October 2021 brought a lot of new things to WordPress, from release updates to new versions of Gutenberg. More notably, in the latest episode of WP Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden reminded us about the importance of freedom in open source platforms like WordPress.

Free speech has with it a lot of responsibility, just like being a part of a community. Governments or communities, or in our case, this software is built by the people who show up.

For WordPress, at 42% of the web, every small choice we make can cause huge changes in the way that people experience the web today and tomorrow.

Josepha Haden, Executive Director of the WordPress project

Last month was yet another chapter in this journey. So keep reading to learn what’s new. 

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WordPress 5.9: All proposed updates will likely be included

• We announced the go/no-go for WordPress 5.9 features in mid-October. The release will probably include all the proposed features—though not all of them are ready yet, they should be by the proposed release date (December 14, 2021).
• WordPress 5.9 will include a new default theme called Twenty Twenty-Two! The theme’s foundation will be strong, and the unpredictable yet reliable behavior of birds inspired the intentionally subtle design. 

• 5.9 bug scrub sessions began in September and will continue each week until the release on December 14, 2021. View the full bug scrub schedule. 
• Many of you requested a few “must have” enhancements for the 5.9 release—follow the 5.9 Must-Haves project board to track their status.
• The Test Team shared an overview of the team’s approach to testing WordPress 5.9.

Interested in contributing to WordPress core? Join the #core channel, follow the Core Team blog, and check out the team handbook. Also, don’t miss the Core Team’s weekly developer chat on Wednesdays at 8 PM UTC.

Gutenberg releases: 11.6, 11.7, and 11.8 are here

We released three new versions of the Gutenberg block editor between the end of September and October:

• Version 11.6 brings site logo cropping and rotation, block-level locking, improvements to Query Pagination block, support for child themes and thunks, template focus mode, and enhancements to the writing flow.
• Gutenberg version 11.7 includes bug fixes and polishes to the navigation block and editor, global styles and full site editing (including a handy back button that lets you quickly return to the site editor), and columns block support, among other improvements.
• Finally, Gutenberg 11.8 is the second to last version to make it into the WordPress 5.9 release, and it comes with plenty of developments to the editing experience: featured Block Patterns, new animations for a few elements (like Dropzone and Insertion Point), spacing tools for heading blocks, and a lot more.

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. For details on the latest updates, follow the “What’s next in Gutenberg” post.

WordCamp US returned virtually this year with more than 3,600 attendees

WordCamp US 2021 was on October 1, and it was online for the first time. The event drew more than 3,600 attendees, 27 sponsors, and 18 remarkable speakers on topics ranging from accessibility and sustainability to e-commerce, to name a few. 

Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” is expected to be held as a separate event later this year, rather than being part of WordCamp US.

If you missed the live event, you can still watch the Yukon Track and the Columbia Track of WordCamp US 2021.

Team Updates: Polyglots monthly newsletter, a new Performance team, and more

• The first edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter went out on October 15, 2021.
• The following teams opened up their call for team representatives last month, and more are coming soon: Core, Community, Themes, Accessibility, Support, Training, and Hosting.
• A draft of the 2022 Global Community Sponsorship program proposal was released on October 8, 2021. 
• The October 2021 edition of People of WordPress, featuring WordPress e-commerce specialist Ronald Gijsel, went live.
• Following excellent responses to the initial proposal, members of the Core Team announced the next steps in launching a performance team that aims to increase the performance (speed) of WordPress.
• The Polyglots Team kicked-off bi-weekly Glotpress meetings aimed at improving the functionality of the plugin that powers translate.wordpress.org.
• A sprint is planned on November 10-12 to explore a dedicated volunteer program for the Training Team, similar to the Deputy program in the Community Team.
• WordPress.org profiles now display activity from the WordPress GitHub organization.
• The Test Team shared results of the tenth Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program: Pattern Party. 
• Answers from the third round of questions from the FSE Outreach Program are now out!
• The Docs Team is consulting with independent legal experts to explore whether there are issues with having Gutenberg (which is dual-licensed GPL + MPL) coexist with other contents in WordPress (our documentation has a CC0 license and the code is GPL). 
• The Themes Team shared a recap of work happening on automation and improvement processes for the WordPress Themes directory. The Team also shared a p2 post highlighting the performance impact of jQuery on WordPress themes.
• The Marketing Team participated in a contributor ladder workshop to help plan their future activities.
• The feature recap of the WordPress Translation Day 2021 is out from the Polyglots and Marketing teams, with the results of the Polyglots appreciation nominations 2021.

Sign up for the Polyglots monthly newsletter, if you haven’t already.

Feedback/Testing requests: Deadline for redesigned Gutenberg landing page is November 5, 2021

• The Design Team is working on redesigning the wordpress.org/gutenberg landing page, and has already shared a prototype. 
• The team has also shared a few other concepts where they have requested feedback from contributors:
  • Site Editing iA Concepts: Part1 and Part 2
  • Block theme switching concepts
• Version 18.5 of WordPress for iOS and Android are now available for testing!
• The Accessibility Team is requesting feedback on a new Gutenberg Pull request that announces formatting changes or screen readers.

Share your feedback on the new Gutenberg landing page design in Trac or by commenting on the blog post by November 5, 2021.

Keep an eye out for WordCamp Spain, Sâo Paulo, and Taiwan 2021

We had several WordPress events in October, and several more to look forward to the rest of the year:

• We’re seeking a new host city for WordCamp US 2022.
• WordCamp Europe 2022 has extended its call for organizers.
• WordCamp Italia 2021 was held online on October 22-23, 2021. The event had 23 speakers, 17 sponsors, and more than 1,000 registrants. Check out its YouTube channel to watch the event replay.
• Another highlight of the month was WordCamp Nicaragua 2021 which was held on October 8-9, 2021.
• The #WPDiversity working group of the Community Team organized an Allyship workshop for event organizers on October 28. Sign up now for the diversity events planned by the team for November! 
• A two-day contributor event focused on Learn WordPress, took place on October 29 and 31, 2021. There was also another contributor day on October 8, 2021, which involved working groups across the board, from accessibility to user testing.
• The Test Team organized the following Hallway Hangouts this week—check out their recaps:
  • Pattern Party Testing Walkthrough 
  • 5.9 Go/No go, Site Editor Internal Audit, and more

Don’t miss the following upcoming online WordCamps: WordCamp Spain 2021, WordCamp Sâo Paulo 2021, and WordCamp Taiwan 2021!

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Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Let us know by filling out this form.

The following folks contributed to October 2021’s Month in WordPress: @anjanavasan, @harishanker, @rmartinezduque, @callye, @webcommsat, and chaion07.

At what point are FSE theme developers going to start integrating and considering WooCommerce for their themes? WooCommerce has almost always seemed to lag behind all other considerations. It’s a bit like it’s an afterthought to simply scramble in the elements of a solid WooCommerce store. Where is a persistent cart header? Where are the templates for /single-product? There’s all kinds of elements which can be developed right along side of other teams working on FSE, but it seems to (again, consistently) not happen.

I’ve taken Blockbase and all the other FSE themes for a spin on LocalWP, and none of them have any WooCommerce elements in them. Again, one should not expect perfection at a “developmental” stage. However there does seem to be a behavioral pattern of WooCommerce elements being a bit of an “afterthought” that simply brings up the rear about a year or year-and-six-months afterwards.

Why not get everyone on the same page immediately? That way theme authors can address putting the cart elements in the header template. (Yes, WC can be run, but w/out a cart header, shoppers don’t know where to click after an item is in their cart). And, if theme authors and WP core developers always, Always, ALWAYS started simultaneously with one or two WooCommerce folks on board, it would absolutely shorten the time needed for store owners to receive the benefits of FSE (and remove some of their pagebuilders!) and for WordPress to get more Shopify business over to WooCommerce. But that seemingly never happens because WooCommerce always seems to be the “afterthought.”

Brad

First, I want to make sure all of our readers are on the same page. WooCommerce is a third-party plugin. It is unrelated to the core WordPress and Gutenberg projects. Granted, WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, one of the largest contributors of resources and people. So, there is likely some crossover among developers.

It is still crucial that we make a distinction between the two. When looking at some of the recent block themes that other developers have released, I have yet to see any integrate with the WooCommerce plugin. I cannot say whether any of their authors have plans to do so in the future. I imagine that some will and others will not. Like with any third-party plugin that outputs something on the front-end (e.g., bbPress, Easy Digital Downloads, etc.), it is the theme author’s choice of whether they want to take on the burden of supporting integrations with projects that are not their own. It can be a maintenance nightmare at times, particularly when it comes to free themes. However, I have no doubt that we will see more block theme authors catering to WooCommerce users as we move forward.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying the responsibility of WooCommerce working in a block world is on WooCommerce itself. When it gets to that stage, theme authors will follow.

One of the things I love about the block system is that it creates a standard for all themes and plugins to build from. The long-term goal of plugins like WooCommerce should be to work without theme support. If a user wants a cart item in their nav menu, it should be as simple as adding a block via the site editor. The same should be said for any other element of creating an online shop.

I reached out to Darren Ethier, an engineering team lead within Automattic who works on the intersection between WooCommerce and Gutenberg. He agreed that the block system could make it easier for things to simply work without specialized theme support.

“That’s definitely the target we’re shooting for,” he said. “Whether or not we will land it in the first iteration is still unknown.”

However, the answer is more complex than that. WooCommerce is a heavy plugin with a history entrenched in the pre-block era of WordPress and has an ecosystem of third-party add-ons it must be careful not to break. The team is making progress and has a few things shooting through the pipeline. It will take some time, but you will not see block themes showcasing WooCommerce shops without the plugin first laying the groundwork.

Block templates are a high priority. Top-level templates like single-product.html, archive-product.html, taxonomy-product-cat.html, and taxonomy-product-tag.html will be available to any block-enabled theme soon.

“This initial iteration will be a straight port of the existing PHP templates and have a placeholder for the rendering of the template in the editor,” said Ethier. “We’re essentially wrapping the rendered PHP template in a dynamic block. This is definitely not the end goal. It just is the initial step of moving towards our vision of ‘Store Editing’ where merchants are able to completely customize the layout of their stores using all the opportunities available through the block and site editors.”

This is more of a stopgap measure than full-blown support. However, it is a step in that direction.

“We decided to take this approach because it more quickly helps bridge the gap between the current PHP-based templates and block themes so that folks can start to see the potential (and still add blocks around the PHP-rendered content),” he said. “We also know it’s going to be a complex job to more fully implement the vision of Store editing with block themes while supporting (and inspiring) the rich existing ecosystem of WooCommerce extensions. So, this allows us to incrementally improve things over time.”

This may not be the news all block theme authors want to hear, but the changes will be enough for them to start exploring tighter integration with the plugin.

The team is currently aiming to add block template support in the next release of the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. If all goes well, the feature will be ported to WooCommerce 6.0, which should be in time for the WordPress 5.9 release.

“It’s important to set expectations, though (which is why I’m mentioning this again),” said Ethier. “This initial iteration definitely will not be the final iteration of Woo Block templates.”

He also highlighted several things from the roadmap:

• “Product Element Blocks” – which are the Woo equivalents to the WP template blocks. So, things like “Product Title,” “Product Description,” “Add to Cart Button,” etc.
• Integrating with the WP Query Loop Block (for products).
• “Mini-Cart Block” – which should allow for insertion into header/footer template parts.
• Commerce Patterns.

“All these things (and more) will help us with iterating on the various components of a store that are visually represented via templates, template parts (i.e., think of things like reviews on the single product page, etc.),” said Ethier.

For a deeper look at what is ahead, read Peek into the WooCommerce Blocks Roadmap. Warning: it is dense and geared toward developers, but it must be. The solutions for a project the size and scope of WooCommerce are not simple.

“One key strategy we’re trying here is to provide default WooCommerce store editing templates and functionality out of the box with Woo Core that should in theory ‘just work’ with any block theme,” said Ethier. “There’s so much that theme.json and global styles unlock to make this possible. Themes will still be able to override the default WooCommerce templates and template parts if they want, but they won’t need to.”

While it may feel like block-based storefronts are lightyears away, we must remember that block themes are in their infancy. There are only about a couple dozen in the directory, and most of those are experimental.

I am as excited as anyone about what this could mean for projects like WooCommerce. At the same time, I also know that the road might be longer than what we have in mind, but the WooCommerce team is already traveling down it.

Automattic has acquired WPScan, a ten-year-old service that provides a database for WordPress core, plugin, and theme vulnerabilities. The company has sponsored WPScan for a number of years and has already been white labeling its use in Jetpack Scan.

Pricing for WPScan is based on API requests per day, with a free version limited to 25. Monthly pricing is tiered based on requests and additional features. The pricing matrix estimates that WordPress websites have 22 plugins installed, on average, and each one makes an API request, as well as one each for the core version and themes.

“Our goal for this acquisition is to make malware data and APIs more open source,” Jetpack marketing representative Rob Pugh said. “We want to ensure that WPScan continues to be a high-quality security resource for the entire WordPress community. To that effect, we’ll be exploring ways to make the API completely free for non-commercial sites.”

Some users may be wondering whether the WPScan plugin offers more than what is built into Jetpack Scan. The two provide complementary features and can be used at the same time.

“[WPScan] does do some different checks that Jetpack Scan doesn’t do such as weak passwords and https,” Pugh confirmed. “Conversely, Jetpack Scan does some things that WPScan doesn’t, such as a library of signatures checking for malicious code.”

Automattic has not ruled out requiring WPScan users to have Jetpack installed in order to use the plugin in the future. When asked if Automattic is considering the possibility of requiring Jetpack in order to access WPScan, Pugh said, “We still need to evaluate what makes the most sense for Jetpack and WPScan long-term.”

Since the product was announced on the Jetpack blog as a Jetpack acquisition, it seems likely that Automattic will merge the branding under Jetpack Scan, rather than leave them separate. There is too much confusion regarding which security product offers which set of features and customers are more likely to respond to a streamlined, simple security package. It’s also possible the product could be combined and offered as a standalone plugin, like Jetpack Backup, Jetpack CRM, and Jetpack Boost. This may or may not require the core Jetpack plugin.

For now, there are no changes planned for the service. WPScsan founders Ryan Dewhurst and Erwan Le Rousseau will continue their work on the product at Automattic.

“WPScan will continue to operate independently in the near term and may be integrated into Jetpack Scan in the future,” Pugh said.

WordCamp Birmingham is the first in-person WordCamp on the schedule for 2022. The event will be held at the Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema in downtown Birmingham on February 4-5. It is one of the first cracks in WordPress’ iced over event landscape after the pandemic brought in-person gatherings to a halt.

“WordCamp Birmingham was one of 40 or more WordCamps that needed to cancel or postpone in 2020,” co-organizer Ryan Marks said. “We had intentions of just postponing until 2021. During WordFest 2021 in July, Matt Mullenweg said, ‘I encourage people to start planning. As soon as you feel safe to do so, do so.’ The proposal to return to in-person WordCamps was announced within a week of that interview. The local team met in August and targeted early February for our event. When the announcement updating the guidelines for in-person WordCamps was posted in September, it gave us a green light to keep moving forward.” 

The updated guidelines for in-person WordCamps require that attendees be fully vaccinated, recently tested negative, or recently recovered in the last three months. Marks said the organizing team has not made a decision about whether to require masks but will be monitoring local health guidelines and communicate any expectations with attendees in January.  

WordCamp Birmingham secured a flexible arrangement with the venue in case they need to cancel.

“The contract with Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema gives us the flexibility to cancel without any loss of deposit as long as we give notice more than 7 days before the event,” Marks said. “This was sufficient for our local organizing team and WordPress Community Support.”

Marks reported that the process of getting the WordCamp approved was “quite smooth” thanks to assistance from their mentor, Kevin Cristiano, who worked with them on budget review.

Although the maximum capacity of the venue is 300, the organizers have capped attendee numbers at 200 as a precaution.

Tickets are on sale and the calls for speakers, sponsors, and volunteers is open. Organizers expect that it will sell out quickly since it’s the first in-person WordCamp since all the pandemic cancellations.

“The best thing about WordPress isn’t the software, it’s the community,” WordCamp Birmingham speaker wrangler Nathan Ingram said. “And WordCamps are where the community meets, shares, and learns together. Virtual WordCamps have been necessary, but just aren’t the same as being together face to face.

“WordCamp Birmingham is the oldest WordCamp in the Southeast – our first WordCamp was in 2008. I hope that this year’s WordCamp Birmingham is a family reunion – a place where friends and colleagues can gather and enjoy the community that makes WordPress so great.”

It needed to be said. I know some of you loved writing in the classic editor. I know some of you enjoy the current block editor. Some of you may have even been thrilled with the platform’s earlier attempt at a distraction-free writing mode.

But, for actual writing, WordPress has always been kind of, sort of, OK — maybe even good — but not great.

Coupled with a content-focused theme with great typography and a registered editor stylesheet, both the classic and block editors could be equals. They would offer an interface and experience of editing the content as seen on the front end. However, having the back and front ends meet does not necessarily mean you have an ideal writing experience. It can be a top-tier platform for layout and design. However, for typing words on a screen, there are better tools.

When I talk about writing, I am generally referring to mid or long-form content. If you are penning 200-word posts, dropping in photos, or designing a landing page, WordPress is as good as it comes. For publishing software, it is a powerhouse that few systems can rival.

However, publishing and writing are two different things.

There was a time that I wrote pages upon pages of essays, fiction, and everything else by hand. With a pen and pad, I spent hours drafting papers for my college classes. Even in my final two years, as I took four or five English and journalism courses at a time, I clung to what I knew best. The feel of the pen in my hand was a source of comfort. It glided atop the page in legible-but-imperfect cursive.

It was not until an ethnography class that I had to put down the pen and move on to the technological upgrade of the computer. Don’t get me wrong. I was a speedy typist at the time and was well on my way to becoming a WordPress developer. I did not come of age with computers, but I picked up the skills I needed quickly. I was even writing blog posts in the OG classic editor back then.

However, writing was such a personal act for me, and the keyboard and screen felt impersonal. A 30-page ethnographic paper on modern literacy changed my view on the matter. Since then, I have not looked back.

If you are concerned that I will say that you are stuck in the past, that is not the case. The tools we use can be a great comfort to us. I would not tell a pianist not to compose their next piece on the old church piano they have played since childhood. That may be one source of their inspiration, likewise, for someone’s favorite writing software.

What I have learned is to try out new things once in a while. I am very much the type of person who gets stuck using the tools that I am comfortable with, so I remind myself to mix it up from time to time.

The classic WordPress editor and I never clicked. Eventually, I learned to write in Markdown and port those posts to the WordPress editor. Mark Jaquith’s Markdown on Save plugin was a godsend for many years. Eventually, I switched to Jetpack’s Markdown module. Today, the block editor converts my preferred writing format to blocks automatically as I paste it in.

As much as I love the block editor, I rarely use it during the drafting process. I am literally writing this post in Atom.

My writing workspace (Atom).

Atom is known more for being a code editor, but its packages come in handy for Markdown enthusiasts. I also like using something with quick folder access for traversing through various ongoing stories and projects. I use a simple “bucket” system for working, published, and trashed posts to organize everything. Once I finish drafting and running the first edit, I copy and paste the text directly into the WordPress editor. Then, I dive into the final editing rounds. This is where WordPress becomes far more beneficial to my flow. I can make adjustments that I did not see in plainer text format, and dropping in media is simple.

I am sure many people would dislike my choice of writing tools or my workflow. Some people enjoy writing in Microsoft Word — really, I have heard such people exist. Others publish via email, apps, or other computer programs.

Currently, I am giving Dabble a try during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I wrote via Atom the last time I participated in the writing challenge. However, the tool I enjoy most for writing blog posts offers a sub-par experience for something as complex as a 50,000-word manuscript.

Writing a novel manuscript in Dabble.

Dabble is a platform specifically built for writing books. I wish it was open-source, but it is hard to come by equivalent software without restrictive licensing. Nevertheless, it does its job and sticks in its lane. It also does not hurt that it updates word counts through the NaNoWriMo API.

Thus far, I am loving the Dabble experience. It is also imperative that those who work on the WordPress platform step outside our bubbles and try related software. We should learn and grow from it. Then, bring those experiences back into the WordPress fold.

I cannot imagine writing a novel in WordPress without first creating a plugin that added the extra bits, such as scene and character cards, and cut away almost everything else. The editing canvas might be acceptable with the right style adjustments. Note: if anyone wants to build this, I would be happy to offer direct feedback.

WordPress may never be the ideal writing experience for all people. However, it should always offer a pathway toward publishing, regardless of what tools its users prefer.

It should also continue striving to create a more well-rounded writing experience. Besides a few oddities, the block editor seems to be on this path. Every now and again, I write a post in it. It is part of my promise to step outside my comfort zone. Each time, the experience is better. It continues to be in that “sort of good” zone, and I am OK with that. WordPress is making progress.

Continue the conversation. This post builds on the following articles:

• Justin Ferriman – Matt’s Page Builder
• Jose Casabona – Should You Really Write in the WordPress Editor?
• WP Mainline – I Hope This Is All Worth It

About this episode.

On the podcast today we have Tara King.

Tara has recently begun working for Automattic in the developer relations role. Tara will lead a newly formed team who will get out and about; trying to understand the pain points which people are having with the new Block Editor and Full Site Editing. They will then report their findings back to the developer and contributor teams, and hopefully establish a feedback loop to make the editor better.

They are also creating blogs, podcasts, courses and many other types of content to help people get up to speed with the Block Editor.

It’s no secret that whilst there are many people who love the Block Editor, there are many who remain unconvinced. Unconvinced might not be a strong enough word, but you get the idea. I wanted to hear about the purpose of this new team and how it’s going to be working. Will it have a real impact upon the future of the Block Editor? What will they be offering? How can they be reached? Who is deciding what’s included and what’s left out? What motivations are behind all these decisions?

We also get into a chat about the fact that WordPress is changing; moving away from a legacy of easy-to-understand PHP code and moving towards a JavaScript and React based future. Is the pain of learning these new skills going to be worth it, and is there going to be any support to help people get there?

It’s a wide-ranging discussion at an important moment in WordPress’ history.

Time will tell if Tara’s team can win the hearts and minds of unconvinced developers.

Have a listen to the podcast and leave a comment below.

Useful links.

Tara’s email address: tara.king [at] automattic [dot] com

Automattic: Developer Relations Job Description

Transcript

Dit essay is ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands.

This post is not about web accessibility, it’s about mental health. About trying to cope with grief and burnout.

I’m not the first within the WordPress community who lost someone they love. People within the community lost a spouse, a sibling, a parent, a child. People that cannot be missed but died anyway. Life and death happens to all of us. And everyone copes in a different way. How can you help them? And how can you help yourself? I don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to share some of my experiences.

My story

I remember WordCamp Helsinki 2019 as the last WordCamp where things were normal. I was in a good place, at home with my husband and son and in my career, working in a job I like.

Shortly after that my mother was diagnosed with cancer and my husband Marc died of a heart attack. My father had to move to a nursing home because of his Parkinsons. In the middle of the first lockdown my mother died, just at the same time my kitchen was being renovated. At that point I burned out.

What did grief do to me? It drained all of my energy and made me feel lonely, overwhelmed and in a constant state of panic. Marc and I were together for 35 years, I had no idea how to live without him. Suddenly there were a ton of things to do and to decide. Decisions I had to make alone, important decisions we used to make together. Mortgage, pension, stuff, the leaking roof and for God’s sake that bloody new kitchen.

I spent a lot of evenings on the couch watching Netflix. Shutting down my brain. Re-watching all the SciFi they offer. And yes, I love Michael “Let’s fly” Burnham.

What can you do for someone who grieves?

Just listen and ask questions. Don’t force decisions on them, just listen. In the conversation you may discover how to also help in a practical way. Like Job, who bottled Marc’s last batch of home brew beer. Monique, who took me to an exposition of cat paintings to cheer me up. Or colleagues who gave a hug when I returned to work, and friends who just called out of the blue to ask how I was doing.

What not to do?

Taking over the conversation and telling about your sister-in-law’s brother’s neighbour who had cancer too and blablablabla. I don’t have the energy for that and besides, what’s the point?

Assuming things, like the advice to stop working for a while. I burned out, not from my work, but from all the stuff I needed to do at home while being tired and sad as fuck. Work was actually a relief, a way to escape. I could not work as much, but I needed to be there to feel my old self again.

What can you do for yourself?

What worked for me? Professional counseling. Really. Get a professional, not some mumbo jumbo alternative therapy. A wonderful psychologist taught me to live in the moment, reduce the stress in my body and take care of myself. To accept that healing takes time. And she helped me to properly say goodbye to Marc and my mother and to not feel guilty about my dad being in a nursing home.

Stuff is worthless

Last year I had to sort out the things of Marc, my mother and my father. Stuff is worthless. It may sound cliche and very Marie Kondo, but a lot of items went through my hands. I thanked them and brought them to the charity shop. And yes, thanking helps. It felt disrespectful to throw things away without giving them a proper goodbye. Getting rid of so much stuff gave me a different perspective on what is important and what brings me real joy.

The Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Alles van waarde is weerloos”. That translates as “Everything of value is defenceless”. Stuff is worthless, people are valuable. Colleagues, friends, family, the memories of holidays, important events in life, having dinner or just hanging out at some WordCamp and talking about WordPress or make-up. People are indispensable, even though they are fragile.

So how am I now?

I’m ok-ish. My energy is still not 100%. I get tired easily and need to listen to my body. Healing takes frustratingly longer than I want, but I’m getting there.

I am blessed to be part of 2 communities, the WordPress and the Accessibility community. Both showed up at Marc’s funeral and looked after me during the time after.

And I’m very thankful to Taeke, my CEO, for giving me the time to heal.

Rouw, Spullen en Netflix

Dit artikel gaat niet over webtoegankelijkheid, het gaat over mentale gezondheid. Over het proberen om te gaan met rouw en burn-out.

Ik ben niet de eerste binnen de WordPress-community die iemand verloor van wie ze houden. Mensen binnen de community verloren een partner, een broer of zus, een ouder, een kind. Mensen die niet gemist kunnen worden, maar toch stierven. Leven en dood overkomt ons allemaal. Maar iedereen gaat er op een andere manier mee om.

Hoe kun je helpen? En hoe kun je jezelf helpen? Ik heb niet voor alles een oplossing, maar ik wil graag mijn ervaringen met je delen.

Mijn verhaal

Ik herinner me WordCamp Helsinki 2019 als de laatste WordCamp waarop alles normaal was. Ik was gelukkig, thuis bij mijn man en zoon en in mijn carrière, met een leuke baan.

Kort daarna kreeg mijn moeder kanker en stierf mijn man Marc aan een hartaanval. Mijn vader moest vanwege zijn Parkinson verhuizen naar een verpleeghuis. Midden in de eerste lockdown stierf mijn moeder, op hetzelfde moment dat mijn keuken werd gerenoveerd. Op dat moment stortte ik in.

Wat deed verdriet met mij? Het putte me volkomen uit, ik voelde me eenzaam, overweldigd, in een constante paniek. Marc en ik waren 35 jaar samen, ik had geen idee hoe ik zonder hem moest leven. Plotseling waren er een heleboel dingen om te doen en te beslissen. Beslissingen die ik alleen moest nemen, belangrijke beslissingen die we vroeger altijd samen namen. Hypotheek, pensioen, spullen, het lekkende dak en sodeju, die verdomde nieuwe keuken.

Ik heb vele avonden op de bank naar Netflix zitten kijken. Om mijn piekerende hoofd stil te zetten door alle SciFi te kijken die ze hebben. En ja, ik hou van Michael “Let’s fly” Burnham.

Wat kun je doen voor iemand die rouwt?

Gewoon luisteren en vragen stellen. Druk geen veronderstellingen door, luister gewoon. Tijdens het gesprek ontdek je misschien hoe je ook praktisch kunt helpen. Zoals Job, die Marc’s laatste batch zelfgebrouwen bier bottelde. Monique, die me meenam naar een tentoonstelling van kunst over katten, om me op te vrolijken. Collega’s die me een knuffel gaven toen ik weer aan het werk ging en vrienden die zomaar opbelden om te vragen hoe het met me ging.

Wat je niet moet doen?

Het gesprek overnemen en vertellen over de buurman van de broer van je schoonzus die ook kanker had en blablablabla. Daar heb ik echt de energie niet voor en bovendien, wat heeft het voor zin?

Dingen veronderstellen, zoals het advies om even te stoppen met werken. Ik kreeg geen een burn-out van mijn werk, maar van alle dingen die ik thuis moest doen terwijl ik moe en verdrietig was. Werk was eigenlijk een verademing, een manier om te ontsnappen. Ik kon niet zoveel werken, maar ik wilde er wel zijn om me weer een beetje de oude te voelen.

Wat kun je voor jezelf doen?

Wat werkte voor mij? Professionele begeleiding. Echt, zoek een professional en geen een of andere vage alternatieve therapie. Een goede psycholoog leerde me om in het nu te leven, de stress in mijn lichaam te verminderen en beter voor mezelf te zorgen. Ze leerde me accepteren dat genezing tijd kost. Ze heeft me geholpen om fatsoenlijk afscheid te nemen van Marc en mijn moeder en me niet schuldig te voelen omdat mijn vader in een verpleeghuis zit.

Spullen zijn onbelangrijk

Vorig jaar moest ik de bezittingen uitzoeken van Marc, mijn moeder en mijn vader. Spullen hebben geen waarde. Het klinkt misschien cliché en heel Marie Kondo, maar er zijn veel spullen door mijn handen gegaan. Ik bedankte ze en bracht ze naar de kringloopwinkel. En ja, bedanken helpt echt. Het voelt respectloos om dingen weg te gooien zonder ze een goed afscheid te geven. Het uitzoeken en wegdoen van zoveel spullen gaf me een ander perspectief op wat belangrijk is en waar ik gelukkig van word.

De Nederlandse dichter Lucebert schreef: “Alles van waarde is weerloos”. Spullen zijn onbelangrijk, mensen zijn waardevol. Collega’s, vrienden, familie, de herinneringen aan vakanties, belangrijke gebeurtenissen in het leven, samen eten of gewoon rondhangen bij een WordCamp en praten over WordPress of make-up. Mensen zijn onmisbaar, ook al zijn ze kwetsbaar.

Hoe gaat het nu met mij?

Ik ben een soort van oké. Mijn energie is nog steeds geen 100%. Ik word snel moe en moet goed naar mijn lijf luisteren. Beter worden duurt frustrerend langer dan ik wil, maar ik kom er wel.

Ik ben bevoorrecht deel uit te maken van twee communities, de WordPress en de Accessibility-community. Beiden kwamen naar de uitvaart van Marc en beiden keken naar me om, in de tijd daarna. En ik ben Taeke, mijn CEO, erg dankbaar dat hij me de tijd geeft om te genezen.

No sooner than I said the floodgates of block theme development would be open, a couple of more FSE-capable themes landed in the WordPress.org directory. I checked the review system, and three more were queued up.

It took mere days for me to find another favorite: Ona by DeoThemes. When the author mentioned it, I checked the source code to ensure it was a 100% block theme. It was hard to believe at first glance.

The theme has been approved for the directory, but it has not yet been set live. It should be available soon, but anyone can grab the ZIP file from its ticket if they want to give it a spin.

We are now at a point where the block system can nearly match traditional theming in features. There are still some kinks to work out and a few missing pieces, but Ona embraces block templating and global styles like few have before. It is modern, almost minimalist, yet packed with potential for a site owner who wants to share their content in style.

Of the free block themes available, less than a handful could be named its equal. But let’s give it a few weeks and see what else lands. I could be eating my own words shortly.

Ona’s design leans heavily toward modern-day fashion, lifestyle, and travel blogs. However, that is not a hard requirement. It is balanced enough for use on a range of sites. It works well as a blog, but small businesses could get a lot out of it with block-built landing pages. It does lend itself well to storytelling with a mix of large, in-content images.

Single post view.

The change that users will need to make out of the gates is with the site branding. The default 18px of letter-spacing for the site title does not work well for more than a few characters. This is easy to adjust in the site editor.

Ona does not have a lot of patterns, but it makes up for it with a well-rounded set. It ships with two headers, one footer, and five for general usage. Most of them are in use on the demo’s homepage.

Inserting Ona’s “Promo Boxes” pattern.

Looking through the theme’s source code, I noticed a couple of additional registered pattern categories titled “Ona Pages” and “Ona Posts.” There are no block patterns defined for them, so they do not appear in the inserter. The author may have forgotten to remove them or has plans for a more extensive set in the future.

Instead of putting everything into patterns, the theme also offers extra About and Contact page templates. Such custom templates were commonplace in traditional theming, but their usefulness was impeded by the lack of a standard editing interface. That is a non-issue with block themes.

Contact page template.

With the template and site editors, Ona showcases how custom page templates could see a resurgence. I still lean toward block patterns as the primary way to offer custom layouts, but having full-page designs ready to go through the templating system is much nicer than in the classic era.

The problem with templates is that it can be hard to judge where structure and layout end and the content begins. For an About or Contact template, this is usually not a problem. Those two are likely to only be used once on a site. However, when you get into templates meant for use with multiple pages, there should be a clear separation of the two. Patterns are going to make a lot more sense for the content.

I rarely judge a theme entirely by its fancier features. What I truly want to know is whether its typography makes for comfortable long-form reading, and Ona does well in that department. I am not a fan of the oversized default blockquote design, but that can be easily adjusted.

The biggest issues I had with the theme were the font and color slugs. However, this is more of a personal grievance about nonexistent standards. Right now, slug naming is a free-for-all affair for block themes, and I do not see that changing any time soon.

Users will also encounter 404 errors from the theme’s default images. Again, this is not specific to Ona; it is a WordPress/Gutenberg issue. A fix only landed in the development version of the Gutenberg plugin five days ago. Maybe when the theme’s next update rolls around, it will be able to make use of it.

If this is the quality we are seeing at this stage, I cannot wait to see what the rest of the theme design community has in store. DeoThemes just raised the bar.

The official Gutenberg demo page on WordPress.org may soon be getting an update that better reflects the editor’s capabilities and showcases the design creativity available through patterns.

Automattic-sponsored designers Beatriz Fialho and Kelly Hoffman have submitted a prototype for consideration with explorations of both light and dark modes and three different variations for typography.

“Now that Gutenberg has been a part of WordPress for a few years, it makes sense to update it, shifting the message from what used to be the new post editor to the editor that can power all parts of your site,” Fialho said.

Practically speaking, this works out to a more polished landing page with less focus on the demo being a playground that can be manipulated by visitors. Headings like “Say Hello to the New Editor” are now outdated, as the editor is no longer new. It has been nearly three years since Gutenberg was introduced in WordPress 5.0.

Since the time the demo page was first launched, the use of pattens has become a centerpiece in designing pages with Gutenberg. The updated demo will highlight blocks and patterns and will add a new section dedicated to helping new users get connected to resources for learning WordPress.

“It is intentional that the page looks more like a landing page rather than an open canvas ‘playground’ page,” Fialho said. “While it can still be interactive, allowing people to click around and explore, it shows what is possible to achieve with the editor, remaining ultimately informative.”

A few contributors have commented on the post to offer critical feedback. Some refinements in wording on the page may be necessary to be appropriate for newer audiences. Dan Soschin, an Automattic-sponsored marketing team member, suggests rephrasing terms like “WordPress Editor” and “blocks” and “patterns,” so that understanding them is not a requirement for choosing WordPress as a CMS.

Soschin also suggested the design include more variety of visuals for showing different types of websites, such as e-commerce, media portfolios, and news sites, to demonstrate the flexibility of the platform beyond just blogging.

Feedback on the proposal will be open through November 5 before the next iteration. Contributors are also welcome to jump in on the Meta Trac ticket where previous discussions have been held.

It is November, and that only means one thing. It is National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo for short.

Autumn is my favorite time of year. Football is in full swing. Warm mugs of coffee replace the cold brew. Eggnog cartons line supermarket fridges. There are weekend hayrides, face paintings, corn mazes, ring-toss games, and more as fall festivals and fairs are underway. Local farmers’ markets are selling off the last of the summer crop. Many of us can begin switching our thermostats over to heating mode — anything below 60° in my home state of Alabama is jeans and jacket weather. Walks around the neighborhood or park are ablaze with reds, browns, and oranges as the yearly cycles start to wind down. It is always a magical time that offers one last explosion of life before winter comes.

November is smack in the middle of it all. While it can be a busy month for many, it is always the ideal time for writing. The changing season creates moments worth capturing and stories to savor.

Between the hustle and bustle of autumn activities and upcoming holidays, the season also has those quiet moments that allow us to reflect on the world around us. There is a calmness in the cooling air for those who slow down and simply observe.

This is the season where I get the itch to write fiction. While I enjoy the work I do here at the Tavern, I am a novelist at heart. If I am fortunate, I will one day publish a novel. Until then, there is this worldwide movement known as NaNoWriMo. It is an event where 1,000s of people attempt to write a 50,000-word first draft.

There is also a massive community around the challenge. It is sort of like group therapy for those crazy enough to attempt it.

It is a wild ride that is only driven by grit and coffee. There are no guaranteed publishing deals or trophies at the end of the road. The reward is a printable certificate, self-pride, and a month of household chores you likely skipped out on. You may bask in the glory of an achievement few others have accomplished. Many crash and burn by the end of Week #1.

But, if you are a writer, the techniques and lessons you learn along the way are well worth it.

I have a B.A. in English and am a published tech book author. Nothing has taught me more practical writing skills than my participation and victory in NaNoWriMo 2018. School gave me the foundation, but NaNoWriMo taught me about word sprints and how to disable my inner editor.

I will once again participate in NaNoWriMo. I was unable to do so over the past couple of years because of preexisting obligations. But I have that itch again and need to see this thing through.

While NaNoWriMo is not directly related to WordPress (though many participants blog their journey via the platform), there is a spin-off of the event for bloggers:

National Blog Posting Month.

NaBloPoMo does not roll off the tongue quite as well, and it has never reached the global success of NaNoWriMo. There is not even an official website dedicated to the month-long blogging challenge. However, it was once popular enough that WordPress.com hyped it for several years. The last announcement seems to be from 2014.

In 2006, blogger Eden Kennedy began NaBloPoMo in response to the NaNoWriMo mania. Not everyone has the time or desire to write 50,000 words in a month, but many want to up their writing game. Instead of averaging 1,667 words per day, the challenge is merely to blog something — anything — every day throughout November.

Our frenemies over at Post Status have also been running a similar event called #ClickPublish throughout the year via Slack. Today is the start of a new month-long challenge in which WordPress professionals might participate. Side note: “Click Publish” is much better branding than NaBloPoMo.

If you are looking for an excuse to wipe the dust off your WordPress blog, what better reason than a 30-day publishing challenge?

Any of our readers up for it? Feel free to let us know in the comments, and share your articles if you jump on the bandwagon.

We’re all about making it easy to keep spam off your site, from the initial signup process to the protection we provide for years to come. 

Last year, we introduced Enterprise Plus plans, designed for businesses that have over 60K API calls each month. But until now, you had to contact our sales team to register. 

Don’t get us wrong, our sales team is pretty awesome. But time is money and the sooner you’re registered, the sooner you’re protected.

So, we’ve made signing up for an Enterprise Plus plan easier than ever. 

Three new Enterprise Plus plans

The three tiers are based on monthly API calls. We define an API call as any time a request is made to our servers – basically when we check your content for spam. The larger your site and the more visitors, comments, and form submissions you have, the more API calls you’ll use.

And now, customers with less than two million per month can now sign up automatically. 

60K – 350K API calls per month 

This tier costs $250 per month. Simply choose the plan, agree to our terms and conditions, and you can check out right away. 

And there’s a bonus: Sign up for an annual subscription and you’ll get a 16% discount — $500 back in your pocket! 

350K – 2 million API calls per month 

Woah — that’s a lot of spam-fighting power! 

This plan is $1,250 per month. Sign up for a year and save $2,500 with the 16% discount. 

2+ million API calls per month 

If you expect more than two million monthly API calls, you should speak to one of our spam-fighting experts to get a custom plan. Just let us know.

Exceeding API call limits 

Sometimes it’s hard to accurately predict your exact needs. Plus, things outside of your control can temporarily impact the number of API calls you use. 

That’s why, if you exceed your plan’s limit for a couple of months, there’s no reason to worry. We’ll continue to fight spam while we see if your usage normalizes. However, if you exceed the limit for more than three consecutive months, future requests in excess of the monthly limit will be denied until you upgrade your plan. 

Remember: the number of API calls is tracked based on the calendar month, not the date you registered or renewed. You can monitor your API usage by going to the bottom of your account page, clicking the prompt that says, “click here for account-wide spam stats,” and checking the Total API Calls column. 

Learn more about API limits and reducing API calls.

Get started with Enterprise Plus 

Our new self-serve options for less than two million API calls mean one less barrier to great spam-fighting power. 

Less talking, less spam, more time. 

Pretty great, right? 

Get started with an Enterprise Plus plan. 

In this nineteenth episode, WordPress’s Executive director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, discusses and expresses gratitude for the inspiration behind the People of WordPress series, HeroPress.

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

People of WordPress series

HeroPress

HeroPress Network

WordPress 5.9 Development Cycle

Call for Team Rep Nomination

Transcript

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:11

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. Here we go!

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  00:29

The month of November includes the Thanksgiving holiday in my part of the world and in my familial traditions. And one of the things that November always brings up for me is the concept of gratitude. I have a gratitude practice that lasts throughout the year. But this time of year always kind of lets me look outside what makes me feel routinely grateful and explore areas that I don’t always notice. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:05

This year, I’m taking some time to do that in the context of the WordPress project, and it’s reminded me of one of the foundational things I talk about a lot that may be a little harder for folks to see. I am routinely grateful, of course, for the people who show up to maintain WordPress, the people who keep the back office work going, the contributors who contribute directly to the WordPress CMS and project, the folks who routinely go out and tell other people about WordPress and make sure others know how to use it. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  01:35

But there’s another group that I talk about a lot that is a little harder to grasp. And that’s this conceptual group of people whose lives have been changed by WordPress. I used to run into people like this all the time when I was organizing WordCamps. And the small but meaningful successes that they share year after year made me realize that my small contribution of organizing these events was really quite valuable; valuable to them, and I assumed also valuable to just other people in the WordPress project. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  02:09

Now, if you’re contributing in a way that doesn’t let you have contact with the same users consistently over time, or if contributing doesn’t quite balance out in your ledger at the moment, it can be hard to put names to faces in a way that lets you see how your contributions are making an impact. To help with that, a few years ago, the WordPress project partnered with the community Marketing team and the HeroPress team to share the People of WordPress series which you can find monthly on wordpress.org/news. For me, this series provides a glimpse into the humanity of the people who use WordPress, and for me, that’s enough. If all the series ever did was to remind us that WordPress was made for people whose needs matter, that would be enough to continue to have that series forever. But fortunately, the series does quite a bit more than that. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  03:04

The People of WordPress series also lifts up the stories of people who we don’t always hear from in technology. It highlights the wide array of origin stories that lead people to WordPress. It reminds us of the global nature of what we’re doing. It reconnects us to the hopefulness of our own first WordPress successes. And it draws a direct line to why we should care about refreshing the commons of this open ecosystem. I’m sure that there are more things that do as well. But those are just the things off the top of my head, we draw all of the people of WordPress stories that are inside that series directly from the HeroPress essays that have been submitted by users. And I was gonna say users like you in a kind of Reading Rainbow way. But I actually don’t know if any of you are everyday users who are also using WordPress but maybe not contributing yet. If you are then like I’m talking to you. And if you’re not, I’m probably still talking to you. Because all of these stories that go to HeroPress are very valuable and very important for us to know. Anyway, I digress.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  04:14

Topher DeRosia, who founded HeroPress, is among the first people I met in the community lo these many years ago. And I think the impact that HeroPress has on the WordPress community as a whole is not always well recognized. So in the spirit of expanding the scope of my gratitude, and in the context of refreshing the commons, I would encourage you to head over to HeroPress.com and their newly launched HeroPress Network and see if there’s any little way that you can contribute to their commons, submitting your story donating to their network offering a small bit of volunteer time if you happen to have any spare time lying around. I know that the team would be delighted to hear from you.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:01

That leads us now to our small list of big things. We are about a week away from the feature freeze for WordPress 5.9, the final release of the year. Feature freeze caused a little confusion last time. So I just want to clarify there won’t be a package released with this milestone. But no more enhancements or features will be worked on at that point. And bug fixing will become the primary focus. That will be on November 9, which I believe is next Tuesday. It’s definitely next week whenever the calendar turns to nine of November 2021. That’s the day that we’re going into feature freeze. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:38

The second big thing in our small list of big things is that team rep nomination season is upon us. If you are a team rep or want to learn more about being one, now is the time to kind of look at what’s going on and how to keep everything moving in that way. I’ll include a link to the announcement post of that in the notes below. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  05:57

And finally, Daylight Saving Time movements are also upon us. Some parts of the world are ending Daylight Saving Time others are starting it and some have already started or stopped that already. So no matter where you are, don’t forget to check and double-check the timing of things across time zones for the next few weeks. 

Josepha Haden Chomphosy  06:21

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 Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz (Greg) Ziolkowski  discuss this week’s Gutenberg 11.8 release, WordPress 5.9, the Navigation Block, Full-site Editing and the Plugin Machine.

• Music: Homer Gaines
• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Pauli Systems

Show Notes / Transcript

Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast via your favorite podcast apps!
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Show Notes

Announcements

• Theme.json and block.json now available through SchemaStore.org
• GitHub Issue: Create a Schemas Package

Community Contributions

• Building Custom Gutenberg Blocks: The Definitive Block Development Tutorial by Carlo Daniele from Kinsta
• Updated: Gutenberg Example Blocks
• Plugin Machine by Josh Pollock
• Video: Live Q & A Converting classic widgets to blocks with Mathieu Viet, Varun Dubey and David Cavins from the BuddyPress team

Gutenberg 11.8 is a massive release!

• What’s new in Gutenberg 11.8.0? (27 October)
• Gutenberg 11.8 Adds Dozens of Features, Including Featured Patterns and Automatically-Generated Heading Anchors

What’s discussed or in active development

New Gallery Block will come out of experimental for 11.9 (#34979)

Audit of experimental APIs is on the way (#35970)

The Template Parts are almost there (#33926)

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 54th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. We are recording this on October 29 in 2021. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 11.8, navigation block, full-site editing and the plugin machine. I’m Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and developer advocate for WordPress at Automattic. And I’m here with my co-host, co-worker fellow European and friend Grzegorz Ziolkowski, JavaScript developer at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. Howdy howdy Grzegorz, how are you doing today?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Howdy, howdy Birgit? I’m great today. Oh, that’s a good way to begin that. Today I met with my co-workers from Poland; we met in a co-working space, that was really nice to meet them again about, I guess two years. That’s a lot of time and a lot has changed. So we had spent a lot of time catching up, and meet some new co-workers. So very exciting. And yeah, I’m ready to talk about what’s happening in the Gutenberg world. And how are you today Birgit?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I’m excited. My new pixel six pro phone will be delivered this weekend, and I’m looking forward to sunset-setting my old phone that’s from 2018. And it seems like it’s too long, although it’s only four years, right? Yeah. So I will plan to test the new camera features over the weekend. And it’s a good excuse to get out on a photo tour downtown or around town. Yeah. So… yeah.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: I’m looking forward to see some footage from your walks in Florida.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. So maybe I need to start a little photo blog and not put them all on Instagram. Yeah-

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: That’s a good way to use Gutenberg and create a gallery using the gallery blog. That’s going to be in using inner blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, but it’s still not as easy. And I like WordPress to be as easy as Instagram, but it’s not yet with the photos. So maybe I should switch teams.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, maybe to the mobile team that is working on the Gutenberg app and they have some features that will help with that in the future. I hope so.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I will try that out, definitely, yeah. So we have a few announcements that theme.json and block.json are now available through the schemastore.org. And you can add the location, the URL of the schema on the top of your JSON file, and then your code editor supports this with your suggestions for the keys and values. You don’t have to look up exact syntax, and can avoid missing commas and end quotes. Grzegorz, you and Marcus are working on the canonical version for the Gutenberg ripple to integrate. So how does that work?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Birgit, we are still discussing how to approach that, because at the moment we are using an external project, that has a URL that could change one day for whatever reason. And WordPress prefers to have control over everything. Also, if we have it stored locally, then we will be able to integrate that in the process. So when there is a change in a core block, we can validate that and ensure that it’s always up to date. And you already count a few issues with existing blocks, which is a good testament that the tooling is really solid. And yeah, so probably one of the ways we could approach that, and Marcus discovered that Microsoft is using this approach, that we could just create a redirect to a URL, that would be like something in the wp.org domain, I don’t know, it’s something that we will find out. But I’m really excited about that, because this will help a lot, especially with the theme.JSON, which is a huge file to maintain. And it also shows hints, so if you provide… There are descriptions, so it explains what the given properties about, what values are available there. So also people will be able to contribute to that, and improve the hints, so this is really exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I’m glad we talked about this here quite there, early in the process. So whoever, if you want to use it more and you want to contribute, yeah. Grzegorz and Marcus are the person to-

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. So just to be clear, so the credit should go to Alex Lender from Automattic, he originally submitted the first version of schema for theme.json file. And then the follow up was for the blog.json. So great work on that, and the idea was excellent.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And Alex Lender, there’s also the developer who did the whole duotone feature, right?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes, that’s him.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. So, but WordPress 5.9 is coming up fast, FeatureFreeze is November 9th, that’s less than two weeks. And Gutenberg 11.9, which is the same date, November 9th.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: What a coincidence.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Will be the last version with features to get into core. The release candidate has been rescheduled for the plugin, has been rescheduled for November 5th instead of November 3rd. But the final release will be after FeatureFreeze on November 10th, but the release candidate is the version that will get into core, for the first FeatureFreeze kind of. Then between November first and ninth, the team will be working on merging all the packages and code with core for the 5.9 release. Are you going to do it before that, like a dry run too? Or you’re just going to use this, the whole thing in one scoop into one core?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Oh, so I don’t know about this one. I didn’t follow that so closely, because I’m working on another project. I’m working on new version of the comments, query loop block, which is going to be responsible for displaying comments and comments form. But from my experience, it might be a few comments on the WordPress core site, because it’s quite complex, it’s… So the packages that update only JavaScript, but there is a lot of features that require PHP changes, which is more complex to tackle. I don’t know, I guess it will take a few days, hopefully they have enough boundaries to finish that on time. But also FeatureFreeze, it’s mostly about making a cut that this is what we provide for the release. And I wouldn’t be so worried if the merging is delayed a little bit, because what matters here, is the date for Beta one, which is November 16, right? So there will be a couple of days to make sure that everything is solid enough.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So as you said, Beta on November 16th, and then the final release of WordPress 5.9 will be on December 14th, 2021. All right, so we got that out of the way. 

Community Contributions

If you want to start now building blocks and need kind of a rundown, what all needs to be there. Of course there is a developer handbook, but Carlo Daniele from Kinsta has actually published a great tutorial, building custom Gutenberg blocks for definitive block development tutorial, and we will share the link and the show notes. So he walks us through all the prerequisites, and then all the tooling, and then also get into one block, an example block.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, it’s a more complex block than the one that is provided in the official block development tutorial in the block editor handbook. And it’s also really is collected in one article that you can just process, and it provides a different option. So it’s not that step by step, but you have options in every step that you can take. For instance, you can use WPN for building your WordPress local environment, but you could also use the other option that as provided, I don’t remember what exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Kinsta has their own local development tool, and then there is local as well. Yeah.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Recently the WordPress repository of the Gutenberg examples has been updated. Ryan Welcher went through all the examples and updated them to the newest APIs, and make them work. I think you also have found one, a few that are a little bit more complicated than the ‘hello world’ examples. So it’s definitely now another repository to go to, to have examples that work, and you can learn from in your journey to developing the blocks.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. So, he did that, most of the work he did live streaming on Twitch, which is also recorded on his YouTube account. And it’s really a great way to see the steps he does to update everything. And the nice thing about that is also that the examples use up to the syntax, the latest APIs, and the most correct recommendations from the Gutenberg core team. So he did exciting work, very great work there, but also he is now looking and integrating some tooling that helps developers like code formatting, code linking. So, there are now integrations with IDEs, so everything is much simpler than before, and he is even looking and integrating very basic end to end test, using the same tools that Gutenberg uses. So that’s very helpful for someone that wants to explore block development.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Yeah. So Ryan has actually settled on Thursdays 10:30 Eastern, which is 4:30 UTC PM to do his Twitch live streaming and live coding session. So if you want to put this on your calendar, Thursdays at 10:30 on Twitch, and his…. We have the links and the show notes. His username is Ryanwelchercodes, all one word. And yeah, for those who listen and will not just keep it in memory. 

Now, yesterday, a whole new tool popped up on my radar and that is by Josh Pollock. It’s an electronic app for plugin developers to get a head start on boilerplate on. He wrote, “It can create plugins with blocks, editor sidebar, custom admin pages, remote updater, common actions and filters, custom content, post types, local development, tests, GitHub actions, and any other things.” So it’s more like an all encompassing tool. “The UI for creating plugins, managing features, modifying generated files, and downloading development versions of the plugin, is nearly done.” He wrote on his new site, “And I’m also making good progress on the CLI, I’m almost ready to start early access.” That was Josh Pollock on his websites. I signed up for the early access and I’m excited for Josh’s new app, because Josh pollock was one of the early JavaScript educators in WordPress community together with you Grzegorz, Zack and Brian Richards at WordCamp Miami in 2018, which was in spring 2018.

And Josh Pollock is also the original creator of Caldera forms that he sold in 2020 to Ninja Forms. And that plugin will reach end of life at the end of the year. It’s a shame that because it was one of the few form builders who actually offered a lot of features beyond creating forms for the end user, because other plugin developers could connect with it and create processes, for the submitted form data. So, Josh certainly knows what a plugin developer might be looking for, so will keep an eye out for this new tool that comes on the website. He also said, of course, this tool can come for free, but it’s also going to increase your or improve plug-in developer’s processes. So especially in agencies, so it definitely will be worth its investment.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: It sounds very intriguing. I hear for the first time about that, but I believe that Josh did great work, because he has all the necessary knowledge to do that. And he was one of the early adopters and educators in the space. So, he’s definitely someone that has credit to do this type of work. And also, it sounds really interesting to have an app that you can install on your machine. I guess it will work with Mac and with Windows, and then you will just install that and does all the job for you. Sounds very exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, it is. Yes. Also exciting, we had a very good conversation yesterday. A lot of things happened yesterday, with Mathieu Viet, Varun Dubey and David Cavins from the BuddyPress team, when we discussed how they were converting their classic widgets to blocks and what the advantages are now, and what they learned, when they were using blocks. And one thing stood out, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t zeroing in on that, but Mathieu Viet, he mentions that he likes programming just a little block, a one unit kind of content unit. And if you stay within your own lane, you only do what this block does, and you’re not messing with everything else, like the post content or the sidebar, or any other place on the WordPress, it’s very isolated, but you can also focus on it. And I think it wasn’t really that clear to me until you said it, but that see atomic nature of the blocks.

And he’s also said that it’s so much easier now setting up a BuddyPress site for end users, because they see, they just drag the blocks over and it just works. Yeah. And they don’t have to learn short codes or widgets and all that, because… Yeah, I think David said that widgets are very hard for end users to grasp the concept of that and to apply it to their site building. So it was an interesting conversation. We will have the YouTube video, the recording available in the show notes, and also some of the tools and the resources that they mentioned, how they got into it and what helped them to move forward with the blocks. Yeah, and now we come to Gutenberg 11.8.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 11.8

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes, the last one that goes into WordPress 5.9 release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, the second last.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes, second last.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Vincente Canales has managed to release for this version and highlights plenty of great features in the release post on the make blog. And it had 166 PRs merged, excluding all the mobile version PRs that were released, and it has 80 enhancements. We are not going to talk about all of them.

Enhancements

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, 80, it’s an impressive number. And it’s for real. And a lot of those enhancements are really great, so we should start right away.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the… go ahead.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. You probably wanted to say something there, it’s like there’s a lot of integration with global styles and this product evolves so fast, and it really gives a lot of power to block developers, because you just need to provide one entry in the JSON file, and suddenly you have this feature enabled. So this way is like, now you can add spacing controls to all heading blocks, which is pretty interesting that you can now control the margin or padding depending on your needs. So it’s under the dimension section in the sidebar of your block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, that’s one that was missing for a long time for the spacing part. I think the most used block was actually the spacer block, to make up for the missing pieces there. But now many blocks have actually the space controls and blocks like the buttons block, where you have inner blocks, as you have the buttons block outside, and then you have multiple buttons inside the block. You also have a vertical margin support and the gap. So you can, and we also saw that last version 11.7, the columns had that as well. So this is going to be rolled out also to the feature image and block, and those other blocks.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, in general, the idea is that most of the blocks to occupy the full role, they need to have some ways to declare spacing. So you don’t have to use the spacer block anymore. And that’s the most important change. And I think at the time of the release, we also have the space gap. However, the name which will stick at the end of take this gap, will be also in all blocks that group other blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the category block got an enhancement by supporting now only top level categories. So when you use the categories you can change that, the column block has now this specification that you can actually have specifications for the blocks within the columns. So which we’re allowed and which are not, and all that. And also how they are placed into the columns, there’s a common content block that now has typography color and pattern support. And then there were quite a few changes to the cover block, and it has now the allowed blocks and template block attributes for the cover blocks. So you, as a developer and theme developer can now determine what the cover block can entail. That’s through the block.json right from the cover block, or is it through theme or both?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: I guess this is from through the block attribute, so you can define that. So for instance, when you are using a block pattern, then you can encode that, and you can set a lock now for the block, so once that is like combined together, the user won’t have a way to change that, so you have a very nice control on how those block will behave after they’re inserted.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I just looked at the PR and it’s through the blocks register block type area there. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, that’s something that a lot of theme developers and plugin developers are really worried about, is how they can control and block things down, especially when you do development for a larger editor team. So they are guided through their editing experience there.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, I think those APIs will major soon because we have so many use cases for that these days, and those features are added. And as soon as we have enough blocks to make a good decision, then this API will be improved, and this is how it all happens in the block editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. So for the features, we now also have a new embed integration is for Pinterest, that was missing as it looks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it was also added to core, so the embed provider is also available for classic editor, not only the block for the block editor, it’s a new variation on the embed block. I just want to go back just a little bit to the cover block, there were also so a few changes and gradual changes to the opacity for background colors. So now you could have a background color, or a background image, and then the opacity of that, you are really in control of it. There are dim ratios and they have controls over that. And that’s really good way when you create more creative block patterns. What we have seen for instance from Tammie Lister, she has a few block patterns, the pattern inspiration, and this is a place where I go when I need a little bit inspiration, is she had a background and then an image on it, and then a duotone attached to it, and made that a block pattern.

And it’s really fascinating, what you can do with those tools already, in terms of your visual layouts on your post or pages. So yeah, just saying that, yeah. It’s now in the plugin available now. So feature image got more spacing controls for the image block, and also the heading while we talked about this, but what I missed talking about the heading, was that it also now auto generates heading anchors. So you can, when you create subheaders, you can get a link to those subheaders that you can use, not only to drive people to end and say, okay, check out this little header there, or section of my blog post, or of my page, it also enables the finishing the table of content block that has been in process.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: On hold.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … on hold for quite a while, until that feature is actually available. And I read a little bit through the PR, and if it is already at anchor, it will not override it. So in your existing pages and posts, don’t worry that some automation is now making your work redundant or make your work more, it only creates new anchors and not override existing anchors.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, it’s just to ensure that every heading has an anchor, that is already rendered on the front end. So you can use as URLs, but also you can provide your own name, I guess so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you can.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: The last version I saw it was working this way, so it’s very flexible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I really love that, but sometimes you have longer blog posts, but then you only want to kind of have share one paragraph of it or one quote or yeah, kind of put a heading on it, and you get an auto generated anchor for it.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. It’s also, sometimes you have to write a very long heading and then just autogenerate writes out of the text, how the heading is, the anchor how it’s named. So it’s also very good experience for the user because they don’t have to type almost the same name again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, yeah. So there are some other things I wanted to just point out, the post comment author, now add link settings, and to the block support as well as the comment dates, those are also link… I always like links, yeah. It’s kind of….

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Because you can link both, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: For the author that links to the website that is provided in the user’s profile, and for the date, that’s just getting through to the comment.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And to the comments of that date, yeah. And then there’s some… Now we come to the more theme-related blocks, the site. Well, the comment author and data already important for the theme, the site logo received some improvements. And now there is a basic example in the site logo block. And there was some interesting back and forth on the reset button and the replace, the menu drop down, and then back and forth. But it works now really nicely, all this back and forth had the benefit that everybody who worked on it now has a better hands on how the site logo works, and how it can be added to the navigation block or to the head up block and head on template part. All right.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: And there are also changes to the social links or social icons. I don’t know what’s the name, but the titles use both versions. And so the change there is that you can now set the top and bottom margin for those icons, and the other change, there is some changes to the styling. So when you have only logos, you don’t display any texture, then it looks better than before.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It got a Polish.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Polish, a Polish slack.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: A Polish slack. It’s not in polish. No, of course we are making a pun here from Polish and polish, it’s a polish logo style. But sometimes when you travel in multiple languages, these things kind of pop up at you at very different times.

So the global styles, and they’re now called styles. So yeah in language, in 5.9, you will see that everybody’s only talking about site styles, not the global styles, but the big change is now that the child theme, JSON file will be merged with a parent theme, JSON file. And that is important because a lot of people think about… yeah. So when you always have to build a child theme, so when the parent theme gets an update, things are not overwritten, and you can change some of the settings in the same JSON file in your child’s name.

So it applies to styles on top of those from the parent theme. And you can… so the parent space is maintained. If no theme.JSON file is present as child theme, all the parents standards are applied, or the other way around, because you can actually use the theme.JSON file and classic themes. So it works, yeah. If you have a classic theme, you can create a child theme and then put a theme.JSON file in it to configure all the settings for the block editor. So that’s a very good enhancement, and I’m glad that it will make it into 5.9.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. Because theme.JSON file is about the styling, and to specify that a given theme is a block theme, you need to provide templates in a special folder. That’s the distinction. It might be a bit confusing, even for me wrapping a head around that is a bit hard.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I don’t think that is the last word yet spoken in on the parent theme, the child theme, because we really need to consider that this is the first version where a block theme is actually in core or as a default theme in core, and the handling of a block theme will be in core with 5.9, but it’s the first version. And as you listeners probably have already noticed, there’s always the minimal and a first version to get the functionality right, and then iterate fast on it. And what’s going to happen also with the block themes, and the handling of it in terms of extensibility and all backwards compatibility. So, always through the….

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: We can move to… you know we are not done yet. We can move to patterns and a big change there, that there is now a new category which feature patterns that come from the pattern directory that is hosted on wordpress.org. So, that’s a big change because now the patterns that are submitted by the community, they are somehow, I don’t know, selected to the special category, and every website that is using the block editor will be able to show them on the list, and user will be able to insert them directly from the editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: From the inserter, yes. And there’s also a change in the query loop block, where the number of items per page for the default block has actually increased. So it’s not only six, but you can change that as well. The query loop block pattern. It’s one of my most favorite block patterns, because that’s where you show your….

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: The query loop.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s so extensible and it’s… well, so flexible that you can really make a lot of different pages out of it and showcase your content. So the block editor also got animations for the insertion point and drop zones and other elements. So the drag and drop improvements have been merged there. I didn’t see anything, well, the template editor itself, it comes totally… it’s out of experimentation for this third version, I think. And you get a lot of different updates there, as one of them is to now handle template areas with the template inspector, and have more options for them. And the other one is there for just some cosmetic items, and now it uses a dark background, but though if you have a light background on your theme, yeah, you hardly see it.

It’s going to be a… the background of the editor is not white, it’s actually black. I don’t know if it makes a difference. And then the components, there were quite a few update on the story book. That’s a place where you can look up components, and see the attributes and how they change, and you can kind of copy and paste code from there. So that’s as good that there are some nice updates there.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. And I also notice that change in the navigation block, that is going out of experimental phase. So, on the mobile screen, if you use that block, you would see the hamburger icon. So now, the changes that you can also enforce then on the desktop or the wider screens, you can also always show this hamburger. It’s something that, for instance, some Twenty Twenty family of themes, they use that feature very often. So that’s interesting change that user can use now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, yeah. And then there are some, the great block package, got some changes and one of them is really helpful for people using that to create blocks, as it allows now local directory to pass to a template as a relative path. So, you don’t have to submit your template to NPM to actually use it in your grade block. You can just have it in a particular directory on your own machine, and reuse it for the next one of your grade block features here. And the pascal case, you can now have a Pascal case slug on your template strings as well.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: So that changes mostly for using PHP classes. So it follows the conversion. So you can just use that to start your class name, and then provide the rest of the class name if you are using a PHP file in your templates. So those two features are related to each other. If you are using those templates and you can build local folder with templates that generates PHP files. And I think there’s one more thing I wanted to mention. So the one is, last time we talked that for the navigation block, there was a change that allowed using a slash inserter.

So you need to make inserting a certain type of blocks easier in the navigation menu. And this feature was extended now for the heading list and core blocks. So, for the heading it looks quite funny because if you are using H2, then the font is big, but you are able quickly to insert a different block from that as well. So, sometimes it could be useful to do this type of operation. Maybe in the future, the slash insert might support a different type of action. So, I saw some explorations that could use machine learning. So it could like for instance, Siri or Cortana just to understand what you want to say. And like you could start typing, like insert heading with, find me a pattern with certain characteristics. So I’m looking forward to how the slash inserter will evolve now that it can be used in more places.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The slash inserter was actually the… it has been around since the beginning of Gutenberg, and it has a few nice for the post editor, but I didn’t realize that you actually have to enable it also for the other screens. And I saw that PR in the list and I didn’t highlight it, because it… hmm, I didn’t understand it quite what the significance was this time around, but now thank you for explaining it to me. I also know that some of the tools that deal with the second brain editing, like Roam Research or Logseq, they use the slash command also to add a to do list item, or to add a to do list to a certain date, or just kind of reference date. So there’s a lot that can be done with slash insert, the slash commands.

And for the heading, if you use it in your post, just a little secret from the treasure chest of your Birgit’s secrets, if you say slash H3, it actually gives you a heading three. So you don’t have to control the heading through the block tool or H5. Yeah, you can do that as well. But now we going back to our changelog here. 

Bug Fixes

Then there were 42 bug fixes in that release, and I’m pretty sure there are quite a few coming up also in the next release. There was actually none that really stand out where I said, okay, that took a long time to fix, or that makes it now much easier or something like that.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, it’s definitely in recent releases, we have so many new features and enhancements that show up, that is really hard to find a bug fix that stands out. And those are small things or some something that is a bit of improvement, it’s not like sometimes it’s hard to classify. And many of them are related to how it displayed visually inside the editor, because with so many the features you sometimes miss something less important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think in total they make a real improvement on the quality of life, of the experience, kind of the workflow. But when you isolate them to just one line item, then it’s not that clear how the improvement really affects a normal user in the block editor. But I’m always looking out for those items that are kind of significant in that area, but I didn’t see one in this one in that regard.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, just in the meantime. So during the Go/No-Go Meeting that was held two weeks ago, Helen Hou-Sandi she mentioned that the biggest difference for her is that, the editor that was a couple months back, feels less buggy, like the experience overall has improved, not because something significantly changed, but because those small interaction has been improved a lot. And the difference between what you see in the block editor and on the front end doesn’t differ so much, and that’s the biggest change. This is where those little bug fixes come from, and as you pointed out in isolation, they don’t seem significant, but the amount of work done is really important, because it improves the first impression for the user.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, yeah. Thank you for pointing it out. I heard Helen saying that as well, also in the discussion that we had with her, and Mark Jaquith and Riad Benguella, that the block editor has come such a long way now, that the underlying structure, as well as the look and feel and the usage. 

Documentation

So we come to a documentation, there are 21 changes in documentation. Of course, some of the things with new features comes new documentation, and there’s now a section on how to use this theme in JSON schema, that we mentioned above, and also update the block categories and the clarifying documentation about the inner blocks orientation prop, and what else? So, there’s some package documentation updated, and quite a few components didn’t have any read-me files. And that made it hard to have the automated documentation flow that goes from the GitHub repo into the WordPress meta site on the make block a little harder. And when the information is not in the code, it can’t be in the documentation either. So there’s, well, quite a few efforts there to bring the information out of the components into the documentation there.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah, to fill the missing gaps, because there are still a few, however, it has improved significantly in the last few weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. And that also covers the grade block documentation that has been updated with the new features.

Code Quality

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: And there were also code quality related changes, and there are 17 of that, and it’s related to maintenance and to bring some libraries up to date, or replace some libraries. So one of the works is to replace tiny color libraries, color D, which is more up to date and is a better fit for the project. And also part of the change to the color picker, that had some refactorings and it looks a bit different than before.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you know why the color picker was changed? Was it… I think we discussed it, that we both were kind of….

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: I still know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Accessibility.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: But yes, and performance, and also flexibility of the new library.

Tools

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. And then there were some 11 changes to the tooling or for tools. And these are way over my head anyway, but then I only marvel at the nice naming there, which is now we have flaky test.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Flaky test.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which kind of isn’t funny.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: There is a tool, so maybe not tool. So when end to end tests fail, there is a special script that processes those failures. And it tries the test, if the test succeeds on the second or third attempt, then there is an issue opened called flaky tests, and it just reports what went wrong. So someone could look at that and try to fix the failure, or decide that is not an issue and close that one. So that’s the backstory for that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s very interesting, yes. Well, thank you for that.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. I think we reached to the end of the list, and we can now talk about what’s in active development, or discussed in the community.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And they have….

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: And I think he wanted to talk about project APTA is that, people shared on the core editor meeting on Wednesday, which is very related to the upcoming FeatureFreeze.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And first this was about the navigation block and navigation editor. You might remember the listeners that the navigation editor screen won’t make it into 5.8, and the navigation block has been scaled down a bit for that. And the architecture of the navigation block has changed a little bit, because now it will be saved as a… the storage of it has been changed. And there are some… it’s underlying architecture, and it’s interesting that it’s very late in the process for these to come in, but the team feels quite confident to get this, get through it.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: So are you talking about the idea to use a new post type or WP_template? WP_navigation to solve the navigation issues.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that PR has already been merged, so it’s not in this version, but it’s in the next version, so it can go get into 5.9, and it allows the same navigation items to be used in multiple places on a site, but with a potential to have each different visual presentation. So the that’s kind of how they approach it. So you could have a menu in your header and footer, but if you use it on the sub-site, and just want to point it out, you can style it differently, but you use the same links. You only have one place to edit that. And then with it comes also the facilitation of the WP navigation area as a part of the facilitating that from the classic menus. So it preserves its nature on theme switch, that’s one of the hard things that are now in the work that theme switching should not make you have to redo your menus and your navigation from the website, and that’s part of the feature parity with the existing one. And then here have some transforms on the links, and they split up the URL and the text in the link. So it can have a rich preview as well. So that was for the navigation editor reports. Do you want to talk about the template editor or the styles?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: For the template editor?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: So, I think that the template editor is a template part editor is the thing that had a lot of iterations, like the focus mode, which displays this template part inside, like removes everything that is not the template part from the view, so you can focus on that. And yeah, it seems like it’s almost there, and it will be moved out of the experimental phase, and you’ll launch in WordPress 5.9.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Did I miss anything there?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, there was a tracking issue, that’s actually what is linked there to the template focus mode by Matias, and he had quite a few issues from the design issues that need to be merged, before it all comes together. And it’s still pretty hard to have the template editor, template part editing should work. And the overview issue has also been closed. So all the things that were in the works have actually been merged, and this overview issue has been closed.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. When we talked about improvements to the template part editor last time, it looked pretty solid for me. So, I’m not surprised that it has been closed since then. And also it’s very interesting that this navigation will have its own post type, the same applies for the template part. In some ways they could use this template far for navigation, but I think it’s conceptually different, that’s why they decided that should be a different post type.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think so, that it’s a single purpose of concern, I think it’s a better approach than mixing things, just because they’re technically similar, it doesn’t have to be that they are same. We have a similar discussion actually between reusable blocks, block patterns, and template parts. And to figure out the differences and what’s the same, because the end users will have that question as well. And there is a big discussion on how to rename the reusable blocks, and to what name, but it’s not… I don’t think it has come to an end yet, so we can’t link it in the show notes, I think it’s ongoing right now for two weeks, but yeah, any opinion is welcome, and every reasoning is welcome, in terms of how this should be called. But what I also learned about in that discussion was that there is definitely quite confusion, or it’s not particularly clear the purpose of each of them.

So reading through that has quite a bit of that. That can be… oh, that’s why epiphany is in there. So, I think I also read another discussion somewhere, I forgot, that’s my life now, I read something and then I forget where I have, and when I read it, I bookmark it, but then I still, if I don’t know where the bookmarks are, I’m at the same place. So, I have not yet found a solution to it, but I will navy through. 

Jorge posted an update on their global styles in the meeting. And they have a PR that actually propose a new color palette editor. So it makes multiple color palettes from different sources available to the user. And that’s actually also something that came out of the Go/No Go Meeting, when the team in there was thinking about how can this be improved or what’s the next step for it, when they showed the color sidebar for a template editing screen. I think it was something that Matt Mullenweg just had loaded outside. Oh, isn’t there a website out there like color palette.com where you can select different color palettes? And wouldn’t it be cool if we could get it in? So I’m definitely looking through those PRs and see how they’re progressing there or what they suggest in there.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes. Similar cases for the patterns, explorer, and a new way to browse them, it would be in the modal. So the exploration that is in very advanced phase now, just provides an icon that you can click in the sidebar, and it just moves all the patterns to the modal and you have almost full screen to see them, and so that should help to pick your pattern, like spend more time and have better preview of them, not limited by the very narrow space that the sidebar gives you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, you’re right, that’s a big underscore exploration now, because most page builders have that, third party page builders, and also early layout block plugins collections had some of the full model Windows to select full page patterns. When you come to full page patterns, you need a bigger space to display than the… Sidebar preview is definitely not going to be enough. Well, that’s in the discussion, what else do we have? One of preparing for the WordPress 5.9, the technical leads for the editor release leads, Robert Anderson and George Mamadashvili, are conducting an audit of experimental APIs of the various Gutenberg packages that need to come out of experimental to be merged with core. And they have a one issue list that’s 35920 is the issue number. And it’s a list of quite a few experimental methods and APIs, but only a few of them. And I know there are a few developers who actually created the features, are already preparing those to come out of experiment. They’re working on that. This is just the issue list with all the experimental methods, and when you go through the comments, you’ll see which one are already work in progress to be bring out of experiment.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yeah. Just wanted to explain what this experimental status means for those methods. So, as long as they’re experimental, then there is no guarantee that this method will have the same signatures. So, plugin developers, or theme developers, they use it and at their own risk, it happens, but those… I know that people who use that, they pay attention to ensure that, as long as it’s stabilized, they update their codes. So it still works as they should. And yeah, so the idea is that as soon as you change the name and remove this underscore experimental prefix, the method gets integrated with the block editor handbook and all the like method name, description, patterns, they get included there so people can easily find them later. So it’s just a way to ensure that the Gutenberg plugin can move very fast, and check out if given API makes sense, and use that with core, usually with the block editor or with the block library for core blocks, and it worked pretty nice. However, the list of experiments has grown over time, and probably it would be a good idea to soon take step back and clarify what the future of some of those APIs.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Will be, yeah, absolutely. Speaking, coming out of experimental, the new gallery block will come out of experimental for 11.9. It was a little bit delayed because when found that there was a problem with the mobile app, if you have a lower mobile app than 18.2, there was some content loss there. So now there is a little notification on the gallery block placeholder, that if you have a different mobile version, make sure that you don’t use it, so you’re not encountering any content loss. That’s the only… it is from the developers, is the estimation that by the time 6.0 comes around, the people that are on lower mobile apps have upgraded by then, and it’s not an issue anymore, but it’s just for this release, but it definitely will come to 11.9 for everybody else. And so I’m really looking forward to that, because having image blocks within your gallery, is so much easier to handle so much better concept than having images that don’t have all the features like it has now.

And they also have… so the developers, Glen Davis, mostly spearheaded that effort, he took care of quite a few backwards compatibility issues that happened with existing galleries, that are normally not touched, but when you open up the post again, it will be automatically changed. And we have not finished our outreach to the plugin developers yet, to alert them to that change. But most of them that we have contacted, about 15 of them, 80% actually knew about it and had already adopted their gallery extensions. All right.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: That’s great to hear that people are following the progress on their blog.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think a big part is they’re listening to our podcast. I’m just saying that now. 

So yeah. And that is pretty much the end of our show. I don’t have anything else that I wanted to talk about, do you have anything Grzegorz?

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: No, and other than usual stuff like, we are waiting for reviews and send us your comments, what do you like about the show? What you don’t like? So we could improve, that would be always appreciated, and you can also contact us on Twitter, like tweet us or DM us. My Twitter handle is @gziolo and yours Birgit’s is @bph, it’s very short and sweet. How did you manage to find this one? So short.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I signed up in 2008, so very early. But I get a lot of street cred from the young-ins that I have a three digit Twitter handle.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So we also have an email address where you can send your questions and suggestions, and the news, it’s [email protected]. And this is it for me. I wish you all a great weekend. And next week, when you listen to that, we are all looking forward to WordPress 5.9 testing, and yeah, this is it until the next time, bye-bye.

Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Yes, that was a great one. Thank you Birgit, and thank you our listeners, see you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Bye.

We are glad to announce that WordPress Foundation has published its financials for the year 2020.

In 2020, the WordPress Foundation and its subsidiary B-Corp (WordPress Community Support, PBC) provided support and guidance for a total of 33 WordCamps and hundreds of Meetup groups, organized by volunteers in communities all over the world.

WordPress Foundation’s total revenue in 2020 was $10,787, with donations making up all of this amount. Expenses for the WordPress Foundation totaled $3,438. Major 2020 expenses include:

• do_action charity hackathon grants $1,650
• Dues & Subscriptions $759

You can read about our finances in detail in our 2020 financials page:

Support the WordPress Foundation

As you all may know, the WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that pursues a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software. We regularly host educational programs like charity hackathons and open source educational events. These programs are made possible through the help of generous donations from our donors. 

If WordPress has helped you in any way, kindly consider donating to the WordPress Foundation.

Money raised by the WordPress Foundation will be used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund various programs. 2022 will be an exciting year for the WordPress Foundation, as we have a plethora of exciting plans in mind, including a potential global charity hackathon program along with a host of novel educational initiatives through learn.wordpress.org.

In short – your donations will go a long way in sustaining and growing the WordPress project.

Every penny you contribute will help us build and grow our charitable programs that will in turn empower individuals and communities with the help of the WordPress open source software.

You can either make a one-time donation or choose to donate annually. If you sign up for any one of the four annual subscription plans, you will be featured on our Donors page – as a token of our gratitude for supporting education programs about WordPress and open source. A big thank you to all our donors for supporting us in our journey so far!

Check out our donations page for more information:

Show your support for WordPress by taking part in the Worldwide WordPress 5K run from wherever you are! You can also support the WordPress Foundation by donating to us directly through their website. Hurry up! The event concludes on October 31!

Thank you so much, for all that you do, to support our goal of serving the public good through our myriad initiatives.

In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a WordPress e-commerce specialist on the difference it makes.

Empowered to make a change

For WordPress contributor Ronald Gijsel, open source is a lifeline and a perfect place for people with creative minds. It led him on a transformational journey from chef to WordPress e-commerce specialist. Originally from the Netherlands, where he trained in hospitality, he was to find a restorative and energizing power within the WordPress local and global community.

Ten years ago, life took a sad turn for Ronald and his wife Nihan when their baby daughter passed away only a few days after she was born. At that time, Ronald was a restaurant owner in the UK, working hard in a challenging economic environment. Discovering open source was in many ways his lifeline and helped him and his wife through their considerable heartache. Through this community, a journey to understand the opportunities of the web and new career paths began.

Ronald believes that working together in WordPress and other open source communities can lead to massive benefits for a large number of users. Not least, an online presence has been essential to the survival of many businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

During recent years, he has visited open source events worldwide as a partnership manager at a WordPress e-commerce plugin company and community supporter. His enthusiasm for WordPress has steered him to being part of local support, solutions and collaboration as a co-organizer of WordCamp Bristol, the WordPress Cheltenham Meetup and more.

Moving forward 

When Nihan enrolled in the UK’s Open University to complete her computer science degree, Ronald found her course materials stirring his own interest. He started to follow the lectures with her and even attempted some of the course work for himself – all whilst he continued to work as a chef in various local pubs. 

Through this, he discovered how to generate affiliate commission earnings through blogging on different platforms. “Creating websites was slowly becoming a passion. In these first few years, I enjoyed every part of the steep learning curve, from tackling the basics to more advanced coding and designs,” said Ronald.

The Start of a Web Career

Ronald reduced his hours as a chef and devoted more time to online courses learning coding, e-commerce, SEO, and online marketing. Yet when he applied for a job as a WordPress designer, he had only heard of the platform in the context of blogging. This was all to change when an online tutor on one of the training sites revealed the many functions available with WordPress. It was the start of a new career and life journey. This tutor was Topher DeRosia, who went on to create HeroPress.

Ronald with Topher at WordCamp London in 2019

To learn WordPress, Ronald ‘binge-watched’ webinars on various development topics and over time he became more familiar with it. Securing a job as a designer was only the beginning of his journey into the WordPress ecosystem.

A year later in 2015, after landing the job as a WordPress designer, Ronald’s boss asked him to consider taking on the business and its clients. With his wife, Ronald decided to take on the firm and to expand their work in WordPress e-commerce and online marketing.

As an advocate for learning new skills and practicing them, Ronald encourages others to continue to expand their knowledge through study, attending talks at Meetups and WordCamps, and using the new Learn WordPress resource.

“WordPress has evolved in so many branches that require different skills. There are hundreds of areas of expertise, roles, and jobs that complement WordPress to make it what it is.”

Ronald believes WordPress thrives on diversity, with many contributor opportunities and jobs in the ecosystem that require a wide range of skills. 

“A big part of this is that each person’s personal background complements their skill sets. Who you are and what you do is influenced by what you have done and learned. We need to cherish this. These things also add to our culture, language, experience, and knowledge,” he said.

A journey into WordPress e-commerce

Ronald shares his enthusiasm for building WordPress and e-commerce websites at WordCamp London in 2019

Ronald initially extended his interest in the WordPress ecosystem through representing a plugin company at WordCamps in the UK. He became hooked and went on to attend events in many different countries. 

In 2018, he realized he could do more with his connections and create meaningful partnerships. Within a few weeks, he had crafted his dream job and sent a proposal to the CEO of a WordPress e-commerce firm.

But pitching to strangers wasn’t an easy task, as he did not know if they would understand his vision.

Ronald said: “The doubts went through my head for months. ‘Do I give up my business and work for the benefit of another company? What if I don’t get on? What do I do with my customers?’ But I decided to take the leap.” His pitch proved successful, joining his current firm in 2019.

In the firm’s CEO, Ronald found a mentor, supporter, and a friend. He explained: “Nando Pappalardo never tells me what to do, but instead, he asks questions to make me realize what is achievable, or could be even better. He simply makes suggestions that I read something and reach my own conclusions.”

Looking back at the journey 

Taking risks or changing directions in mid-career often involves a giant leap. In Ronald’s view, through WordPress, you don’t need to be alone. He believes its community can offer support and help to process thinking.

Ronald said: “I often think back to the moment my daughter passed away. She only lived for a few days. Every day, I wonder how events would have unfolded if she had survived. Maybe her memory lives on in every decision I make and the paths I decide to take.”

From his experience, he found that changing a career can sometimes take a few years and have a period of transition. He said: “Only looking back do I realize that each small step slowly made a difference in my life.”

“It was WordPress that made the online world easier to navigate and empowered me to make a change” 

Ronald Gijsel

He added: “Feeling welcomed into the WordPress community through Meetups and WordCamps added a human dimension and confidence that I can do ‘this’ too.”

Ronald’s wish is that his story will offer support to others who may have experienced tragedy in their lives. “I hope that I can give you the hope and strength to try and put your energy into something else that can lead to more significant changes in your life. Try to take it as one positive decision at a time.”

Share the stories

Help us share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. #ContributorStory.

Contributors

Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), and Surendra Thakor (@sthakor) for the interviews and writing this feature, and to Ronald Gijsel (@just2ronald) for sharing his story.

Thanks to Meher Bala (@meher), Chloé Bringmann (@cbringmann), Anjana Vasan (@anjanavasan), Collieth Clarke (@callye), and Reyes Martinez (@rmartinezduque) for their content contributions, and Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune), and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support for the series.

This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress

Howdy, howdy!

How was your week in the WordPress ecosystem? I hope got to enjoy the creative energy around the Gutenberg project, despite encountering the little quirks and bugs.

In this edition, you’ll find updates from the team working on WordPress 5.9, tutorials for the new features coming in WordPress 5.9 and tools and videos for theme and plugin developers.

Don’t forget to stop by at the Patternspiration site by Tammie Lister who added a few more beautiful patterns. Today’s creation shows a beautiful DropCap design.

Last week, I visited the local contemporary art museum, was fascinated by Robert Colescott‘s art. I am also a sucker for museums shop and spend some money on books. What brings joy into your life? Hit reply and let me know, please.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Table of Contents

WordPress Team updates

WordPress 5.9 is coming up fast. Robert Anderson, editor technical release lead, posted an updated list of Must-Have features of the block editor to be merged to core for the release.

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On the WPTavern, Sarah Gooding recounts a discussion among Gutenberg Contributors Focus Efforts on Navigation Block for WordPress 5.9, Navigation Editor Punted to Future Release. We discussed it before, navigation menus are super important for site owners, as they guide the site visitor through the site. WordPress’ plugins are extending in many ways the menus and front end. The first version of the navigation block will not offer any additional extension and will be used in a block theme made for Full-site-Editing. It will not be part of the main navigation for classic themes.

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Gutenberg 11.8 is now available in the WordPress repository. Vicente Canales published the release and Make Blog post: What’s new in Gutenberg 11.8 You’ll find instructional short videos as demos for some features. My favorite new feature is the auto-generated Anchors for Headings and the opacity controls for background in the Cover block. Developers might be happy to learn that a child theme’s theme.json file can now be merged with the parent theme.json. There were 166 PRs merged in total, and the changelog lists 80 Enhancements. 🎉

Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I recorded the Gutenberg Changelog episode #54 on Friday, published Saturday. You might see it pop up in the WordPress Dashboard News section.

Justin Tadlock took it our for a spin and posted: Gutenberg 11.8 Adds Dozens of Features, Including Featured Patterns and Automatically-Generated Heading Anchors

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The third round of Q & A of the FSE Program yielded quite a few new questions. Anne McCarthy has connected with the teams and got you the Answers from Round Three of Questions.

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Now that the block editor has been in the WordPress ecosystems for a few years, it’s time for a Redesign of the Gutenberg Page. Beatriz Fialho has a proposal and a few first prototypes.

 “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.

Content Creators and the Block Editor

Jamie Marsland published a tutorial on WordPress Gutenberg Full Site Editing for Beginners. He explains in short demos what new blocks come to WordPress, how Templates work and how you can control your site with Global Styles.

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Courtney Robinson takes a deep dive to help you to Navigate WordPress Full Site Editing experience. She also provides links to tutorials on some components of Full-site-editing, like the Query block, and the template editor.

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Joe Casabona asked in his post Should You Really Write in the WordPress Editor? The quick answer is probably not, neither in the classic editor nor the block editor.

Casabona uses Ulysses as his writing app (mac only, paid) and he lists a few other writing tools. I mostly use Google Doc, as I often collaborate on articles, especially when working with WordPress teams on the Make blogs. Being able to access the Google Doc app from all my devices and continue where I left off, or to answer comments, is invaluable.

The block editor’s power feature is that you can copy/paste from almost any tool into the block editor, and it just works. I remember the times when I had to spend another hour after finishing a long form piece to format it in the classic editor. Here the block editor shines widely. (Excerpt of a longer blog post by yours truly)

If you are looking for a more distraction-free writing experience based on the editor, try Iceberg by Rich Tabor and Jeffery Carandang.

Jeff Chandler also chimed in via WPMainline: I Hope This Is All Worth It

What is your writing process like? How does the block editor fit in there, or does it? Share in the comments or send an email [email protected].

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Wes Theron published the workshop “Using the Block Widget Editor” on Learn.WordPress.org. Widgets provide a convenient means of adding content and features to a website and require no coding experience. This five-minute lesson will give an introduction to finding and including widgets on your website.

The list of workshops regarding using the Block Editor has grown quite a bit. If you are looking for tutorials to share with your clients and their editors, follow this link the page with all videos available

List of Workshops on Learn.WordPress.org about using the block editor

Design and Theme Building with Gutenberg

Eric Karkovack posted an Introduction to the WordPress theme.json File. “Developers no longer have to settle for Gutenberg’s out-of-the-box defaults or deal with clunky workarounds. “ He wrote, and went on to walk you through the various settings and their purpose.

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Two weeks ago, we had Ellen Bauer, Anders Noren and Carolina Nymark on our Live Q & A and here is the post on the Discussion: Going from Creating classic themes to Building block themes with the recording, a ton of resources and the transcript.

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Justin Tadlock posted about his journey into the weeds of Designing Block-Based WordPress Child Themes With a Single JSON File.

“Block child themes have partially worked in the Gutenberg plugin for months. However, the feature that I was looking forward to the most was not ready until a week ago. A new patch allows a child theme to overwrite single values of its parent’s theme.json file. Essentially, the two files are merged, with the child taking precedence.”

Justin Tadlock

Take a look at the post and learn why Tadlock got all excited about this feature.

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.

Building Blocks for Gutenberg

Bob Dunn and Noëlle Steegs hosted on their show Darren Either, and Gary Murray, WooCommerce, and Manos Psychogyiopoulos of SomeWhereWarm. for An Inside/Outside Conversation Around WooCommerce Blocks in this #105 episode of DotheWoo Podcast.

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This week, I hosted on the Gutenberg Time Live Q & A, members of the BuddyPress team, Mathieu Viet, Varun Dubey and David Cavins and discussed their journey converting classic widgets to dynamic blocks. The recording is available on YouTube. The post, with resources and transcript, is in the works.

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The @wordpress/create-blocks package now supports local templates. Ryan Welcher took it out for a spin on this week’s Twitch stream. On GitHub, you find the corresponding Issue and PR. The documentation was updated as well.

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For advanced Gutenberg developers, Adam Zielinski wrote about Thunks in Gutenberg.

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Plugin Machine is the name of a new tool, Josh Pollock has been working on for a few months. It’s an Electron app for plugin developers to get a head start on the plugin development and deployment.

He wrote: “ It can create plugins with blocks, editor sidebars, custom admin pages, remote updater, common actions and filters, custom content types, local development, tests, GitHub actions, and many other things. The UI for creating plugins, managing features, modifying generated files and downloading development versions of the plugin is nearly done. I am also making good progress on the CLI. I am almost ready to start early access.”

Josh Pollock was one of the early JavaScript educators in WordPress community together with Grzegorz Ziolkowski, Zac Gordon and  Brian Richards at WordCamp Miami in 2018. Pollock is also the original creator of Caldera Forms plugin that was sold in 2020 to Ninja Forms and will be phased out by the end of this year.

It’s a shame as it was one of the few form builders, who offered more features beyond creating forms. Other plugins developers could connect with it and create sophisticated processors for the submitted form data and integrating other systems.  Josh certainly knows what plugin developer might be looking for. 

WordPress Events

November 3rd, 2021 2pm EDT / 18:00 UTC
What is Full-Site Editing in WordPress?
iThemes Webinar w/ Birgit Pauli-Haack

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November 3rd, 2021
WordCamp Spain 2021 Online
Please note: all presentation will be in Spanish

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November 4th, 2021,
WPEngine Summit 2021 (EMEA)
starts at 10 am UTC / 6am EDT

With many fantastic speakers, among them CEO Heather Brunner, Chris Weigman, Rob Stinson, Hashim Warren, Grace Erixon, and Brian Gardner

• Schedule
• Tickets

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November 16th, 2021 – 11am EST / 16:00 UTC
Testing the latest features in Gutenberg
GoDaddy Pro Online w/ Andy Fragen, Birgit Pauli-Haack, George Mamadashvili

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

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“blocks” by ye auld bugga is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

It is only a matter of time before the floodgates are flung open. Many of the block themes released in the past year have been little different than your typical starter theme. However, there is a quiet momentum building that might just surprise some folks in a few months.

Automattic has put out several block themes. However, its themes tend to fit into a specific mold that caters toward its WordPress.com users. Many of the company’s employees are active in the Gutenberg project, and it has massive resources to throw at theme dev. It can push forward all it wants, and it certainly has with its Blockbase parent theme. Automattic’s Theme Team has already launched four child themes: Seedlet (Blocks), Mayland (Blocks), Quadrat, and Geologist.

Nevertheless, it will take other theme authors and shops to move the ball forward.

Twenty Twenty-Two is already shaping up to be a beautiful default theme that will showcase the power of global styles and block patterns. Development began so late that it will take a full-speed sprint to wrap it up for the WordPress 5.9 launch in December. My primary concern with the time crunch is that some of the little details that make great designs get overlooked.

However, I have seen enough of the work that has gone into this theme to believe it will be one of the best default themes in years.

Twenty Twenty-Two homepage.

For block themes to work, people must find those that they want to use on their sites. The designs must be representative of their personality or style. Or, they must offer features or layouts that match what they need.

That takes time, and it takes more theme authors jumping on the block bandwagon.

I could see a little of it with Anariel Design’s Naledia and Clove themes earlier this year. They were beautiful designs but did not fit me.

Clove theme homepage.

Then, Anders Norén released Tove last month. It was a bit funky, eclectic. Most of all, it was something fresh. And it did not rely on any components of traditional theming. What stood out was its 40+ block patterns, which offered just a little something for everybody.

This is the moment where I started seeing the shift in parts of the community. Having one of its most well-known theme authors build on top of the new system shows that maybe this whole block-based theme system might actually be worth exploring.

Custom-built homepage with Tove.

I still could not see myself using Tove. It is a well-built theme but not my cup of tea.

Earlier this week, I briefly mentioned the Bai theme by Seed Webs in a post about a potential Pattern block. Unlike Tove, it was far less experimental with its style — a bit more down to earth. As I browsed its demo blog posts, I saw something of myself in it. There were things I disliked, such as the animations when scrolling down the page. However, the heavy focus on the written word and the color scheme drew me in.

I still dabble a bit in design and development. This helps me understand what the system is capable of in the right hands. I know that even more complex and unique designs are possible within the block framework that we have now.

I am also a WordPress user. Until Bai, no other theme had come along that spoke to that side of me that wants to install something and just blog.

Single post view of the Bai theme.

It also resembled traditional themes on the outside. This is crucial because other theme authors must see something that more closely resembles what they might build.

This is not a dig at the pioneers who built the earliest block themes dating back to 2020, but many were not particularly eye-catching projects. The underlying technology was fun to dig through, but they were not something you could sell users on. The recent wave of themes is different. They show that, yes, you can build beautiful block-based designs.

It can be hard to put faith into a system until you see a little bit of yourself in it. As more and more theme authors begin exploring block themes, more users will find those designs that represent who they are or meet some other site design goal.

The block theme journey is just beginning. It is going to be a fun ride once WordPress 5.9 launches and we hit the gas pedal.

Jetpack is finally formalizing its approach to agency licensing with a new portal launched this week. The program is aimed at streamlining product setup and account billing records for agencies and professionals who use Jetpack on client projects.

The dashboard shows partners their total licenses and costs at a glance. It also allows agencies to monitor clients’ backups, scans, and activity logs. This is an improvement over managing billing for licenses scattered across client sites. Once an agency is approved for the program, Jetpack representatives will migrate existing plans into the same account. An agency’s clients can then all be rolled into one monthly bill.

“The Jetpack licensing portal is the first solution we’ve launched to address licensing for agencies or professionals that manage multiple sites,” said Jesse Friedman, who manages Strategic Marketing and Partnerships for Jetpack. “We’ve spent a lot of time focused on making it easier for customers to setup and get started with Jetpack. This licensing platform streamlines that setup flow specifically for agencies. They will be able to issue a license, and have Jetpack backing up or scanning a site in moments, by eliminating the checkout flows and reducing multiple monthly bills into one single invoice.”

This is the first in a new line of products targeted at agencies and Jetpack is incentivizing signups with tiered discounts for more licenses. There was some confusion about the pricing but a Jetpack representative said the discounts apply to the regular product pricing. There is no cost for agencies to sign up but they are required to issue 5 licenses within 90 days.

“Our hope is to attract agencies who use Jetpack today so we can address the needs they have right now,” Friedman said. “We wanted to create some minimal requirements to use the platform in order to ensure a positive experience.  If an agency signs up and doesn’t end up issuing 5 licenses within 90 days they may not benefit from the platform or the tools we are hoping to build for them and we’d recommend they continue using the Jetpack products the same way they use them today.”

The search for a host city for WordCamp US 2022 is now underway with what WordPress community organizer Angela Jin calls “big changes” to the selection process. Unlike previous years where WordPress communities applied after researching venues and demonstrating activity and interest, community leadership plans to conduct its own city search.

“We all felt that requesting applications from local WordPress communities today would place an undue burden on volunteers,” Jin said. “Risk evaluation and forecasting feasibility of an in-person flagship [event] requires a professional events management team.”

WCUS lost money in deposits made for the event in 2020 after it was cancelled due to the pandemic. It was supposed to be held in St. Louis another year but the organizing team has decided to make a fresh start on the planning.

“When WordCamp US 2020 was canceled, we did explore moving the venue contract in St. Louis forward,” Jin said. “The negotiations didn’t lead to anything we felt was in the best interest of the WordPress community, however, so we did cancel the contract and we lost some venue deposits.” 

Jin said WordCamp US is one of the biggest venue contracts they manage and it made sense to bring in a professional events management team to negotiate with potential venues, given all the uncertainty surrounding in-person events right now.

“They will be a part of the organizing team and help facilitate venue logistics,” Jin said. “Venue logistics at this scale tends to be difficult and invisible. Having a professional events team frees up our volunteer organizers to focus more on community-facing tasks. For now, though, the focus is finding and negotiating with the venue.”

WCUS may or may not continue with hosting the event in the same city for two years, depending on the relationship with the venue.

“We’re asking for bids for 2022, with an option to propose for 2023,” Jin said. “A big part of the decision making this year is whether or not the venue will be a partner to the WCUS organizing team. For example, if we do need to cancel, we hope to see any loss minimized. On the other hand, if the situation improves, a venue that offers flexibility to help us host a larger event than we currently anticipate would be amazing.” 

Jin would not reveal which cities are under consideration for WCUS 2022 but said the team is including local communities that applied to host the event in 2020. She said many of those organizers are still interested and enthusiastic about hosting the event.

The community team plans to put out a call for organizers in mid-November and will extend the call to more local organizers once the host city has been chosen.

It's a haunting but educational tale with Brad Williams, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Greg Rickaby, and Amor Kumar as they join host Cory Miller to talk about headless WordPress.

Topics:

• What is a Headless WordPress Website?
• Considerations when deciding if Headless is a good approach for you.
• Learn how a Headless approach can be faster, more secure, and more scalable.
• Supporting advanced functionality like contact forms and user input.
• Recommended tools, hosting providers, and partners.

Every week Post Status Live will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash.

You can listen to past episodes of Post Status Live, browse all our podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Simplecast, or by RSS.

Mentioned in the show:

• WebDevStudios
• Next.js WordPress Starter
• WP Engine Atlas
• WP VIP
• Frontity
• Beach Body On Demand
• Legend of the Headless WordPress Presentation
• Embracing Headless WordPress with Greg Rickaby
• Post Status (Twitter)
• Cory Miller (Twitter)

Transcript Sponsor: WP Engine

WP Engine is a leader in Managed WordPress hosting. They're also a new breed of technology company at the intersection of innovation and service. WP Engine provides the solutions you need to create great WordPress sites and apps to drive your business forward — and faster. WP Engine's new Atlas platform is fully headless WordPress with support for multiple server-side environments, auto-deployments from GitHub branches, both static and dynamic headless architectures, your choice of JavaScript frameworks — React, Angular, Vue.js, or any other — and command-line that is 100% scriptable.

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a person while they live.” — Albert Schweitzer

In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Cory and David discuss some recent conversations in the WordPress community: Is the WordPress writing experience bad for “serious writers?” Does WordPress have to excel in this area, or is it fine to have third-party writing tools that feed into WordPress? Automattic acquired Day One for a reason. Tumblr might end up getting a WordPress.com writing-and-admin experience makeover.

Also don't forget: Posting content on a regular basis is a good skill to practice. Cory shares how he managed to publish a post every day in October. David points out that whether it's photography, music, or creative writing — regular publishing is important (and can be vital) to you now and in the future. For one thing, it keeps your mind limber, and by “thinking out loud,” you invite unexpected, chance encounters and collaborations with other people.

Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash.

You can listen to past episodes of The Excerpt, browse all our podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Simplecast, or by RSS.

Mentioned in the show:

• Matt's Page Builder
• Should You Really Write in the WordPress Editor?
• David Bisset (Twitter)
• Cory Miller (Twitter)
• Post Status (Twitter)

Sponsor: Sandhills Development

No matter what you're working on with your WordPress website, Sandhills Development has a tool that can help you. Sell digital products with Easy Digital Downloads. Use AffiliateWP as your affiliate marketing solution. Sugar Calendar is event management made easy. And WP Simple Pay is a lightweight Stripe payments plugin. Craft superior experiences with the ingenuity of Sandhills’ plugins.

David Gwyer released his Flexible FAQs plugin a year ago via his WPGO Plugins site. However, after a month of updates, the project seemed to fall off the radar, at least until earlier this week when he released a massive overhaul that integrates more with the block editor.

The plugin creates a custom post type for managing individual FAQ sets. This part of the plugin uses the classic editor interface instead of relying on the block system.

Edit/New FAQ screen.

Admittedly, the experience of the classic editor is always jarring whenever I load a plugin that uses it. FAQ posts do not have a content canvas. The data is saved as meta values, so it does not necessarily need to work with the block editor. However, I would love to see a plugin such as this one move its primary interface over.

The management screen is the same as posts, pages, and other post types, and adding a new FAQ is straightforward. The plugin presents users with a meta box for adding question-and-answer sets, which uses the TinyMCE interface for typing.

There is also a FAQ Group taxonomy for categorizing FAQ posts. This should come in handy for informational sites that need tighter organization. The plugin also offers a [flexible-faqs] shortcode, which classic users can drop in their posts and pages. However, others will want to take advantage of its blocks.

The plugin ships with three blocks for outputting expandable FAQ posts:

• Text
• Box
• Accordion

Each of the blocks allows end-users to select a published FAQ or a FAQ Group. They can then choose a “theme,” which can be customized.

Box-style FAQ with default theme.

Users will likely need to customize the FAQ theme because the plugin’s output has some styles that overrule theme defaults, particularly its colors.

The color picker used in each block’s options is different from core and feels out of place. However, users can still select from their theme-defined colors, except for the border setting. For some reason, the border color uses an entirely different picker control. Despite that, I was still able to get the output to line up with my theme.

Accordion-style FAQ with customized theme.

The blocks would offer a smoother user experience if they leaned on more of WordPress’s built-in block controls and components. Using the core color and border features would be a good starting point. However, offering access to typography, full or wide-alignment, text alignment, and more would give users more flexibility with the design.

I am not currently a fan of the three-block approach. From my tests, I do not see a reason to separate them. Each does the same thing with slightly different styles. Instead of splitting the blocks, I would like to see a single FAQ block that focuses on design controls. The plugin could still offer the three base layouts as variations that are essentially presets of specific settings — that is what the variation system is for.

I would drop the “theme” system altogether. Then, use block styles for different default designs and add extra controls for customizing more specific features.

However, the pro version relies heavily on the plugin’s block-theming system. While the free copy offers a handful of themes, the commercial upgrade has over 100. This is not something that would be easy to backtrack at this point. Its saving grace is that user customizations are stored in the database, and they can reuse these modified themes across the site.

Regardless of any nit-picks I have, the version 0.5.10 update is leaps and bounds better than the earlier versions. The plugin is dead simple to get up and running. I built a few FAQ posts and dropped them into pages within minutes.

The plugin is also ARIA compliant and accessible. I ran into no trouble testing it from the keyboard.

The plugin’s front-end scripts for opening and closing the tabs do not seem to load when using a block-based theme. I am not sure if this is an issue from the plugin or a bug with Gutenberg. It should not deter most users at this point, but it should be addressed before WordPress 5.9 launches with its support of block themes.

The plugin is not ideal for every situation. For those who have multiple FAQ pages or lists, it offers an easy route toward managing them. For sites with just one or two sections of questions and answers, it is likely overkill.

For the latter group, Jordy Meow’s FAQ Block plugin makes a lot more sense. It allows users to build a FAQ directly in the post or page, but it does not provide a central location for managing multiple FAQs.

On October 7th, 2021, I had the privilege to host an amazing panel with Ellen Bauer, Andres Noren and Carolina Nymark on a Live Q & A.

We discussed block themes and how these three theme developers made the journey from creating classic theme, to building block themes.

On this post you’ll find the Video recording, the resource links shared and the transcript.

Resources and Links to learn more

Stay in Touch with the Panelists

Video Live Q & A: How to make it easier to build blocks

Previous Live Q & As on Block themes and Full-site Editing

• In January 2020 with Enrique Piqueras who showed us some plans and early interfaces for full-site editing.
  
• Then five month, later in June 2020 later Kjell Reigstad, Carolina Nymark and Eileen Violini showed us the various pieces of full-site editing.
  
• This year January we discussed the FSE outreach program and learning resources, with the Themes team, Carolina Nymark, Anne McCarthy and Ari Stathopoulos.
  
• And in June Jeff Ong, Daisy Olsen and Tammie Lister talked us through the Theme.json file and all it ramifications ahead of WordPress 5.8.

Theme.json resources

• Developer Handbook: Global Settings & Styles (theme.json)
• Introducing Theme.json in WordPress 5.8 (DevNote)
• Using theme.json in a classic theme (Marcus Kazmierczak)
• Standardizing Theme.json Color Slugs in WordPress Block Themes (Rich Tabor)
• Configuring Theme Design with theme.json (Jeff Ong)
• The theme.json horizon (Matias Ventura)

Block Themes for Full-Site Editing

• WordPress.org Theme Repository (Feature: Full-site Editing)
• List of Full Site Editing Themes

Tools

SchemaStore: https://json.schemastore.org/theme-v1.json Most IDEs or code editors use the scheme json to help developers with labels and values

Theme Team experiments

WordPress Theme Team shares code on its theme-experiements repository including

• require-gutenberg 0 a utility for themes to check whether the Gutenberg plugin is installed
• Generating your own starter theme via php new-empty-theme.php

Documentation

• Block Theme Overview
• Tutorial: Create a block Theme

The Show Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. It’s being live streamed to YouTube, and I welcome you all here at the zoom in. Yeah. And of course, I was waiting for the YouTube screen to collapse. I can shut them up because now I hear myself in five minute increments. All right, so

Hi there and welcome to our 29th Gutenberg Times live Q&A. My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack, and I’m your host and the curator of Gutenberg Times. Thank you all for watching. It’s so great to have you here. In today’s show, we will discuss with three outstanding theme developers how they went from building classic themes, to building block-based themes, geared towards Full-Site Editing, and let’s introduce the panelists.

Introduction of Panelists: Ellen Bauer, Anders Noren and Carolina Nymark

We have early morning in New Zealand, Ellen Bauer, co-founder of Elma studio and with Manuel Esposito, the co-author of the A No theme. Ellen, thank you so much for being here on the show again, it’s so good to see you.

Ellen Bauer: Yes, it’s so good. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Also with us and for the first time on the show, Anders Noren, theme developer from Sweden and designer of the default WordPress theme Twenty Twenty. His theme Excel, probably the last classic theme from him. Palace to Gutenberg Times. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Anders.

Anders Noren: Twice, super happy to be here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: As well and finally meet Carolyn, Carolyn, Sorry, Carolina Nymark. From also from Sweden, member of the themes team, co-author of the TT one blog theme, and development lead on the Twenty Twenty-one theme. And her second Full Site Editing theme is Armando. And it’s in the WordPress directory. So glad you have your back on the show, Carolina. It’s the third time I could call you my co-host. So how are you doing today?

Carolina Nymark: Thank you. I’m very well. I am excited to come and talk about teams. So thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So and we have people from Toronto. Hi, Robert. Hi, Jack. Hi, Pierre Maria, from Italy. Also star of the testing, Full-Site Editing outreach team because he translated many of the tests into Italian. And that’s a huge work. And thank you very much for that, Mario. And then of course, Brian Gardner. The minute I mentioned his name, Ellen just disappeared for the from the screen for a minute. Well, greetings back to Chicago. So, we are also excited. And for you joining us on zoom and on YouTube. 

Announcement

And yeah, so I have an announcement while I have you all. Next week. The next Gutenberg Times live Q&A will be next week with Helen Hou-Sandi, Mark J. Chris and Riad Benguella. So Helen Hou-Sandi is a commiters on WordPress. So I think this Mark and Riad. Riad is also the developer lead for Gutenberg.  They will discuss or continue our discussion that was started on Twitter some weeks ago, on how to make it easier to build blocks. All three have explored ways on how PHP and React JS could talk together to make this a better experience for developers. It will happen next week, October 14 at 11 Eastern 15 UTC, registrations are open, and I’ll share the link in the chat window. So you can kind of if you’re interested, can register there as well.

Hi, Miki from Tokyo hi to Nepal. It’s good to see you all. 

So, speaking of the questions for those who are watching this on YouTube and livestream, use the chat window on the right-hand side. I don’t know where it is. But Oh, and if you’re on zoom here, use the chat box, the Q&A for the questions and the chat bubble for all your other thoughts. Please keep it family friendly. Even if you disagree. So, this is a family club so to speak. Alright, and hi, back to Atlanta to Sequester McKinney. It’s all so great to see you here. All right, so what’s today’s show about?

How do theme developers move from building classic themes to building block themes?

Our topic is how do theme developers move from building classic themes to building block-based themes with Full-Site Editing features that are already in WordPress 5.8 and more will come to WordPress 5.9 and WordPress 6.0.

Development has been going on for almost two years. And some of you might remember our previous shows here.

On the same spot, one in January 2020 was the first one then in June. Then again this year in January, and in June was the last one with Jeff Ong, Daisy Olsen and Tammie Lister where we talked very extensively about the theme JSON. And Jeff did a little demo there.

So if you want to go back in our records on YouTube to see that so with Full-Site Editing and global styles, themes are changing in architecture, as well as in functionality, they will enable much more customization for users than ever before.

So today, we’re having that conversation with the theme developers who already walked the path before you give us in building blocks, block by seams and put them out for users to use. So Anders first and then we’ll Ellen we will have a demo of the work and to give us an overview and then by then I would think we will have already some questions from the audience from you. So before but before we go into the weeds too deep, let’s do a round robin to a question for everyone.

Q: What kept you going through the transition? What excites you most about block themes?

When you were building the themes, you are on the cutting edge and some would say on the bleeding edge of Gutenberg development, that must have been quite stressful. So, what were the factors and situations that kept you going, and what is it that excites you so much about this new way of building themes that you kind of went through the experience, and what kept you going and jump head in first? Carolina first, then Ellen and Anders.

Carolina Nymark: When I first when I started it was all about having new toys to play with right, and then we would work on the Twenty-Twenty-One and TT1 Block started did one box was a little later. And yes, it was stressful. But also a lot of fun. But again we’ve got to contribute back to Gutenberg and improve on the things that we found that weren’t got they weren’t working and also figure out what features do we need to add later? What’s our wish list? And of course what is not working now, what bugs need to be fixed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, thank you thank you for going through the bug fixing part and the testing part

Ellen Bauer: Hello, I need your my audio.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, very well I can hear you

Ellen Bauer: I just enjoy so Carolina was like started way longer and she did have cool Full-Site Editing website which I knew for a long time and like I knew the terms and stuff and we were kind of busy building blocks and that took up a lot of my time kind of learning getting into that part. And so it’s like back and forth switching between themes and blocks for us, which was challenging or is challenging. But the final like 5.8 the release of 5.8 was the final like straw for us and we’ve been building I know for like over a year like building kind of testing where we should go it was and it was like we felt a little bit stuck at times like what would we do.

We played around with patterns a lot and we just thought like there’s something missing with our Aino theme. And we just started the project for this whole transition. So obviously, then we had this Aino theme kind of sitting around waiting to be a black theme And with 5.9, we just kind of like, okay, we go with it. We had the theme in the WordPress org repository. And yeah, it was just always meant to be for this kind of project. So 5.8 got us ready, like there’s a site editor, let’s just try it out. And I thought it’s, I thought it will maybe take me like a few days, which was a little bit naive. And then I think it ended up being three weeks, mainly. And there’s like, still huge, like work in progress. Our like, we had the theme already on, like, the WooCommerce. And I was like, eager to get WooCommerce into the block theme. I didn’t want to lose any of our work. And yeah, there’s still like things to do. But it has WooCommerce support. And it’s kind of cool that we can jump in like right from the beginning and kind of explore what we can do and what we can’t do. And then yeah, we updated the theme as a blog theme. And we were super happy that we went this way. But then there was like, oh, there’s quite a lot of Gutenberg updates, like pushed. And I remember Carolina you said this, oh, there’s a lot of Gutenberg updates do we push, like, quite like fast, you have to be on your toes. And one of them like got me like I was like, Oh, god, what are they doing? I didn’t pay attention. I was so busy. But yeah, now it’s, I think I have it a little bit better than the control, like after the first one or two update with like, as a block theme.

The one thing that caught me a little off guard, like transverse translating to the converting to the HTML templates, was that I didn’t realize once people use the templates, and I change something in them, that it wouldn’t change for them automatically. Because they customize them. So I and I made changes to the page templates. And so that was a little bit confusing. And I learned my lesson from that. But we have awesome. Yeah, we have awesome users. And they like I think I got it sorted out together like a lot of help. And we have a Slack channel, which is super useful. People can like shout out like, Ellen, what are you doing? I think it will be smooth. And yeah, we learn like, we learn big lessons.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, good. Yeah. Thank you. Anders.

Anders Noren: Yeah, I was gonna say that. I didn’t really feel like Trailblazer were early adopter in block teams.

Because by the time I actually delved deep into it, then people like Carolina with FullSiteediting.com had already found the path through Full-Site Editing theme, some document that pretty much everything theme developers need to know, I feel like, actually get started with Office themes.

So it felt like the path was very well worn by the time I actually started working on it. Because that was the like around summer this year. Whereas Carolina has been working with it for a year plus, at this point. So I feel, like pretty much everyone who works with block based teams now owe a lot to the people who really spend time with them in the early days, because it has only gotten easier to build them up up to this point. And will hopefully get a lot easier as 5.9 gets closer as well. But I mean, I’m going to echo Carolina, as well was saying that, the thing that keeps it going is just that it’s so fun to play around with all of the toys that Full-Site Editing brings. And the really fun part is when you actually release something, and other users start to use your theme. And they actually use it in ways that you didn’t imagine at all, while you were making it.

I had a support request from a guy just the other day, who sent me a link to a site running my block-based theme. And at first, I thought that he had actually sent me the wrong link because I couldn’t recognize that as to my theme. Because the layouts were different. The colors were different. The typeface was different. So it just looked like an entirely different thing from mine. And I feel like that’s always the really exciting, but when you step in and do something completely unexpected with it. And I think We’re going to see more and more about them in this space overall, as 5.9 gets closer, but I think the next two months will be really, fascinating.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. All right. So I don’t see any comments for our audience to get to. So I’m glad that you are. And thank you very much for saying that for about Carolina. And all those who worked so hard on it. Yeah, it’s nice of you to say and to acknowledge that. 

So I think it’s a great time now to see the finished product. First Anders, as I said, and then Ellen. And dear viewers, if you do, you probably will have questions right away. And I’m asking for a little bit of a patience, then we will switch to the Q&A after the demos. And a note, if you write long blog posts before you get to your question, I’d probably skip it, as it will be too long to read first for me and then aloud, and I will get you an answer after the show. Promised is Andrea Middleton wrote, Be kind be brief. So Anders, are you ready to share your screen?

Anders Noren: Yes, let’s do it. There we go. So I thought I was gonna keep this pretty simple and just show a little bit from my block face theme, which is called tool that after the after two rounds on the finish, creator of the Roman characters, and basically give a brief overview of power block-based site running a block based team can look like.

But as I said earlier, it can really look like anything, which is the whole point of block-based themes in the first place. So what we have here is the demo site for the theme Tove, which is on wordpress.org. And I created this with cafe/restaurants in mind. And a lot of the patterns here on the front page, including the header pattern here, is sort of geared towards that audience. We have a little color spot on the on the top, we have the social icons, we have opening hours, and a small menu.

And everything on this page is thumbed completely within the site editor. So opening hours, again, here, we have one of the cafe/restaurant-oriented Block Patterns that are included in the thing with information for location and our cafe restaurant chain. We have some testimonials, a call to action for when you want to make a reservation, somewhere nice looking coffee, cafe menu, a different call to action. A very tasty looking lemon cake, I think. And then some more information about the theme itself.

And my plan for making this theme is that I was going to keep it as simple as possible within the constraints on Full-Site Editing, and block themes with just something I struggled with. Because I want to basically tweak and adjust everything. So when it’s something in the like core Block Editor styles that I don’t really agree with I to try to override them, which never works out well because then they need to keep up to date with the latest Gutenberg updates and so on.

With Full-Site Editing, what’s going to happen is as the Block Editor gets better and better with every Gutenberg update, and every WordPress release is that theme developers will actually remove CSS from their themes step by step.

Because the whole idea with dropping Sr. eventually there will only need to be the theme of JSON file, which Ellen will show in our demo. Where everything that makes the theme a theme, all the colors, all the fonts, all of the layout adjustments will only have within a single JSON file which can be easily changed and adapted for other themes and so on. So hopefully CSS will be something that you can have the doesn’t need to add to make your theme look good. So I look forward to removing a lot more CSS in the future in future updates. And here you can see a brief overview of the structure of what files are included. So we want to get this where this file is the only file in the theme folder. So one day, hopefully, maybe a screenshot as well. 

The second big component of the Theme is really all of the Block Patterns which are bundled with it as well, which are all listed out on this page. And this is really the second big puzzle piece I would say on block-based things it needs to look good and and include a few examples of how to combine the different blocks in patterns that make the styles look and work as well as possible. So that’s a very brief look at the WordPress theme. Alright, I think that’s all.

Carolina Nymark: I can say on this that what I like most about this theme is not that this block team, but it’s so cute, just really makes you happy to look at it. Really, really cute.

Anders Noren: I’m really, really happy to do her that. No, thank you. I have some. I mean, since the themes, the block-based themes themselves are so simple to actually make. You need to spend that time that you would otherwise spend writing a bunch of PHP on something else. So I just made illustrations for two which was a lot of fun. I mean, maybe I got a bit carried away with it as well. All right. Oh, I think your audio is muted.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep, I muted it because I entered a few comments on YouTube. And there was Marcus Kazmirczak and I need to ask him if I’m butchering his name now he says “I’m an Anders super fan. I’ve been running themes for years. So and then he loves the bright colors and the feel Yeah. And Gangoff says I did recommend the theme done who wants to learn block themes and the theme is really good looking. So these are comments and love saying thanks Carolina and Anders for the block themes and she has a question about we’re gonna go through the question just in a bit. Ellen, are you ready?

Ellen Bauer: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I share my screen I have to select them so um, I thought that it’s a little bit improvised because and showed kind of the front end of the themes it’s probably fun to look at at the back end so just kind of to give an overview for anyone who hasn’t looked at what we are building so this is our I know website it’s like the presentation website for our for our project, and I just opened the different pages so you kind of see what we’re building like the layout wise. So the different pages we kind of present the work that way and what our approach is with this site is that anything we put out here that’s just the block and post is always the latest version of our I know work so everything you see here you can build with our patterns and with everything we have like out in the beam and with our blocks. So I thought it’s fun like we don’t have any showcase website and stuff yet up we will add that because that’s gonna be fun. See, but you can see like what we are building you can build so I think that’s an awesome approach. So we had I know as like classic theme with just patterns in the beginning and then we converted it to block theme. So I don’t know, not everyone has started using block themes. So what happens if you use block theme instead of instead of a classic theme, you see the site editor, which is currently in beta. And actually, at the very beginning, I kind of didn’t know that is the customizer was kind of fun like for us they have it anymore. So you kind of need to work around it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You were breaking up in a bit.

Ellen Bauer: What do and what we have? Actually? Am I frozen? Yeah, a little bit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Oh, no. No, we got to know the screen changed

Ellen Bauer: My screen or the audio?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The audio was going on the screen finally changed to the experimental settings. And I think with the latest plugin on the site, actually. Oh, you can’t hear me. Yeah, I hear you. Okay, yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Ellen Bauer: Okay. it’s my internet connection. Oh, my God. Oh. Well, the site editor is?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think the internet connection in conjunction with the video going back and forth. Might be a problem. So let’s no audio at all. Um, Ellen, can you hear me?

Ellen Bauer: I can hear you. I it’s my internet connection is unstable. Should we maybe talk and then I can do the presentation and a bit later?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, let’s do that. And we have our first. So what you wanted to show was how the site editor works with your theme. And yes. And I think there’s too much power that needs to go out of in and out on the visuals for your internet connection. So. So if you want to try things for those who don’t know it? And yes, that’s a theme JSON file with the template parts. And so the end headers and header logo header dark for the stork and for the live columns, like these all sections on the same. So do you want to stop sharing?

Ellen Bauer: Should I try again? Oh, should I stop?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I would say stop sharing. Okay, because that you can we can try later. Yeah. Either later or kind of put it in a we saw your theme. Yeah, you’ve scrolled very well through it. So I really like it. And there were also some comments there. I love your design said Lobsang wangdue and then we had no audio on Wi Fi problems. Check. Yeah, it’s the internet. Yeah. When Facebook went offline for six hours. Yeah. So it’s still a little fragile. So Badlob Song had a question for how to inherit theme JSON to child theme, JSON at the moment, that doesn’t seem to work. Do you have an answer for that?

Carolina Nymark: I do have yours. Maybe because it should work since the latest version 11.6 from last week, it should actually work. Oh, yeah, I haven’t updated Gutenberg. I suggest that you try again with the Shan theme.

Ellen Bauer: I actually tried that out too. Am I can you hear me here? You know, I think I’m totally off

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No. Yeah, it was just a combination. Good New Zealand. video that kind of made you

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I don’t. I tried that too, with the child theme and it didn’t work like just two or three weeks ago, because we actually really want to get into child themes. And there was an update. Yeah, like Carolina said, it should work a lot better now. And I think it will be worked on quite a bit like over the next two weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, so um, so that was the first question. And that seems to be the only question right now from the audience. So I have a question. So when you were trying to what were the concepts, going from classic to block-based theme that you had a hard time kind of connecting. You mentioned, Ellen, the HTML part of that was, what were other things that were that are totally different, but that kind of a little bit of a hurdle to get it all right.

Ellen Bauer: From our side, it was mainly like, not the like, not the actual development, because the file template structure and stuff kind of stays the same. So you just kind of need to, you can actually go into the editor, and then switch to code mode and kind of copy paste your work. And luckily, like under said, we could look like we also looked at Carolina’s theme. And especially also the block based theme from, like Automattic is building. And that quadrat theme that really helped me just to get a first idea of what I’m actually doing. It was mostly like after we can watch it to that, like with updates, I didn’t quite understand completely understand the structure that, like once you edit anything in your template, that it becomes like a custom template. And so a theme author updates their work, the templates, it doesn’t get updated for every user automatically. That was kind of the confusing part. I because normally, as a theme author, you had complete control like of your template files, and because more things like users can customize themselves and adapt in the template files. And they use they kind of customize it. So you need to be more careful with update, like what you update or what you shouldn’t update.

Birgit Paui-Haack: Do you think that’s a bug?

Ellen Bauer: That No, no, no, I think it just it was like just I didn’t quite get it. Like think the concept you kind of really have to play around with to get the concept because it’s so different. And like Anders said, like, he thinks he will kind of get rid of his CSS work. And which I think is cool. We I think that definitely true that like global styles will be there. And but I think it’s also awesome that there will be different approaches, like we will kind of have a base CSS and then work with different things to solve that. So you can use child themes for that, which is awesome. So that totally different kind of approaches going forward, which is cool. It will be cool to see like people building totally different things. And I think the global styles was pretty easy to get into the theme. json. And then also I think we need to mention that it’s the first version of the theme JSON. And it’s kind of like chaos Kartik and gets like long pretty quickly. And that will definitely change. So we have to be on our like, be on our watch to see what how the theme JSON approach will be improved, probably split up into multiple sections and stuff.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Anders, would you were there concepts that you found difficult to grasp? And that kind of took a while to actually figure it out?

Anders Noren: Yeah, I think one of the most challenging part for me was actually the design phase of making a theme. Because usually when you make a classic theme, you can design it pretty much however you want. And know that using PHP and CSS, you can recreate your design exactly, because you have full control over where all elements are, what elements are used and how you style those elements. But with the with block-based themes to really govern by what can be created in the site editor, so how users can combine the different blocks to create the layout and how you can combine different blocks to create the layout. So my initial designs for to the were pretty involved in like the header and footer areas. And I was really happy with the design and then they said about recreating those layouts in the site editor. I quickly realized that I couldn’t create them as I have designed them because The Block Editor is still somewhat limited in how you can layout the page and added scale correctly down to mobile and stuff. So thing, the approach for the signing block-based themes will rely a lot more on you actually deciding what colors you will use, what fonts you will use, and then the sign how specific blocks and block styles will look. And after you have all of those components, and basically your global styles set, you will need to go about actually building the design with the different header layouts and footer layouts in the site editor itself. And I think that would be a pretty big workflow change really, for everyone builds classic themes now and we’ll move over to block-based themes. Because I believe a lot of designers will have my experience of designing something really involved trying to build it realizing I can’t build it like this, and then basically re-evaluating the original design and try to work within the constraints of the site editor. And what you can do, as the Block Editor gets better and better. I think that was really my The biggest change I had to go through.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Understand that. So it’s more like you need, you need to know the end product, before you actually have the product. And also, there is probably the design system approach for the patterns can have that will come into much higher attention there. So we got some questions, and one is from Tim Bowen. And the theme JSON color naming. And that’s of course, one that will occupy plenty of so is there a primary, secondary, tertiary kind of naming? Or would you rather do the blue and the green at the red kind of thing? I think it would also goes into that question also goes into the theme switching problem, or changing colors later on. To get this done? Do you want to take that wants to take Carolina?

Carolina Nymark: I switched from using slugs. slug is the code the name and the name that is visible is a different can be different, right? So I switched from using red blue to primary secondary trader because there were a lot of discussions around it. How do we make Block Patterns match when we switch themes? And then how do we make colors match when we use Block Patterns from the Block Patterns directory and so on. So you can this be red, the color can be red, but actually naming the code can be primary or secondary. That should reduce some of the problems.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That was also your approach. Anders I think when I looked at things.

Anders Noren: Yeah, exactly. And that was actually the as I’m sure everyone here knows Twenty Twenty Two. The next default theme was unveiled just the other day, and looks really, really good. I think and the first thing I checked when the GitHub repository for that went live was how the naming scheme for the colors are in that theme. And they also use the primary secondary tertiary model. So I’m assuming that a lot of people will use Twenty Twenty Two as a foundation for future block-based themes. We should say that, I think the original proponent of using that structure, one of the foremost proponents at least was recover as well in a blog post. He sort of got the ball rolling on this discussion.

Ellen Bauer: A tiny bit because when I got into it, what is actually pretty cool is that you have your general color palette for the theme. And then you can also add specific color palettes because I was got kind of like long, I thought maybe not so helpful. And so you can actually name color palettes just for specific blocks, which I think is super helpful. So you have a button block and you only want your button colors in the button block. So you have like, and like block specific color palettes as well in options in the theme JSON which I think is helpful to kind of split it up and make it more approachable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So another question is can I use theme JSON with a classic theme? I am using Genesis and that comes from Lapsang Wangdue. Again, and I can answer that quite fast because Marcus because music has on his blog exactly that using theme JSON on classic theme, and I will share the link in the chat window. So you can read up about it, it’s, it’s actually quite nice. Have any of you use the theme JSON for classic themes?

Anders Noren: I haven’t tried it yet. Actually. Yeah, I want to look into it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, what I really like is that in the classic theme, up until that point, you had to use the color or assign the color in your functions, PHP for the palette. And then in your CSS, you had to actually have a section for the background color and a section for the text color. So you were talking about the three times. So but the theme JSON, what it does, you put it, what you put in the functions, PHP, kind of similar on theme JSON and that’s it, you don’t have to do any CSS. And that’s really helpful. So I really enjoyed that when I was reading through that then trying that out. So Jonah Sander has a question. So I know includes some PHP files, but not Tov, but which is Anders’ theme, where will the journey go with or without PHP files?

Ellen Bauer: So obviously, the function PHP will stay. I think like, but it’s just it’s like super stripped down. Yeah, you can replace a lot of things from the functions into the into the theme JSON file. Sorry. But why we have still PHP files, it’s mainly because of our WooCommerce support. We needed to keep some things in for further WooCommerce support, because some of the things are not quite yet ready. That was the only reason so we kind of like a little bit. It’s still in between theme. But I think Yeah, with without PHP files for, for us, at least. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You did a little introduction to your toll theme. And you made a comment about that. Your classic theme, Excel was so elaborate and had so many thousands of lines of code and CSS lines, and it was so much lightweight, so much more lightweight to do a block-based by theme.

Anders Noren: Yeah, yeah, there’s really no comparison in terms of your scale, or the themes. That was another thing I noticed on the Twenty Twenty Two github repository as well. You can see the GitHub stats for what type of files are included in the folder. And it’s just like, I think it’s maybe 6%, PHP, or something, and maybe 24%, JSON, and then just HTML. Because the HTML is obviously the templates and the template bots. The tool has a lot more styles right now, which I want to get down on as I can move more into the node JSON. But even with the style, the size, sort of style sheets, the comparing it to a theme like Excel, which has like seven PHP classes, like 2000 lines and functions for PHP. It’s just completely different scalable theme. And I mean, obviously, with a block-based theme, the potential for what you can do in the theme is so much greater than that classic theme. So I’ll be really interested to see how many people actually get into creating themes. Now the block-based themes become much more easy to create. Because I think a lot of people don’t have a background in development, but rather in the sign will have themes.JSON. That’s a very nice entry point to start with colors and typography, and then getting integrating patterns and so on. So if we really open up the entire theme creation process, to people with less of a technical background, and hopefully that in turn can lead to more interesting theme design. So we’re all which is something I know everyone who does this had been asking for, for years. So I really think the colors and typography will become king. In the theme development space so that’ll be really exciting, I think. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Totally if you want to say something regarding the weight of things.

Carolina Nymark: Yes, right now we need to use PHP to register Block Patterns, but for example the the block styles, we can do them with JavaScript if you prefer. So there will be some PHP left, but I’m looking forward to plugins catching up, so that they don’t need to have some fallbacks. Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, so the next question was, can you sign also from Lobsang Can you assign header and footer template ports to different pages and posts. She couldn’t find it from the dashboard.

Carolina Nymark: You can assign them but you have to open that page or post first. So there is no dashboard you have to go to the site editor. And then either replace your current header if there is a header or add a new part. Okay. You have ideas for how you would like to assign them, please do share them because this is something that’s very interesting for Gutenberg development.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that is actually quite a good point. Yeah, this has all not been it’s not all yet in WordPress, so there’s always a chance to have different approaches or fixes after the initial rollout and 5.9 then for the next version, so it’s good to try out the plugin Gutenberg plugin on on a test site and enable a block-based theme and then play around with it. So Plum Mood has a question for Ellen please share your experience in developing WooCommerce websites what is possible and what are the restrictions?

Ellen Bauer: So there are like it’s not ready for production yet. But I think as you just said, the good it’s super important for our for us right now to just look into it and try to make the best of it and what they’re building with whoo is they’re building woo blocks which is an extra plugin you can install at the moment so that is super helpful for anyone who has like worked with WooCommerce for a while the experience in the checkout and cart templates were not like it wasn’t really customizable a lot. So that will change tremendously because they’re also building everything in WooCommerce with blocks so at the moment you can install the woo blocks plugin and see how far they’re going and that they actually documenting it quite nicely and they asked some questions and they answered right away they have like a roadmap going but it’s a little bit behind compared to like just themes at the moment so we need to wait a little bit for them to to get it going. But yeah, we actually got WooCommerce into our theme and they I think variable pose like products are not working at the moment but it’s kind of working like it’s I wouldn’t like put it up for production sites but it’s cool to kind of go along with the development and it was module better than I thought it would be and I got into the the blocks already which is super helpful to get like a head start of what what is going on in WooCommerce if you’re developing for it so I think that was helpful and whatever wanted to mention like with the themes like where it’s going it’s so cool at the moment so I think as you said Birgit, there are so many different approaches and kind of like make your own thing out of it which we like we just fall out like teams were so established like plugin established now it’s like an open field where we can kind of our way into and I think that’s gonna be so cool to see. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? Yeah, you keep….

Ellen Bauer: Oh, I had what is happening with my internet Connect, Okay, I’m gonna shut maybe, maybe someone else would take over sorry, that’s so frustrating not only our connection is quite fast.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Carolina shared in the chat window a link to WooCommerce roadmap in connection with blocks and Site Health. And Derek is a publisher. And he says, Okay, this is what we’re doing now, and why we are not yet ready for blocks. And this is what soon to come. And yeah, in flip chart block as well as for the checkout block. And that was the reason why they’re so behind with a few things, because some of the features that they need are some of the hooks that they need. They haven’t been in the Block Editor yet. So they block, the Gutenberg team cannot need to catch up on things, especially with the connection with the REST API. So we have another question from Tim Bowen. Thank you. What are the current best practices for theme JSON, and responsive font sizes.

Anders Noren: So when it comes to best practices, and this ties in into what Elon was saying, as well, the interesting thing is that best practices hadn’t really been established for a lot of stuff around block-based themes. And I think that’s sort of what people will look to Twenty Twenty Two for, for a lot of those best practice discussions to happen around the next default theme, the first block-based default theme, and have those best practices be established as part of that development. But there are, of course, a lot of different approaches to everything. Basically, indoor play seems right now, which is very exciting, very fun. It feels like it’s been a long while since people basically wrote think thesis on their blogs about the best way to do stuff and WordPress development. And we’re really seeing a resurgence of that just in the last couple of weeks, are people arguing for the different approaches. I think, I think the current Twenty Twenty Two font sizes, use this CSS protocol, message method or function called clan, to set a base font size, and then use the viewport based on size for smaller screens, to scale it down from that original font size. And I know a couple of different themes that you start as well. So maybe that would be the current answer. But it could change. Keep a lookout on the Twenty Twenty Two GitHub issues, I guess.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s so I still come across a lot of websites where the font size is so large, that I barely can scroll fast enough to with my reading speed. So it’s gonna be really one of the things that I love designers. 

Ellen Bauer: I think just I think that it’s it’s true like under said, I think the clamp approach will be taking over. And we are also like in the works to convert our, like, kind of responsive heck in our current team, like and I know like base to clam because it’s just the smartest approach. And it’s like, we can use it now in the like most browsers I think. And Rich actually posted a blog post yesterday. Rich Tabor on his blog about it. So maybe we can link that in the woods styles. He posted about fluid typography. Oh, right, right. Yeah. Like you said, like people start sharing again. What? Yeah, it’s kind of fun. Yeah. Facebook being out and stuff. We can all blog again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We could blog before that. Yeah, you’re right. Oh, I got a copy link right down there. Just bring it into the chat window. And we have another question. From Jack Cannot surprise to hear and see different options to the admin panel. What do you think? The admin panel will look like in the future with blocks? Anybody wants to pick it?

Carolina Nymark: I’m not sure which admin panel if you want to expand on that, Jack.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Jack, do you mean the site editor or the WP admin? Just answer so I can see that plugin developers could use Gutenberg components in the Login in the WP admin and I know there’s also those core CSS team is also working on streamlining the color selections on an admin, because they found that in the CSS they had they had about, I don’t know, 500 different colors. And when you want to change your color palette, then it’s really hard to actually adjust all the 500 lines of code or colors there. So the site editor is actually will mimic what the front end has and styles. So and that gets better and better. As far as I know, what was your experience with that Anders or Ellen or Carolina to get the side editor kind of match what’s on the front end? So the user has a really what you see is what you get to experience?

Anders Noren: Yeah, I definitely think it’s getting a lot better. I think if you stick to only using theme.JSON right now, it basically will look the same. Because they are they are very good. The Gutenberg team about mapping those values to both views, I think the more difficult part is when you have a lot of custom CSS, like Google still has that knowing what elements to target and having those elements be targeted, consistently, both in the site editor and on the front term is very difficult, especially since the borrower through all the Gutenberg styles can differ quite a bit between the two views. So I think that’s another area where the sooner we can start to move more stuff into themes.JSON, the easier it will be. Because one of the common problems even with the blog, comm block-based Content Editor is that the priority of CSS and the names of elements change from update to update. So supporting those changes, could be quite a hurdle for themes that rolled a lot of custom CSS. And I think that’s what I look forward to with moving more stuff into theme.JSON. On that I can’t be less terrified of new updates. Fedora style center core element Nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I can see that there have. Have any of you watched Helen Hou-Sandi’s presentation on the White House site at the WordCamp US?

Anders Noren: I missed it, unfortunately.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I, she also talked a little bit about it, because they have this whole header, full width header image, and then a box that kind of is on the left side on the right side, on the header, with some links to go deeper into whatever the topic of the day is right now. And she said it was a little bit harder to match up the front end with the back end, because the side bar of the Block Editor has to get into the way. Yeah, it’s not going to be full screen. And so she said, a good remedy for that would be if you have custom blocks, that you put most of the most important things that people will use all the time into the block toolbar rather than into the sidebar. And so that’s kind of a remedy for that as well, just to kind of organize your real estate there. So Jack came back and said, Carolina, you mentioned something about no pages, maybe I misunderstood. So he had the question that about what you think the admin panel will look like in the future with blocks. And then he might have misunderstood and Ellen, you showed that you didn’t have a custom tab. But I think what you might be referring to Jack is that Ellen said she doesn’t have a customizer that some of the settings will all be in the global styles sidebar, right? Yeah. And that’s definitely to come here.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, so the customizer disappears with the site editor with the, I think probably in 5.9. I don’t know I think Carolina you probably know more about that. So I’m actually not missing the customizer at all, so we’re fine. So we end but we always used it pretty minimal, but there are different themes out there that kind of used it heavily. And yeah, we just had to kind of rewrite a lot and I will write a blog post about that, like, how we manage without the customizer, because that’s super interesting. And yeah. We don’t have any.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You said at all. No, we all expecting that blog post stuff.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I will do that I will do it definitely. Because I just like all the transition, I thought, Oh, I have to share that, because it just makes sense to share now, like, since it’s all still in progress, and it’s more like snippets that we’ve learned along the way. And yeah, you managed better without the customizer set than you would expect. But I think yeah, just get into like, new approaches now. And I think in general, just the like, the theme JSON will replace everything that we had in the customizer for, for themes. And it will be more, I think, I think beam can be more like viewed as just like a skin, like you have skins and in the code editors and stuff. So it’s just the skin, you lay over things. And then you come in with blocks, and you come in with patterns. And you have all these, like more modular kind of ways to to add things to WordPress. And I think that’s just the smart approach, and will be a lot more user friendly. In the long run.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sorry, Carolina, I wanted to say something about customizer. And well, Ellen thought you might say something.

Carolina Nymark: I do not have any more information on what might or might not be in 5.9. The customizer is not being removed. But if you activate a team that has support for Full Site Editing, the menu option will not be there. Yeah, but it will stop the global styles. So for all the teams, or for new, what we call classic team to customize this will still be there until the team developer has come over this initial period, the transition as soon as they learn that it’s so much easier to work in a theme JSON than creating custom customizer options. Yeah, then the theme.JSON will take over.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but I think that it’s not gonna the customizer will not disappear from WordPress in the next three years.

Carolina Nymark: Is not supported, right? And no one is going to remove the code or defines for the customizer, it’s actually only the menu option. That is no longer there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? And you approach it with slash customizer PHP. Yes. 

Carolina Nymark: There is on the ad teams page, you have the live preview. But you can still actually view a block-based team in the customizer, so it’s not gone. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: And also WooCommerce at the moment you use it uses it still like even with block themes, because someone asked about like WooCommerce support, they still needed. So if you have WooCommerce active with a black theme now you can still access things now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think we have one last question, because we are on on the hour mark here. And so that was Timbo and again, will theme.JSON always be adding so many important references in the CSS. So I think the talks about the color palette and coming into that.

Carolina Nymark: Until you come up with a smarter solution. Unfortunately, I mean, it is it is something that no one wants. But this is where we have ended up with because no one has been able to do it smarter.

Anders Noren: Yeah, I think I prefer the importance to the same class name five times in a row to increase the priority of the targeting, which has also become pretty frequent. But I totally understand that it’s a difficult problem to solve for the people who actually need to write the CSS as part of Gutenberg and core because there are so many different themes and so much different CSS to account for. So they really need to bump up that priority to a very high level to make it work. But it is a bit of an eyesore, but it’s unfortunately, necessary, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I think that the team is very hard exploring also creating the theme JSON not in code view but to create an interface so that way you can you can then we put all the things in and then it automatically creates a theme JSON file so maybe that’s not connected to that topic completely but there’s also something people that are more comfortable with CSS have a hard time thinking Oh Do I have to write my CSS now in theme Jason I don’t like it kind of thing. So there will be a remedy for that as well.

So Lobsang has a question Carolina I was thinking about you can sign template parts like main template page or post from the dashboard. What your I think that’s out of context, in certain things i o that you can assign the index.

Carolina Nymark: I almost need an image of what’s what you’re thinking about to baby 10 standard, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And Brian says, I have to leave this for another call. But I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. And Tim, is 19 so thank you all so yes, it seems like we all that’s all the time we have today and we I have just two more questions for our panelists. So do you have an announcement or something that you couldn’t get in before and you want to have people in mind and how can they reach you if they wanted to get in touch with you? 

Ellen Bauer: An announcement is just sorry for the failed presentation that was maybe I can do a little I can do a little video or something like as a replacement I can share on Twitter that is a little bit sad from my side I’m sorry about that and yet just like us on twitter on our blog like comment yeah we kind of everywhere around our event even like on on the in the support forum for our blog and theme and stuff.

Anders Noren: Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter. I guess. It’s mostly WordPress related stuff these days. But I’m under Ashmolean at Twitter, one word.

Carolina Nymark: No announcements, but I have enjoyed this shot. And I can be reached on the wordpresser slack. And my name is Brianna, or on Twitter at Carolina Cuyama. So one name one word.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, a big thank you to you all, and to our viewers for the great questions. And I also have a survey for you. So I’m gonna share that in the chat. If you want to fill that out, we are always trying to improve our shows and with your opinions. That will be great. And if you have any more questions, you can always send them to pauli@Gutenberg times.com that’s pauli@ Gutenbergtimes.com. A recording will be available in a few minutes on the YouTube channel. And we will publish the transcript and the resources. Also for the resources of the theme.JSON. You will think looking for a website. I think the earlier post to Marcus Kazmierczack you can use the theme JSON also for classic theme. I think he had a quite a few resources in his blog post as well. Yeah, thank you to Carolina, Ellen and Anders for spending time with us. It was a great joy talking to you. Be well and good bye and good luck.

Carolina Nymark: Good luck. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.

Ellen Bauer: Bye. Thank you. Bye. Have a good evening.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, and that’s that’s it, you Take care and I’ll see you in the slack.

In late September, Chloe Chamberland, a researcher at Wordfence, discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the OptinMonster plugin, which could allow unauthenticated attackers to export sensitive information and inject malicious JavaScript into vulnerable sites.

The OptinMonster team promptly patched the plugin and updated the plugin again after more feedback from the Wordfence team. Version 2.6.5 was released on October 7, 2021, to address these issues.

OptinMonster is used on more than 1 million WordPress sites to create popup campaigns, email subscription forms, sticky announcement bars, and gamified spin-a-wheel opt-in forms. The plugin relies heavily on the use of WP REST API endpoints. Chamberland identified the majority of these endpoints as “insecurely implemented:”

The most critical of the REST-API endpoints was the /wp-json/omapp/v1/support endpoint, which disclosed sensitive data like the site’s full path on the server, along with the API key needed to make requests on the OptinMonster site. With access to the API key, an attacker could make changes to any campaign associated with a site’s connected OptinMonster account and add malicious JavaScript that would execute anytime a campaign was displayed on the exploited site.

Worse yet, an attacker did not need to be authenticated to the site in order to access the API endpoint

Chamberland described how any unauthenticated attacker could add malicious JavaScript to vulnerable OptinMonster sites and redirect visitors to external malicious domains, or create the opportunity for site takeover using JavaScript to inject new admin user accounts.

As a precaution, OptinMonster has invalidated all API keys, forcing administrators to generate new ones, in case any keys had been previously compromised. There are no sites known to have been exploited at this time, but the vulnerabilities are now public. Site owners are advised to update to the latest version of the plugin as soon as possible.

Gutenberg 11.8 was released at about 12 pm (CDT) today. However, it hit a bump in the road toward its destination, the WordPress plugin directory. A mix-up with getting the release tagged was the culprit, so it sat in limbo for around eight hours. Technically, it was available via its GitHub and SVN repositories. However, the version shown on WordPress.org was stuck on 11.7.1 for much of the day.

The latest release includes dozens of enhancements across the block library, theming, global styles, and more. As we inch closer to the December release of WordPress 5.9, some features are just making it under the wire of the looming feature-freeze deadline, which is set for November 9.

Spacing-related controls are still working their way through the block library. The Heading, Post Title, Query Title, and Social Icons blocks support custom margins. Post Featured Image gets both margin and padding controls, and buttons now have a block gap (spacing) option alongside a margin setting.

Block child themes can now overrule parent theme values via theme.json. I covered this feature in more detail earlier this week.

Block themes now automatically opt into several theme-supported features, including featured images, feed links, and more. Developers should check the pull request for things they may no longer need to register.

Cover Block Background Opacity

Since the initial Cover block launched, users have always been able to change the opacity of the background image. However, when using a background color or gradient, the option to do so would disappear.

With the release of Gutenberg 11.8, users can change the transparency regardless of the background.

This was a feature that was particularly important to me. I opened a ticket to address this in May of this year. My primary use case was to create the effect shown in the following screenshot:

Layered transparent Cover blocks.

Essentially, I am using two Cover blocks here. The outer instance uses a background image. However, the inner one uses a transparent gradient so that the image bleeds through. There are some workarounds I could have employed to make this happen as a developer. However, I wanted end-users to have the ability to build cool things too.

Because this was one of my wish list items, I want to thank Glen Davies for putting in the bulk of the work. However, many others provided feedback and performed code reviews.

There is a bug with the feature. When a user selects a theme-defined gradient background, it is added to both the outer and inner HTML elements. The transparency is correctly applied to the inner container. However, it appears to not work because the outside wrapper background is opaque. Update: this issue was from a code conflict.

Automatically-Generated Heading Anchors

List view of Heading block anchors.

Gutenberg 11.8 now automatically generates and adds anchors for all Heading blocks inserted into the editor. These anchors appear in the block options sidebar under the “Advanced” tab and the list view.

While this feature is welcome as it is, it may serve as merely a stepping stone toward something many have been waiting on: a Table of Contents block.

Technically, the ToC block was merged in February this year, and it is still bundled within the Gutenberg plugin. However, it is hidden from usage at the moment. It needed time to mature and a way to add anchors to headings without manual input.

With this piece of the puzzle in place, a ToC block is much closer to reality. Maybe even by the time WordPress 6.0 lands next year.

Featured Patterns

Inserting a featured pattern.

The first block patterns to appear in the inserter now come from a curated featured list. It is currently limited to 15 patterns and is pulled from the featured category on WordPress.org.

These are currently picked by team members working on the pattern directory. It is unclear if there will be a more formal and detailed process for this list in the future. Because pattern submissions are still not open to the public, there are a limited number of options to choose from.

“Plain” Blockquote Style

Plain blockquote style.

One of my biggest pet peeves is core adding custom block styles, and this extra one for the Quote block is no different. It is simply called “Plain.” This is in addition to Default and Large.

The new style removes any borders for the quote, assuming the user’s active theme displayed any. Because my theme’s default blockquote output did not, the block style does nothing. I suppose I can always unregister it.

If anything, I want us to backtrack this new Plain style and remove the existing Large one (relegating it to typography controls). Leave the custom stuff to theme authors. In the future, we should think long and hard before registering custom styles from Gutenberg or core WordPress. Otherwise, we are creating legacy baggage that will land on the backs of theme authors to carry.

Pinterest oEmbed Support

Embedding a Pinterest pin.

Honestly, I can hardly believe that WordPress did not already support Pinterest embeds. The well-established service is over a decade old and highly popular.

Gutenberg contributors quickly added a Pinterest variation for the embed block following a recent core patch that approved support. Users should be able to embed pins, boards, or user profiles.

In December 2020, we reported on a new antitrust lawsuit against Google that claimed AMP was created for the purpose of pushing publishers away from “header bidding.” This is an advertising mechanism that allows sites to route their ad inventory through several ad exchanges and sell the space to the highest bidder. At that time it was clear that these were troubling allegations regarding AMP’s performance and how Google may be using it to impede header bidding, but many key parts of the complaint were redacted.

The full text of the newly unredacted complaint, which was unsealed by a federal judge last week, references research from internal Google documents. It states that internal Google communications identified header bidding as an “existential threat.” The complaint alleges that Google throttled non-AMP ads in order to give AMP a “nice comparative boost:”

After crippling AMP’s compatibility with header bidding, Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the “median of performance” and AMP pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for a Google-cached AMP version of a webpage were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.

The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.”

The unredacted filing also states that internal documents show that AMP pages brought 40% less revenue to publishers:

Google gave publishers a Faustian bargain: (1) publishers who used header bidding would see the traffic to their site drop precipitously from Google suppressing their ranking in search and re-directing traffic to AMP-compatible publishers; or (2) publishers could adopt AMP pages to maintain traffic flow but forgo exchange competition in header bidding, which would make them more money on an impression-by-impression basis. Either option was far inferior to the options available to publishers before Google introduced AMP. Just how inferior? According to Google’s internal documents, 40 percent less revenue on AMP pages.

The complaint succinctly summarizes the reason many publishers felt under the gun to allocate developer resources for AMPing up their websites, and why Google was in the position to force the issue despite widespread criticism of the AMP project. It also describes how Google’s anticompetitive tactics and control of the market essentially has small publishers over a barrel:

Direct evidence confirms Google’s monopoly power in the display ad network market. GDN charges high double-digit commissions of at least 32 percent on advertising transactions, which, according to public sources, is double the “standard rate” elsewhere in the industry. Internally, Google acknowledges that its fees are very high and that it can demand them because of its market power. For example, in an internal 2016 conversation, Google executives commented that Google’s ad networks make “A LOT of money” with its commission, and they acknowledged that they do this because, quite simply, “we can.” “Smaller pubs don’t have alternative revenue sources,” explained one Google employee when addressing the lack of viable competing ad networks available to its customers.

The suit, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other state attorneys general, also exposes a number of code-named programs. Project NERA is the most insidious among these and one that publishers should know about:

Project NERA was Google’s original plan to create a closed ecosystem out of the open internet. Google documents reveal that Google’s motive was to “successfully mimic a walled garden across the open web [so] we can protect our margins.” For Google, Project NERA’s walled garden meant two things: controlling the design of publishers’ ad space, then forcing those publishers to sell their ad space exclusively through Google’s products. According to internal Google documents, this strategy would permit Google to extract even higher intermediation fees. A Google employee aptly described Google’s ambition for Project NERA by acknowledging that Google wants to “capture the benefits of tightly ‘operating’ a property … without ‘owning’ the property and facing the challenges of building new consumer products.” Google’s nickname for this walled garden plan was “not-owned-but-operated,” or “NOBO” for short.

The complaint also alleges that Facebook and Google colluded to manipulate header bidding auctions, among many other anticompetitive practices.

Google has not yet responded to the AMP-specific allegations but has published a response to the Department of Justice, calling the complaint “a deeply flawed lawsuit that would do nothing to help consumers.” The post attempts to refute the DOJ’s “dubious complaint” with demonstrations of how easy it is to change the default search engine on different devices.

Earlier this year, Google’s Director of Economic Policy, Adam Cohen, addressed the claims that AMP was designed to hurt header bidding, saying that it was created in partnership with publishers and other tech companies to help webpages load faster and improve the experience on mobile devices.

“AMP supports a range of monetization options, including header bidding. Publishers are free to use both AMP and header bidding technologies together if they choose,” Cohen said. “The use of header bidding doesn’t factor into publisher search rankings. 

The AMP project has not officially responded to the allegations in the unredacted complaint. Google transferred the project’s governance to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, a move which skeptics hailed as “mostly meaningless window-dressing.” In August 2021, ex-AMP Advisory Committee member Jeremy Keith gave a behind-the-scenes look at the project in his resignation announcement. “It has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source,” Keith said.

In the beginning, AMP was not a user-friendly product. It severely encumbered publishers and and was roundly denounced by advocates of the open web. In Google’s zealous drive to get publishers to adopt AMP, the company began investing heavily in developing WordPress plugins that would make make its products easier to use. More than 500,000 WordPress sites are now using the official AMP plugin.

The DOJ’s complaint alleges that Google is exploiting the position of smaller publishers that do not have any other options for revenue. It identifies AMP as a vehicle for anticompetitive practices and exposes viperous initiatives like Project NERA that do not have publishers best interests in mind. Any project that would seek to build “a walled garden across the open web” doesn’t seem particularly complementary to democratizing publishing. Getting to the bottom of these concerns should be a priority for the WordPress community and should inspire more scrutiny over Google-led core projects.

You read that correctly, this post is about Call for Cities for WordCamp US 2022! There are some big changes to how we plan to approach city selection for 2022.

In past years, local WordPress communities applied to be the host city of WordCamp US. Organizers were asked to gather info, such as enthusiasm for their city, local WordPress community activity, organizer interest, and even possible venue bids.

This is a big ask: securing a holistic bid from a convention center for +2,000 people is not something most of us do!

In 2020, the WCUS team hired an events management team to handle this step. Local WordPress communities still expressed why their city would be the best fit for WCUS, but the work of soliciting bids and securing a competitive quote was left to a professional. Great, right? Well, 2020 did not work out as hoped.

@kcristiano, @kdrewien, and I, as community deputies and past lead organizers of WordCamp US, began discussing the need to secure a venue to WordCamp US. We all felt that requesting applications from local WordPress communities today would place an undue burden on volunteers. Risk evaluation and forecasting feasibility of an in-person flagship requires a professional events management team.

We intend to do a city search instead of a Call for Cities.

The events management team will send out a Request for Proposal (RFP) and negotiate with venues, and then select the City and venue that best meets the needs for WordCamp US.

The team is looking for a venue that can accommodate WCUS scaling up or down in size, and would allow us to cancel or postpone with minimal financial impact. There were local WordPress communities who applied to be host cities for 2020 and we are including those cities in this year’s search.

You may be wondering what this organizing team for WordCamp US will look like! That’s an excellent question.

WordCamp US 2022 will be opening Call for Organizers in mid-November, and a team of past WordCamp US organizers will review those applications. This team will include @kcristiano, @kdrewien, @mysweetcate, @aaroncampbell, and @kimwhite. The plan is to bring the organizing team to the future host city. Once the city is chosen, we will look to the local community for Organizers. If the Call for Organizers has ended before the city is announced we will reopen applications for Organizers from the host city.

We hope to see you in-person at WordCamp US 2022! If you have any questions or thoughts, please share in the comments on this post.

This post was contributed to by @angelasjin, @kdrewien, @kcristiano, @mysweetcate, and @michelleames

I haven’t accomplished some amazing achievement, or overcome some insurmountable obstacle. I haven’t been through some extreme hardship, or dealt with a personal tragedy. In life, I have been significantly influenced by a negative voice inside me that tells me I’m an impostor and focuses on my past failures and things about myself I cannot change. In short, I don’t see myself as a hero. However, being a part of the WordPress community has taught me to not be too hard on myself and appreciate things I take for granted. This essay is a summary of the personal struggles I have had, mostly alone, in my head.

My family teases me that I started learning to speak after I turned four. I think they exaggerate but it fits my personality. I am slow, it’s not a big impediment, but people point it out sometimes (Like at 13:25 on this WordCamp video) . I am highly sensitive both emotionally and physically to things like bright lights, strong smells, heat and cold. I easily get overwhelmed under pressure or in emotionally or socially tasking activities. As a child, I was under a lot of pressure to be normal. To wake up! Speak up! Stop crying! I carried that pressure into adulthood and spent the first 30 years of my life trying to be ‘normal’. As much as I pushed myself to be more outgoing, work harder, be stronger I only ended up an exhausted, frustrated multiple time college dropout.

Finding WordPress

In 2016 I started learning WordPress with the goal of becoming a web developer. In October of that year, I found out there was a new WordPress meetup in Harare and signed up to attend straight away. Before my first meetup I expected to meet a bunch of condescending tech bros who I hoped would at least tolerate me. What I found there was the total opposite, a diverse group of people who wanted to learn and share their knowledge. What topped it off was when Thabo Tswana, who founded the meetup, ended with the invitation to host meetups. His message was anyone was welcome to host or attend a meetup, whether you were a beginner, professional, blogger, business owner, or developer, everyone is welcome. I was hooked! I signed up to speak at the first WordCamp Harare, and went on to become a meetup organizer, and even lead organizer of WordCamp Harare 2019!

Exposure to the global community taught me a new meaning of citizenship.

Not the kind of citizenship with arbitrary borders and exclusive membership. The citizenship I learned from the WordPress community is one that accepts everyone as they come with one main condition, to genuinely want what’s best for each member and the community as a whole without necessarily needing to agree on what that means. I also learned how to deal with the tension of trying to fit in when you have traits that force you to stand out.

Real Diversity

The WordPress community’s acceptance of diversity doesn’t just mean accepting people as they are, but pushing them to do their best for themselves and society. I have learned from the WP community to lean into my abilities, and also find the best ways to improve on my weaknesses. As an introvert I’ve learned to cultivate my personal interactions at meetups and WordCamps and it has created many opportunities. I’ve also learned from other introverts to pace myself when I attend social events. There’s no need to shake everyone’s hand (or fist bump since the pandemic). It’s also good for me to plan ahead for a day away from the world to recharge after big social events.

One of my favorite hacks has come from conversations about accessibility. I discovered that using a screen reader increased my dismal reading speed from 150 words per minute to the average person’s reading speed of 250!

Getting Practical

Finding myself is all well and good, but I still need to make a living. I have struggled in that regard. I tried being a freelancer, and working as a web designer/developer for companies, but never found the right fit. I’ve given myself excuses like slow internet or a crappy laptop. In 2019 we had daily 13-hour electricity blackouts that disrupted life for everyone who couldn’t afford backup power during the day as electricity was only available at night. All very good excuses, but there’ll always be excuses no matter what you are doing.

I’ve been asked where the money is from this “W” thing I do, and when I’ll get a proper job, and I never had a definite answer.

I come from a utilitarian culture where direct input should always equal direct results. I initially tried applying the same thinking to my WP journey, but it’s not as simple as planting a seed, giving it water and fertilizer and watching it grow. That is where personal growth becomes a practical tool. There is no absolute formula to success. I have been gradually making minor personal adjustments as I go and my income has gradually grown in amount and consistency.

As long as my 5-year WP journey has been, I’m still at the beginning of it. For anyone looking to make it in WordPress, I can’t promise you success. But what I can promise you is that if you intentionally seek out solutions from the people who have come before you, you will gain the skills to be successful no matter where you go.

As I was perusing the latest block themes on WordPress.org, I came across a new favorite: Bai. The typography was on point for those who tend to write long-form content. Plus, it has a built-in dark mode design that did not make me want to rip my eyes from their sockets. I had planned to review it, but I did not have much to say. It is simply a solid design without much in the way of extras.

However, in the particular test environment I had set up, one piece of it was broken. I ran into a longstanding issue with the block system.

The default “intro” image used on the homepage will return a 404 if WordPress is not installed in the root directory or if the /wp-content folder has been moved. I switched it to another test site using the default configuration to make it appear.

Bai theme homepage.

This is not the fault of the developer. Block themes currently have no way to add dynamic values in their templates. Therefore, the only solution is to hotlink an image from a third-party site or add a static URL.

This is a not-so-trivial issue that has, at least in part, hampered the momentum of block theme development.

Ever since themes have been around, they have output data via PHP functions. When using block templates, everything is HTML and bits of JSON data. The dynamic parts are the blocks themselves. This works well enough for at least 90% (probably more) of scenarios.

Where theme authors run into trouble are the cases where there is no existing block or way of adding dynamic data inline. Some use cases include:

• Printing internationalized text strings.
• Outputting the current year in the footer copyright section.
• Adding image URLs.

It is not so much that these things absolutely must be dynamic. Users are expected to edit the content via the site editor. However, the experience is not ideal if an image returns a 404 status when users have a different directory structure. Or when their theme has bits and pieces of English scattered throughout when using the Spanish translation. Before block themes officially land in WordPress, this must be fixed.

There is an open ticket slated for Gutenberg 11.8 that addresses this issue through a new Pattern block. Essentially, it would allow themes to output a pattern within templates.

<!-- wp:pattern {"slug":"namespace/pattern-name"} /-->

The reason this works is that patterns are defined via PHP. Theme authors can use internationalization functions like __(), print out the date with date_i18n(), or output an image URL with get_theme_file_uri().

This upcoming feature closed an earlier proposal for a standalone i18n block. It should also tackle the multiple ideas on an earlier issue for dynamic data in static HTML files. Another one for including images in block templates. A proposal from 2020 for using patterns in templates. And, I am sure a host of other tickets.

The push will likely happen because the upcoming default theme, Twenty Twenty-Two, needs it. Developers currently need to figure out how to show the default flying bird image on the homepage and add internationalized footer credit text.

Twenty Twenty-Two homepage design.

I like the concept here. Developers add the Pattern block within their templates. In the site editor, the pattern is shown and persists until a user makes a direct edit. Then, it behaves like any other set of blocks, and the content is no longer dynamic.

A side benefit of this feature is that it could also solve a duplicate code issue and allows theme authors to follow the DRY principle.

When creating templates or template parts, some theme authors duplicate the same content as user-selectable block patterns. Instead of having the code in two places, they can register it once as a pattern and call it within the template.

While the Pattern block is not officially merged yet, it looks to be the best solution to the dynamic content issue with block themes.

Seven years ago HeroPress was started to inspire and give hope to WordPress community members, particularly those who might feel excluded from the mainstream WordPress community. It’s always been our dream to go one step further, and provide tangible resources to people at all stages of their WordPress journey.

We’ve spent the last 9 months or so coming up with some great ideas, most of which you’ve seen us write about in recent posts. In order to give those resources the attention they need we’re asking the WordPress community to help financially support them, investing back into that very same community.

The resources we’ve built can help people, and we want to keep them free for everyone to use. To do that, we need financial support for the projects maintenance and growth. By sharing the effort, we can work together to change individual lives, and eventually the world.

To help, go to the support page on the HeroPress Network site.

Thank you for being you.