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amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation.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) …

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, …