Editing Panel Discussion

The names of the panelist are still a secret, and I will update the post when we know more.

If you’d like to get a jump start here are few resources:

• Video: Full-Site Editing Overview with Anne McCarthy
• Full-Site-Editing – the Ultimate Resource List
• So, You want to talk about Full-site Editing?

Monday, June 7, 2021 at 12:34 pm EDT / 16:34 UTC / CEST: 18:34

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Workshop: A walkthrough of Full Site Editing with Herb Miller, Web developer in UK,

Description: Herb Miller will give a short tour of Full Site Editing (FSE) in this workshop from his perspective as a contributor to the outreach experiment for this major development in WordPress.

He has created a learning resource which attendees can use to follow on during the workshop.

Herb will give attendees an overview of:

• how to get started
• the components of the Site Editor
• example templates and template parts
• some blocks used to create FSE themes
• example themes
• a very few code samples
• some answers to FAQs
• how to become involved
• and many links to other resources

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 11am EDT / 15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST

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Lee Shadle, web developer Blazing fast block development

Lee Shadle wrote in his description: “I’ve been OBSESSED w/ building blocks since before Gutenberg was released. I’ve built a BUNCH of custom block plugins over the years. In this workshop I’m going to share the framework I’ve been using for quickly building custom block plugins for WordPress.”. Shadle recently also held a talk at WordSesh and demo’d his create-block-plugin scaffolding tool and it was inspiring. This is definitely not a talk to miss.

Tuesday June 8, 2021 12:00 EDT / 16:00 UTC / 18:oo CEST

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The Future of Themes in WordPress

The future of themes will be a topic of this panel discussion. Stay tuned or follow WordCamp Europe on Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

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Conversation with Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic. The conversation should be the highlight of the WordCamp Europe

Wednesday, June 9th, 2021 – 11:42 EDT / 15:42 UTC / 17:42 CEST

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This edition of the WordCamp Europe also offers interesting Sponsor talks. Look for them on the schedule, too.

As we’re nearing 5.8, there’s an increasing demand for people to speak about Full Site Editing and this post should help act as a resource guide to enable more people to do so. As always, I would love contributions from the wider community to build this out into an even more comprehensive resource! While this post covers a lot of content, see it as a go to place to mix and match as you’d like for your own presentation rather than something you need to know every detail of. For example, if you’re presenting to theme authors, you can use this to get a sense at a glance of what might be relevant from what to demo, what resources to share, what GitHub issues to highlight, and more.

Resources

• Feel free to re-use or get inspiration from this FSE Overview.
• Pull from this working transcript for the above talks.

Key points to cover around 5.8:

• FSE is a collection of features and not a monolith.
• Because FSE is a collection of features, Core can be flexible in shipping what is both stable and adds the most value.
• 5.8 is focused mainly on bringing tools to extenders with limited changes to the user experience. This includes theme.json, new theme blocks, design tools, and template editing mode.

Demo ideas

Depending on who you are and who the audience, the following are your best bets for demo content:

• Block Theme building. @mkaz has some great videos uploaded to YouTube that you can check out and Carolina Nymark has this lovely site.
• Template Editing Mode. Here’s an overview video from yours truly but keep in mind this in progress PR that, if merged, would change the experience of editing a post/page inside template editing mode.
• Explore blocks with a focus on the Navigation & Query Blocks. Note that the Navigation Block is not planned for 5.8. You can see a list of blocks planned for inclusion here.
• Build a custom 404 page. You can follow these instructions to set up your demo.

Helpful GitHub issues

• Site Editing Milestones: to get a high level overview of how this work has been approached and where to follow along.
• On plans for restricting access: mapping features/functionality in order to update the UI + proposal for a robust permissions system with FSE.
• On types of pathways for classic themes: Enabling FSE blocks in Classic Themes, Experiment to add Customizer Color Controls to TT1, Experiment using theme.json and Customizer, Allow creating custom block templates in Classic themes.
• On the placement of the site editor experience: Design and discussion exploring how best to finalize the placement of FSE related features in wp-admin. This is a long term item to keep in mind as the Site Editor is not shipping in 5.8.
• Upcoming Dev Notes for 5.8 to get an early peak at what’s new.

Helpful Posts

• Ways to keep up with FSE so people can pick and choose their communication adventure. 
• Full Site Editing and Themes: where things are from February 2021.
• Full Site Editing Outreach Program for those interested in helping to test and give feedback. 
• A recent series of questions and answers about Full Site Editing from 2021.
• A great overview of FSE features for non technical people.
• Status check on Site Editing and Customization from December 2020 for a more historical perspective.
• Go/No Go Recap post: to show how decisions were made around this release.
• Go/No Go Next Steps post: to give greater context around what needs to happen for each feature to be properly considered for inclusion in 5.8.
• Full Site Editing Outreach Program handbook page: to highlight how people can get involved in giving feedback and improving FSE.
• How to Test FSE: to give practical guidance around how to explore these features.
• Block Theme Documentation: to help people get started with block theme creation.
• Full Site Editing Documentation: to give a high level overview of FSE and an entry point to learn more.
• Theme Experiments Repo: to help people explore current approaches to block themes and various in progress experiments.
• Gutenberg + Themes Roundups: to help people stay up to date on happenings in Gutenberg that impact themes.
• Bi-monthly Block theme meeting: to give people a chance to discuss the latest and greatest with block themes.
• FSE Hallway Hangouts: to hear from those working on and giving feedback on these features.

Conversation Starters

• What would you like to see done as part of the gradual adoption milestone? 
• What would make you more inclined to use Full Site Editing? On the flip side, what would make you less inclined? 
• Are there any key people or resources like podcasts, courses, documentation, etc that have helped you explore Full Site Editing? 
• How do you think Full Site Editing will change the WordPress ecosystem? What excites you there? What makes you nervous? 
• What do you think is most helpful to communicate about Full Site Editing right now to put more people at ease and build excitement? 
• What are you still confused about when it comes to Full Site Editing?

FAQs

These are the top questions you can most likely expect to get asked with high level answers to get you started in the right direction. For a more comprehensive list of questions and answers, check out the FSE Outreach Program’s roundups.

Anne McCarthy published this post on her personal blog and gave us permission to republish it here as well.

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, and at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. 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.

PPS: Huge “Thank You” to Dave Smith for his wonderful review of our podcast. 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 [email protected].

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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, 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, Justin Tadlock followed along. He shared his page’s source code and the joy and frustrations along the way.

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Huge W. Roberts introduces you to the Five 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.

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Speaking of which, WordPress 5.8 will bring a new feature to the image and cover block: 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!

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Blockbase “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 The Blockbase themes is available via GitHub. Justin Tadlock at WPTavern kick the tires of it. He concluded: “It is the modern-day Underscores (_s) 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.

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Hector Pietro published What’s new in Gutenberg 10.7? 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.

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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, and has a powerful migration tool 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 by core contributors Tonya Mork and Andrew Ozz.

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Allison Rivers wrote 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.

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The above article was a nice palate cleanser after the rather lively debate on This Week in WordPress #164 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.

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In case you missed it, I thoroughly enjoyed Nathan Wrigley’s interview with Benjamin Intal, of Stackable  on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and Why he is betting his business on blocks.

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Eric Karkovack did a deep dive into the plugin Block Visibility by Nick Diego and shared his insights in his article An Easy Way to Edit Block Visibility in the 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 by Morgan Hvidt with a slightly different approach. Both plugins also provide pro versions via their respective websites.

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Upcoming WordPress Events

June 7 – 9th, 2021
WordCamp Europe
A virtual event and contributor day. Call for sponsors is open.

🎉 Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021

June 10th, 2021
WordPress “Mega Meetup”: Plugins That Keep Websites Running

June 20 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Japan
The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think…

June 24, 2021
WPEngine Summit 2021
The digital breakthrough conference

June 24 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Cochabama (Colombia)

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
Calls for speakers was extended to June 5th, 2021.

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.” Call for Proposal is up and proposal are due May 26, 2021

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On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events you can browse a list of the upcoming WordPress Meetups, around the world, including WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi Builder and Beaver Builder meetups.

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Don’t want to miss the next Weekend Edition?

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Featured Image: Photo by Ravi Palwe on Unsplash

Howdy,

I am getting really excited about the WordPress 5.8 release. It’s still about eight weeks away, but there is a lot of work in front of us. We are coming up to Feature Freeze on May 25, 2021. The Gutenberg team has a release candidate for 10.7, the last version of the plugin, that will make it into WordPress Core.

How can you help? Test, test test!

• Set up a test site. Pantheon offers developer 2 sites for free.
• Use the Beta Tester plugin – set it to channel = Bleeding Edge and stream = Nightlies, that means you have the lasted WordPress version on your site.
• Report any bugs you find

On the team working on the block-editor end user documentation, we have a preliminary list of relevant user-facing changes in Google Doc. We are looking for more contributors to not only get through the latest task list but also update some documentation pages with 5.6 and 5.7 changes. If you have a few hours, and want to take a deep dive into the block-editor features, let me know by joining the #docs channel or DM me on the Make Slack.

Wishing everyone lots of patience. We are still in a pandemic, and all good things take time.

Yours 💕,
Birgit

PS: Did a deep dive into the wp.data package to learn more about state management for the block-editor. Do you know of any resources that helped you get the hang of it? The usual metaphors don’t seem to help much.

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Anne McCarthy posted about Hallway Hangout: Discussion on Full Site Editing Issues/PRs/Designs (20 May). This was the fourth Hallway Hangout, a series of information meetings, that started in April. They are all available on YouTube. Sometimes it is much easier to talk through a feature, an interface, or bugs, when you can ask questions and screen share. If you missed them, they are available on YouTube and summary posts are available on the Make block of the Test Team.

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Although, I long for in-person WordCamps, they are still not safe in many regions. For now, connections to my WordPress friends are still virtual: pick-up Hallway Hangouts, Meetups meetings and WordCamps and conferences.

Speaking of which: Next week WordSesh is taking place May 24 – May 27, with Workshops starting on May 28. Well, depending on where you are in the world, it will start tomorrow night.

On the schedule a five session around Gutenberg:

• Blazing Fast Block Development w/ Lee Shadle
• Building Custom Blocks w/ Rob Stinson
• Block-Based Themes – The Future Of Full Site Editing In WordPress w/ Imran Sayed
• How the Block Editor Makes It Easier to Build Custom Websites w/ Danielle Zarcaro
• Build your own Block-Based Theme w/ Daisy Olsen (Workshop)

Find a list of more upcoming WordPress events further below.

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Eight Gutenberg Tips and Tricks in eight minutes – Learn how to start developing WordPress sites with Gutenberg blocks with Bill Erickson and Gabriel A. Mays from GoDaddy. Take a look at the YouTube video and the links resources, if you are just starting out working with the block-editor in your WordPress development.

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Edward Bock shared how to Properly add modern JavaScript to Gutenberg. In his article, he helps you transition from the conventional programming on PHP to adding JavaScript to your tools set

Full-Site Editing for Theme Developers

Herb Miller shared recording from his presentation: Guide to WordPress Full Site Editing, blocks and themes at the Meetup in Portsmouth. Now the Herb went beyond the template editor bits that are coming to WordPress 5.8. He demonstrated the full Site Editor, which isn’t slated to come to WordPress until 5.9 or even 6.0. To follow along you would need a block-based theme and the latest Gutenberg version (for now 10.6.2). After a tour around the Site Editor, Herb Miller, shared with the audience how he built a block-based theme.

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Carolina Nymark published here full-site editing theme “Armando” in the theme directory on WordPress.org. Carolina also is a contributor to the Gutenberg repository and published a Full Site Editing course for developers. Recently, she also published a VS Code extension WordPress Block Markup with autocomplete snippets to add blocks to your templates faster.

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Fränk Klein of WPDevelopment Courses is getting ready to open his Building Block-Based Themes course. He already shared quite a few insights in his learnings with the articles: What I Learned Building a Full-Site Editing Theme and Implementing Global Styles in Block-Based Bosco. The Block-based Bosco Theme is also available in the WordPress.org repo.

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The theme.json settings structure is now finalized and is not experimental anymore. The Documentation is available in the Gutenberg Handbook. Riad Benguella wrote an Introduction to WordPress’s Global Styles and Global Settings to get you started on the new era of Theme development in WordPress. (Yes, I shared this before. I just want to make sure you find it again )

A few days ago, Ari Stathopoulos started working on a Theme.JSON parser to make it possible for conventional themes to take advantage of the settings file as well.

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Ana Segota, Ariel Design, an early adopter of Gutenberg blocks in her themes she published in 2018 and 2019, came out with her first theme embracing full-site editing, and global styles with here new Theme “Naledi”. Justin Tadlock took the theme for a spin. Once the theme is available at WordPress.org, it will be the sixth theme for full-site editing.

When will we see yours?

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Sarah Gooding has the story of Blocksy Theme Expands Free Starter Site Collection, Plans to Create New Suite of Blocks. Blocksy embraced the block-editor wholeheartedly and grew it’s business rapidly, it seems. They also integrate well with the blocks by Stackable.

Plugins for the Block Editor

Benjamin Intal, of Stackable was this week’s guest of the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and he discussed with Nathan Wrigley the Why He’s Betting His Business on Blocks. Intal and his team were an early adopter of the Block-editor and publish their plugin already in 2018 before the block-editor made it into WordPress Core. Since them Stackable has been an often recommended plugin for content creators, and it has grown quite a bit in features and reach. It’s certainly worth a listening, considering another wave of creativity and opportunities is coming to WordPress. This time for themes.

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Alexandra Yap of Stackable recently posted the Introducing Dynamic Content. They wrote: “We’ve received a huge number of requests to display content from ACF’s custom fields in Stackable blocks, and now you can! Most ACF field types are supported as well as ACF Options Pages.”. They also integrate with Toolset.

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Justin Tadlock reviewed a newly published pricing block and found You Might Not Need That Block. “With WordPress’s base blocks and a decent theme, many custom solutions are possible via patterns.”, he wrote, and he went ahead and recreated a three column pricing table with the core blocks and different themes, Twenty-Twenty, Eksell, and a full-site editing theme, too. I strongly agree with Tadlock that block patterns would provide an easier path. I can see that plugins like Easy-digital downloads, Woo Commerce and other ecommerce plugins would offer such patterns together with their Gutenberg blocks extensions to get store owners up and running quickly.

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Jamie Marsland shared the 10 Big Updates to PootlePress WooCommerce Gutenberg plugins Storefront Blocks and WooBuilder Blocks.

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Upcoming WordPress Events

June 7 – 9th, 2021
WordCamp Europe
A virtual event and contributor day. Call for sponsors is open.

🎉 Gutenberg Times is a media partner of WordCamp Europe 2021

June 20 – 26
WordCamp Japan
The schedule has been posted. Most sessions will be in Japanese, with exceptions, I think…

July 17 + 18th, 2021
WordCamp Santa Clarita
Calls for speakers (May 30th), sponsors, volunteers and organizers are open.

June 24 – 26, 2021
WordCamp Cochabama (Colombia)

July 23, 2021
WordFest Live – The festival of WordPress
Call for Speakers is now open and submissions are due on May 24th, 2021

September 21 + 22, 2021
WPCampus 2021 Online
“A free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education.” Call for Proposal is up and proposal are due May 26, 2021

---

On the Calendar for WordPress Online Events 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

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Thanks for subscribing.

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