Like many others, I often have pinned tabs of all sorts of things in my browser. Some of them linger there for months. Others for years, I shamefully admit. Of the handful of Gutenberg-related browser tabs I have had pinned since late 2020, one of them finally had the sort of movement I have been waiting on. The Gallery block …
User-Friendly Methods for Testing Gutenberg Enhancements and Bug Fixes
Living on the bleeding edge of Gutenberg’s development is not particularly easy for everyone. There is a ton of work and know-how involved with getting everything set up. You have to clone a Git repository, grab pull requests, and run a build process. Non-developers may find themselves facing an overwhelming learning curve. It can be rough for developers who like …
Ask the Bartender: What Happens When Block Markup Changes?
I’m a developer that has started developing with Gutenberg recently. There are a bunch of amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation. One of the worst aspects of Gutenberg from a developer perspective has been block validation. Consider the following scenario. I build a custom (non-dynamic) …
Ask the Bartender: Frustrations and Finding the Right WordPress Block Plugins
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a Footnotes block) and have not …
Gutenberg 9.9 Adds Color Options for Social Icons, Includes Rounded Borders for Images, and Changes the Theme JSON Format
Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme JSON files. WordPress 5.7 Beta …
Gutenberg 9.8 Brings Rounded Borders To the Group Block and Moves the Site Editor Canvas Into an Inline Frame
Gutenberg 9.8 launched yesterday with a few minor UI improvements. The development team added an initial implementation for border-radius support for the Group block that theme authors can opt into. They also moved the site editor into an iframe element to remove CSS conflicts from the global admin styles. Those who have been testing Full Site Editing should be pleased …
Gutenberg’s Faster Performance Is Eroding Page Builders’ Dominance
WordPress’ block editor, colloquially still widely known as Gutenberg, is making inroads into the segment of users who have heavily relied on page builders for years. For the most part, page builder plugins have either declined in growth or stagnated in 2020, with the exception of Elementor. In contrast, block collections with page builder features are gaining more users. Performance …
Exploring Photo Blocks, an Experimental FSE-Ready Photoblogging Theme
Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the repository’s Carrd-like landing page theme, …
What Is Full Site Editing and What Does It Mean for the Future of WordPress?
Block-based Twenty Twenty-One theme in the site editor. As I said last week, 2021 will be the year of the site editor. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word confirms it. WordPress 5.7’s release planning is focused on it. It has been a long journey getting to this point, and it will be a much longer adventure afterward. The ultimate promise …
G2 Components, a From-Scratch Reimagining of WordPress Components
Update some of the things. That was the goal that Jon Quach, a Principal Designer at Automattic, laid out in the roadmap for integrating the G2 Components project into Gutenberg and, eventually, core WordPress. The project is a reimagining of the pieces that make the block editor, a “from-scratch” overhaul of the component system. Updating all of the things or …