Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9

by

In episode 122 of the GT Changelog podcast, host Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Beth Soderberg, CEO of bethink Studio, to discuss the latest updates in Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9. The conversation kicks off with reminiscing about past WordCamp experiences and transitions into a deep dive on block themes, evolving design tools, and the challenges of adopting new workflows. Beth shares practical insights from her agency work, highlighting the benefits of section and block styles, synced patterns, and strategies for cleaning up legacy code as Gutenberg advances.

The episode covers new features like section styles, the highly anticipated accordion block, and improvements to template management, aimed at making theme and site building more flexible for users and developers. They also talk about experimental features such as PHP-only blocks, block bindings, and upcoming blocks like breadcrumbs and table of contents, which promise to streamline site navigation and content organization.

Birgit and Beth underscore the importance of continuous testing and learning, encouraging listeners—especially those hesitant to adopt block themes—to experiment, seek support, and embrace gradual change. The episode wraps with practical advice, recent security updates, and a look at promising innovations coming to the WordPress ecosystem.

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Special Guest: Beth Soderberg

Calls for Testing WordPress 6.9

Community Contributions

What’s Released

New Blocks still in the works

🟣 = already merged into trunk, as experiments.

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 122nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9, what we already know about it. And I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at Gutenberg Times, co contributor on the Word Open Source project, and I work as a developer advocate for Automattic. I’m thrilled that I finally have Beth Soderberg join me on the show. Beth is the CEO of Bethink Studio, a special web design and development agency in Alexandria, Virginia, in the U.S. Beth, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Beth Soderberg: Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to my morning. I’m doing great. Good to see you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I tried to recollect how we actually met or we met over the last few years, and I think it was the first time we met at the WordCamp New York in 2019.

Beth Soderberg: I think that’s right. Ish. I definitely have eaten tacos late at night at WordCamp New York. Okay, so that tracks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I definitely met you sometime before the pandemic, so I’m not sure exactly, but that sounds about right. And then I know we had lunch at WordCamp us when it was in San Diego.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Nice. Oh, right. We had this.

Beth Soderberg: There was.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There was a group of women kind of coming together.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, I saw a table of women. And if I see a table of women at a conference like that, I’m going to sit down at it. And you did exactly the same thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. So.

Beth Soderberg: But that’s the first time I saw you after the pandemic, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And in between, I think we did together the WP Blog Talk virtual conference that was organized by Automattic, but there were a lot of community members in there talking about the Gutenberg and the stage of it and all that.

Beth Soderberg: That was when I realized that I don’t like presenting at virtual conferences in front of audiences that you can’t see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s interesting.

Beth Soderberg: I’m good with Zoom, because you can get some feedback. But the speaking into the void was. I don’t know. It could have also been that I wasn’t speaking to anyone in real life at the time, so it felt extra weird.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no. I get it. The pre-recording and then just be there for the live part of it. But we had a great live discussion there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. It was fun. And we actually did the presentation live. I think that could be why later things were recorded, because it was a really weird experience. It was very strange because you knew you were live. You had no idea if even your audio was working, but you just kind of had to keep talking. And, yeah, it’s the least feedback I’ve ever had from anything I’ve ever spoken at. And I think that not even being sure that the technology was working part. Like, even that level of feedback wasn’t there. It was fun. And hopefully next time I do something like that, it will be recorded in advance.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it was a. It was a good place talk because it was kind of together with Ellen Bauer, and you had 15 minutes, Ellen had 15 minutes. And I think Bill Erickson was there as well.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: There were three of us.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And every one of you kind of took a different take on the block themes. Yeah. And that was really interesting to kind of. Well, we started out in 2020 with that. Yeah. Now it’s five years later, and we finally connected again at WordCamp. Us, because I made it there again.

Beth Soderberg: I know. I was excited to see you. And I think. Yeah, I mean, doing that talk was interesting. I think there’s still some divergence around how people are building and how people are utilizing the tools. That set of like 15-minute talks was a really good microcosm of that because each one of us had been actively building with all of the new tools and had a slightly bigger, different approach. I still think there’s some divergence there, but we’re starting to see some patterns of, like, actual best practices with the new tools, which I think is really exciting. And also it’s fun to sort of invent on the fly. Like, okay, how should this work as the people who really are using it with clients right away, what is the standard we want to set? What does and doesn’t work? And I think that was still in a time period where we were learning so much about what you could do, what the restrictions were. I know in a lot of what we’re going through today, there’s like little tiny changes that end up being so impactful. Right. Like, my favorite thing I hated from that time period was it could have been a little earlier, I don’t remember. But originally you couldn’t set text colors on lists.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Stuff like that. Where it’s so small, but when it’s missing, it’s a big problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah, I think that a lot of work has been put into having consistent design tools for each block that you can control through the theme JSON file and then make it really a unique experience or unique design for your clients. Yeah, that’s definitely something there where you don’t, oh, I can’t do the fonts. Yeah, well, I guess I need to do a variation of it. So there was a lot of coding done to kind of get around those restrictions. How do you feel about kind of ripping out all this additional around coding now that certain things are in core and that are available? Does that kind of trip you up a bit?

Beth Soderberg: I feel great about it and there’s not that much I need to rip out. Some of that is because of how I’ve built things over time. Some of that is because things like the tab block, which I am so excited about, I know it’s not ready and all that, but I have a few sites where I have random solutions for that, but I’ve got them compartmentalized. So pulling them out and putting in something new that makes more sense is going to be easy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because I know, you know, like, especially something like the tabs, they don’t appear that often. And the other thing with stuff like that, you can just search the database for the machine name of block to find where you’re using it. I do that a lot and sometimes I don’t know. I ripped Jetpack out of a site recently because it was only being used for slideshows in like six blog posts. There was no need for it. And it might have been more than six, but still this is a major publishing website that has thousands of posts. They didn’t need Jetpack sitting there doing this like a very minor task. And so that’s one of my tactics for sure. When I’m going to rip something out. People forget that you can search easily. Not even in the database. You can use the WordPress search. Search.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. For the posts. Yes. Yeah, that’s what I do. Yeah. Kind of. You can kind of put the blog name in there and then see which post uses what block, especially the third party blocks. When you find out, okay, I have now three query blocks and core blocks and why am I doing this to me?

Beth Soderberg: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I’ve always been pretty conservative about what I’ll add.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So I think that’s part of why it’s not super daunting to me. Because if I can make it work with the tools that exist, I will.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I’m not going to over engineer it just because I could. And that makes it easier to clean up long term.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think the last big feature that was introduced to theme development was the section styles. Style variation in one and then the section styles, the smaller things and block styles, now that you can edit them in the global styles. How much do you use about that? Is that something that comes up quite a bit in your work?

Beth Soderberg: I use them a lot. Especially when you’re dealing with semantics, I want to give people the ability to have something look the way they want it to look, but also be semantically correct. So especially with things like headings. Right. Having tooling that’s easy for an end user to understand to say this should be an H2, but I would like it to look like an H4 without making it an H4 is a game changer. It improves SEO, it improves accessibility, it keeps everything cleaner. And so that kind of tooling, I think when used strategically can really help. When used randomly, you’re just going to confuse people. But you know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, aren’t we in the business of confusing people?

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, sometimes. Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah, no, it’s interesting too. So are you using also side styles variations or just the section styles or block styles?

Beth Soderberg: Heavily using block styles. Okay, not so much the whole site variations yet. Yeah, there hasn’t. It’s again, it’s like you want to use the right tool for the right use case and yeah, normally you don’t.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Want to change how the site looks.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. There’s only. You kind of need like a site within a site to make that required. And the only thing like that I’ve been building lately is a voter guide that’s like within a site but the voter guide has all the same styling as the rest of the site. Because it’s supposed to match.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve always felt that the style variations are more for theme product developers that want to give more options to modify the theme. For agencies, I didn’t see that there are a whole lot of use cases for. For them. I might be wrong, but. Yeah, but you’re kind of confirming a little bit my bias here.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. I don’t know. I look at anything that’s coming in that’s new. I look at it in terms of strategic utility and there’s a bunch of stuff that is super cool but it’s just not necessary for my clients. Right. Like it’s not the use case for that but for somebody else that could really help. And I’ve had a few where you end up building this random micro site within the site because some weird reason why they need it. And like that’s really what you would use that for. It doesn’t happen all that often.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah. Do you apply section styles to your patterns? Yeah, so that. And you give them design choices and they don’t have to spend time with kind of reorganize their design just because they want to have a pair of a pink background or a yellow background or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I also, I restrict color palettes, of course, because we don’t want anything looking like, you know, we’re in the. We’re in some sort of sci fi. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Geocities. I’m dating myself now.

Beth Soderberg: It’s okay. I told the checker at the grocery store the other day about how I worked at Blockbuster in high school and how that dated me, but it was a good job because you could I had to walk around to put the movies back. So I also use a lot of synced and partially synced blocks to achieve design consistency. So paired together. Because that I have found is really good for editorial teams where you can give them a style guide. And usually I make a page on the inside of the site that’s just privately published so that they can see like, okay, we have these patterns to work from. And, you know, this is the human part. You have a discussion about how, yes, you can do all these things, but you should use these things that we’ve all agreed upon that follow the style guide.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, it also makes for production much, much faster when you don’t have to make those design decisions. They’re already there and then.

Beth Soderberg: Exactly. And you don’t have to train people. I mean, the number one thing I see real clients, real site administrators doing weirdly with formatting is inconsistent vertical spacing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: The tooling is there to make it consistent, but people don’t. Even if you train them, they’re like, wait a minute, do I pick it at the fourth hash? Or like, which setting is it again? And does that look. And like as much as I can look at spacing on anything and know if it’s wrong, many people cannot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, no, no. Yeah. That’s a skill.

Beth Soderberg: It’s a skill.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And many people really. And I found that like syncing those patterns that way and getting. Locking down some of that basic stuff that like, you don’t want your end user to be thinking about how much space they need below something.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Like that’s not what they should be ever actively thinking about. So that’s how I have approached that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. So far. Yeah. Makes sense. Have you taken a survey of how often your clients actually use the spacer block? Because I found that WordPress.com that’s one of the top five blocks used, I.

Beth Soderberg: Have not, but now I’m curious and I. Some of them, I mean you definitely have some, some where it’s used more than it should be. But I think that we’ve avoided some of that and some of it is what we’ve been able to do recently. Right. A few years ago you had to use it if you were going to get any consistency at all across things. But I think sometimes the patterns and the pattern syncing, that type of thing has dramatically reduced the need to use the spacer block, which is great because the speaker, the spacer block is so annoying on mobile.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing. It’s also, you cannot rip it out when, when you redesign the site or something like that, it’s going to be the. In your content.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I haven’t seen similar dislike as it sounds of the spacer block, but when you shrink a screen down suddenly you get wildly different vertical spacing on mobile. And for the average person there is not a straightforward way to make it not do that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You have to know how to write a workaround for yourself to make it work and that’s not great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, well, yeah, it’s good to know. So before we head into our usual sections, is there anything else that you would like to tell people who have not yet done the jump into block themes, why they should do it?

Beth Soderberg: I think, I think that it is, it’s a scary jump, and I have always been an early adopter of the new tooling, and so I look at something like that and it freaks me out a little bit. And then I’m like, well, why not? And I just push myself through and I know that I have the liberty of doing that because I’ve been working independently for almost 10 years. So I am in a lot of ways in control of what is and is not allowed in my environment. I’ve talked to a few folks who have. They understand how it’s working and they, they personally buy in, but their employer does not.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And so for those folks, I think building up your skill set with your personal site or a personal project so that you can advocate for different things internally. It’s very hard to advocate for something that you haven’t done and that you don’t have hands-on experience with. But you know, the ability to spin up a little like MVP demo of, hey, this is how this would solve a problem that we have systemically is really how you sort of gain permission in those sorts of environments. There’s some really good resources out there on learning how to do this. I think that they are much harder to find than they used to be. When I was first learning how to code, it was much easier to find like beginner entry level stuff, to like level yourself up. And now I think fewer people are creating it and I think it’s harder to find just because of how it’s labeled. Everything starts to look the same because it’s all named the same. But I think giving yourself the challenge to – even if you don’t understand everything, listening to a podcast like this, listening to a talk that you’re finding online, having it playing in the background like it does, seep in to how you think about it. And what will happen is that later you’ll encounter the same subject again and you’ll be like, oh, wait, that’s what they were talking about. And that’s how you start to connect the dots when you’re learning anything new. And I think the idea that you’re going to get somebody who has been building themes the classic way, building themes that are heavily reliant on advanced custom fields, something like that, to just magically one day pick up a whole new set of tools with a whole different way of thinking and be completely comfortable from the get is like ludicrous. That’s not going to happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But, you know, giving yourself the ability to slowly absorb it, because it is a different way of thinking, it’s a completely different way of thinking about how to structure the theme. And for me, that has been the hardest part to learn. Once I figured it out, it was great. But of course, it’s always the hardest thing to figure out a new way of thinking. When you say it like that, it’s so obvious. But I think people really get down on themselves about it. And I think really just paying attention, reaching out to folks, you know, when you have questions, not being shy about it. What I’ve figured out over the course of the last, I guess we’re almost at eight years of Gutenberg. Yeah, Gutenberg is a month older than my eldest child. So it’s very easy for me to keep track of how old it is. But we are in a time period where what I have noticed as an early adopter, when I talk to the other early adopters, everybody is making it up. Everybody is inventing their process, everybody is inventing the “ right way.” We’re starting to congeal on some common things. But it has been a time of innovation. And so being a little bit afraid to stick your toe in. That is so reasonable. And at the same time, when you think about it that way, it becomes less scary to fail in air quotes. Right. Because ultimately, how many light bulbs did Edison make before one worked? Like, it’s just, you know, you have to experiment in order to figure out how something works. And I think it is challenging to be mid-career and have to go back to that beginning.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You know, Yeah, I feel a certain.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Confidence that all of a sudden is going away.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So. So I. I just think people need to be a little less hard on themselves, push themselves a little, be okay with failing and talk to people, talk to people. Just keep going, Just keep swimming, as the fish say in Finding Nemo.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right, so you’ve listened here to a very experienced theme developer and yeah, it’s never going to be easy. You need to start now. What is it, the Chinese proverb to the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So it’s kind of exactly for that. Yeah.

Announcements

So, okay, so we have a few announcements. Now we’re going a little bit into the Gutenberg change log message here. We have a few announcements and they’re all calls for testing because we get new stuff and. And the testing team is really on top of things. Last week a call for testing was made for the new template management features that are coming to Core, which. have you checked it out, Beth, on what’s going to come with that? We talked about it here two weeks ago with Anne Katzeff and it’s the tool where you can now have multiple templates with the same slug and of the theme hierarchy and then activate and deactivate the ones that you want to use or not use. So it kind of puts a new layer in there and gets the user a little bit more in control on how the template management actually works and figure that out in there. Because template management is something WordPress users have never done before because it was always a developer designer kind of scope and there was no user interface for it. And now it’s here and the confusion is there, but it’s also something that can be learned and can be helped with.

Beth Soderberg: I think it’s also going to be great for launching changes to live sites where. And you know how to launch code for Gutenberg is a whole other conversation. But the best practice is to keep your live site database as your database of record. Right. And some of what I see with the new template management changes are enabling you to more easily respect that without having weird, momentary blips of your content looking bizarre while you’re changing something over on a live site. So I think it’s going to be, again, another adjustment in how we think about how we work. But ultimately we’ll offer more granular tooling that will allow for the elimination of some of these use cases that haven’t always ended up being really strange, where you’re like, yeah, should we put up a maintenance message while we’re doing this? Because everything is going to look bizarre for the next 20 minutes. That kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really good. Yeah. Yeah. And the first version is going to be not perfect and probably have some bugs, but that’s why the call for testing is there. So I leave the link in the show notes for you so you can start testing and share your experience with it and also share what still confuses you or what didn’t work or where you thought it would work, but it didn’t. It’s definitely something – conversation needs to happen. And if you are not sure what to do, come into the W in the WordPress Slack into the Outreach channel and there are a lot of people there that will help you figure that out. So if you don’t know if it’s a bug or you don’t, you’re not doing it right. I know that’s often kind of that with new things. Did I get this right or is it not working? Most people, and I’m one of them, I default to okay, I’m not doing this right. What’s happening? And there are two more console testing.

One is on the ability to hide blocks, which is kind of the first iteration of a blocks visibility kind of plugin idea that you can hide and show blocks conditionally. Right now it’s only on and off or hide and show. So you could have a block in the editor, but you hide it on the front end. But because you’re still working on it or you don’t want to, you want to put it in there so your editor knows about it, but it’s not going to be pushed to the show version until a certain date or until a certain sale happens or something like that. The instructions for the call for testing are really good and they also show you with little videos how it’s supposed to work to kind of offset my am I doing this right or not? Idea. And the other one that I wanted to point out in this podcast is the accordion block calls for testing. That seems to be really settled. Came in 20.5, I think, and had some iterations, especially for those of you who started styling it. You need to double check your references because the name changes in between for the panel and for the items and all that. So call for testing for accordion block and what you can do with it. Have you experimented with the accordion block?

Beth Soderberg: Mm, I’m really excited about it. This is one of the ones that I’ve been dreaming of for years. It’s one of the ones where I had an external plugin where like, the only reason I was using the external plugin was because I needed accordions. The detail block is sort of an approximation, but it’s not the same semantically speaking. So I’m excited about this one. This one and Tabs are my two that have been a thorn in my side for years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m also. Well, we can talk about the other blocks that are supposedly come or at least been worked on for Core, even if they don’t make it into 6.9 at a later date.

Community Contributions

There’s this new AI feature out there, it’s called Telex, which is automatic block building AI. And there are a few designers and developers that have actually done some great experimentations with that. One is Tammy Lister. She has started a challenge, kind of the blocktober, meaning every day in October she will build a new block with Telex. And I’ll of course share the site in the show notes. She started out with a kind of reaching back into history of computers and started out with an esky Tetris game. And that’s when my afternoon, uploaded my afternoon was shot because I got addicted to Tetris again. Yeah. Did you do any experimentations with that?

Beth Soderberg: Nope. That one, I mean, I know about it, I know about Tammy’s blocktober. I’m paying attention, but I don’t have time to just play with it right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I. I feel the same way. It’s kind of letting other people do that. I. I look at what other people do. Yeah. And there’s Marco Ivanovich. He’s a designer at Automattic. He has some animated icon blocks. They were kind of sparkling and all that. And then he also created a post-it note block where you can put post-its on your site with an image and with a background gradient background. So pretty cool to look at.

And then there was Jeff Paul from Ten Up. He actually also created a game of Pong Hung block that’s kind of the tennis kind of back and forth where you need to up. It was just handy as an easy, medium and hard. Yeah, that was another afternoon. I tried to figure it out. Yeah. Juan Margarito, he created a mermaid diagram which is actually a markdown diagram. And then you put the. The diagram code in markdown and then it kind of creates a. A diagram with errors back and forth. Yeah, it’s kind of a flow diagram if you want to. So that was really interesting to see. Yeah. Anyway, so I just. Yeah, check it out. If you want to play around with it. It’s telex.automattic.com automatic with double T. The second T. Yeah.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.8.3

Okay. So now we come to the heart of the show, which is what’s released. And before we head into Gutenberg 20.8, I wanted to let everybody know WordPress 6. 8.3 is out. It’s a security issue. No, it’s a security release fixing two security issues. And if you haven’t updated yet, please do we wait. Go and update. The two issues were mentioned in the release post. One was data exposure issues and the other one issue and the other one was a cross scripting vulnerability for the nav menus which has been fixed and you are in a secure environment again. But don’t forget to update. Yeah. Any thoughts?

Beth Soderberg: Always update. I’m. I’m of the. I’m of the camp. I always update on the security releases right away and then major releases. I always wait and see what happens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How long do you wait? How long do you wait?

Beth Soderberg: I usually wait until a point release has come out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Beth Soderberg: That’s usually the trigger but sometimes it’s really stable and we’re like, well there. I guess there’s no point release and it’s been three weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So.

Beth Soderberg: I do the same thing with updating like my iPhone. Yeah, I don’t. I’m. As much as I am interested in technology, I am also somebody who just recently started using mobile deposit for checks. I’m skeptical.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think that makes that an early above to decide where to early adopt and where to be cautious.

Beth Soderberg: That’s true. Yeah. My risk tolerance is very high for certain things and very low for other things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if it changes my work environment that I need to retrain my muscle memory. I’m opposed to any change, but I recently had to change my Mac updated and they fixed a bug. That’s the problem with bug fixes. Yeah. If you, if you have for years known about a workaround and the muscle memory is in. You hate that bug fix that fixes that once and for all. So kind of. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. Moving on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you.

Gutenberg 21.8

So Gutenberg 21.8 is the second last before 6.9 beta. There’s one more coming, that’s a 21.9, of course, and that’s coming on October 17th. So we are recording this on October 8th and next week we have the last Gutenberg release before 6.9 beta comes. Which means bug fixes, yes. New features, no. From that point on forward to get into Core. Gutenberg 21.8 had 118 PRs by 47 contributors and five people were first time contributors. Congratulations, you got your merge done. That’s fantastic. Because I can see that the first one is always a little tricky getting it past the reviewers.

Enhancements

For Gutenberg, we start with the enhancements to the block content. Comments. Block comments is a feature that creates a commenting method for each block in your editor so you and others can add comments to your blocks and have an editorial kind of process going. It’s a a lot of PRs made it into that. But the first one that I wanted to point out is a discussion field with trackbacks and comment status aggregated for the post page Quick Edit. So you know, in the Quick edit, are there commenting places? Quick Edit is not the quick edit in the WP admin. It’s a quick edit in the design. But that’s actually not the commenting. The block commenting thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, this is hard to contextualize even looking at the PR, right? Yeah, the PR. I think ultimately it’s unifying. It’s again, it’s one of those things that’s unifying design across components to make things more consistent no matter where you find them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you have the new design view, what was missing that you were able to manage trackbacks and comments. So it’s not the feature that I just said. It’s just getting on par with the previous WP admin kind of thing. Especially for pages. The posts haven’t been included yet in these new designs, but for pages, definitely. And if there’s a post experiment in Gutenberg where you can have the post view also in the new design view, as the site editor. And that’s where this actually comes to pass. So that is kind of labeled wrong in that changelog, but that’s okay. We can handle that. Do you want to do the next one?

Beth Soderberg: Sure. So displaying a message when there is no related block, which is the most logical thing you could do with commentary that has no source attached to it anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Anymore.

Beth Soderberg: Anymore, anymore. Right. So again, it’s giving context to something so that your actual conversations make sense. And basically what it’s doing is just adding a little message that says, hey, your original block was deleted so that somebody reading through it understands and also gives you the ability to…part of why I like this one is because you’re going to end up with people who in collaborating with each other are going to remove things. And you want to have a record of the conversation for editorial purposes, but understanding what has happened is a key part of creating that record.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, definitely you want to have a record of the decision making process for certain things. Yeah. The other one that I wanted to point out is that it now shows the dates of the comments in a more human readable part, like 30 minutes ago or two hours ago or three days ago. So you get a little bit more relation to the timestamps of that. I think there was an option to do this, but I’m not quite sure that you can switch it on and off. But if not. No, it’s not. It’s the first. It’s the first iteration and there are no options.

Beth Soderberg: I think that’s coming later.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, but it’s. It’s known that there will be something like that needed.

Beth Soderberg: Yep. And then the highlighting of the related block. Again, a lot of these changes are improving context indicators and so, you know, this just gives you a clearer sense of what you’re connecting to and which thing you’re actually talking about with the comments.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I’m just going to look through. If we missed something new, we can now go right into the block library section and there’s a ton of PRs that actually work on the accordion blocks. That’s also in the bug fix sections. But I think the most prominent stuff is more like the term description block with the context support. So that if it’s in a template or in an archive template that the term description block is more. You can use it in patterns like you can do post title and query title for that. Yeah, the term description block is something that’s a little bit of a… I have seen people that are quite adamant that they need the block editor in the category description section for editing the description because I wanted to make it more there. Design it a little bit or make it a little bit more versatile. That’s quite interesting because you also can now create a page with all the features that you want on that for a particular category and then just have a query loop on that category displayed on it. So you get around that need to have the term description be a block editor or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I had never thought about that before because theoretically you always could do the latter. Right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But you had to have a certain level of technical skill and knowledge to do that. The idea of adding block support to that description opens up possibilities for folks who are not as technical to make modifications in that presentation of the. The term pages. I don’t know. I could go either way there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I could also create massive. I can see this going very wrong.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think that’s why nobody touched it for now.

Beth Soderberg: That’s a new concept to me. But I don’t know. My gut says no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So. And then we get a new block. It’s the time to read block. And now it has been in the Guternberg plugin for ages. Similar to the table of content block. But they were to get it into core. There were always kind of missing things or quirkinesses that weren’t dealt with. And the time to read had massive accessibility objections because it only had one time that it takes to read a block. Not everybody has that reading skill or is on that level like a lot of people are. English as a second language. They don’t. They don’t read so fast or dyslexia is pretty. Yeah. It’s out there. And they don’t read that fast. And so it kind of makes them feel bad about not reading in that 15 minutes kind of thing. What they’re doing now is kind of offering a range option. It says it takes one to five minutes or something like that. And which I feel is kind of even for someone who is fast reading but tired is a good indicator. Yeah. That’s how long it’s going to actually take. And then they added also a word count to it.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. When there are word count plugins out there. Word count blocks, plugins out there say that 15 times fast. But I think having a core block that actually offers it option is really cool.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t bold that, but I wanted to talk about it.

Beth Soderberg: No, I agree. I think it’s. It’s a kinder way to deal with the problem because you’re giving people enough information to very quickly self assess without shaming them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next one is part of the Data Views section actually. It’s the data forms package. And there’s now support for certain form elements validation in the data forms package. So if you use that as a plugin or your settings pages. You now get help from the packages that drive that. I think that’s a. Yeah, it’s an enhancement for extensibility, for sure.

Beth Soderberg: In the block editor section, block multi selection, disabling transforms and inspector controls.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. So when you select multiple blocks, you still get the. Sometimes the options that you can transform them. And for paragraphs, a series of paragraphs. I like it. Because then you have. You can transform them to list views. But if you have a mixture of selected blocks, you don’t need transforms or inspectors back the controls. You just probably want to move it or move the selection. Yeah. So I think it’s a good way to not confuse people.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And that’s a good example of a tiny change from an end user perspective that probably won’t be noticed, but will reduce friction for people. All right. In global styling, adding a reset button to our background controls panel. Hooray.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hooray. You don’t have to unselect stuff. Yeah. Just click on things and you make it all go away. It’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And then making the additional CSS UI less prominent, which is great because the less random CSS everywhere, the better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. And. Well, it’s. I totally agree with that. And that’s also the. The justification why they want to put it some. So they’re going to hide it. Again, it was hidden on the left hand side of the global styles or styles panel. You always could edit it on the right hand side when the styles panel where sooner or later we probably need to decide if we want to use the left hand side or the right hand side for the styles features. But it now is going to be in the ellipse menu in the header of the styles section. So it says add additional CSS as a menu item on top. So. So you are not going to be. Well, it was there and then it wasn’t there. So where is it kind of thing situation. It ended up in the ellipse menu on top of the screen.

Beth Soderberg: Block bindings. I love block bindings.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There’s an experimental feature there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: To support block attributes from the server side. I haven’t completely read through it. I’m not quite sure I understand that. So I would need to go back to the developers and say what’s the use case and why you’re doing it kind of thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think. Did you get something?

Beth Soderberg: I would have to clarify, but my understanding of it is the big thing with block bindings is like which things are supported and which things aren’t supported and how that is communicated is improved from doing this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Doing it service sort of the nugget.

Beth Soderberg: Of truth there. But I think anything like that. I know it’s experimental but making block bindings easier and more accessible for people to use anything that helps. That is a good thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think there are two areas where they come from. One is to make block bindings available for more than 14 blocks which has been the case until now. That’s one thing. But also to increase extensibility and use have not only blocks use the block bindings but also whole features use the block bindings for external things like the remote block plugin by WordPress VIP USO. Yeah. They also use block bindings to identify the data that comes in and put it into the block editor. But I think it’s hard to bring the server side and the client side together with the same information. And this one will have the server side be the moment of truth. No, the source of truth for block bindings. Yeah, it’s definitely a late edition. I’m not sure it’s going to make it to 6.9. I’m skeptical though. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. Right. Right. Mode Try adding content roles to navigation blocks is the name of the PR which I think is delightfully named and I. Even the way that this is written is pretty great. I wanted to see how far we can go with just adding content roles to nav link in some menu blocks given the improvements to content only logic we’ve had. And then it references another pr. The next sentence is I think it’s working better now. Whoever this contributor is, I love your writing. Tell the machines.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s.

Beth Soderberg: Fun times. But I think it’ll.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Isabelle Bryson. Yeah, she’s been on the podcast before and she’s actually worked also on the grid layouts and yeah, she works for Automattic on the team. And the other I think the tri part is okay. We experiment with things. So that’s when it says try and then there’s also add is kind of definitely need to fix this or add this feature or fix means fix this bug. Yeah. So they have these prefixes on their PRs and the try thing is. Yeah, let’s try it out and see what happens. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But this one, it looks cool. People should check it out. Components. The text area component. Adding a default resize vertical rule just to make things more make sense visually so that you can move stuff around the way you need to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you can control the vertical size of things. That’s always a good thing. And then the other component PR is actually adding storybook examples for the fields package. So there’s more documentation there for the plugin developers who want to use it. Also of course, for the core developers who are going to use the Fields.

Beth Soderberg: Package for their work patterns, we have a change to the block inspector adding a content tab for section blocks that displays content only descendant blocks. So similar to the existing styles tab, but for content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s up until now it lists the blocks that can be edited in a section pattern or in a content only block. But that’s all part of the write mode, and we will see how which part of it actually will come into 6.9. But I think it’s very helpful for content creators who use a pattern to just see the pieces that you can edit and not be confused with any styling of that, even if it’s only the section styles. And from the PR before and after, you can see that the little drop water drop that’s in the block toolbar actually gives you a way to browse through the styles for this particular section. So it’s not taking anything away, it’s just kind of making it clear where the things the information is going to be for you. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I think for anyone who might be confused about what we’re talking about, look at the pr. The screenshots will help you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s a little bit. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard on the podcast to make things come to life on a. In a visual component.

Beth Soderberg: The screenshots make it make sense if you’re confused by what we just said.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the PR we’re talking about is 71714. The next one is an easy one, but it’s definitely something to talk about for Black Friday and all the WooCommerce stuff. There is now a WordPress gift icon available for content creators and developers. So you can use that. It comes from a WooCommerce team, but they contributed to Core so anybody can use it.

New API

The next thing I want to point out was the block API has now the block visibility, control support and the ui. That’s the part where the underlying architecture for the hide and show of blocks I think it is. And that also is the foundation for when you. Later on we will have the conditional Hide and seek. No hide and show. Yeah. When you want to say okay, I want it for logged in users or not. I want it for people who come from Twitter or not. These kinds of conditionals, they’re not yet in there. For that you still need the block visibility plugin by Nick Diego. So I think we have one more. No. Yeah, there’s an accordion block also in write mode. We hide the add button in write mode so you can add an additional accordion block in write mode. But I’m not quite sure that’s particularly helpful for a content creator. But time will tell.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, that could go either way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a 5050 kind of thing. You do it right for 50 people and the others are going to hate you for that.

Bug Fix

And then one bug fix I wanted to point out there is a bug in the pattern override. Some users might have found it is that editing was allowed on non-enabled override blocks which kind of defeated the purpose, but it’s now fixed. So there’s another experiment. I don’t know how that comes about, but the PR definitely has some interesting conversations.

Experiments

There is allow registering PHP only blocks. What do you say for that?

Beth Soderberg: I say I think this is gonna be, this is gonna be so much bigger than it sounds.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Beth Soderberg: Because basically what you’re doing is you’re enabling developers to create blocks using only PHP. So you’re opening up the can of worms about who knows PHP and who knows JavaScript and are we gatekeeping by moving everything to JavaScript and blah blah.

But then you’re also changing the structure in a way that might make things less portable between projects. So I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s definitely an experiment.

Beth Soderberg: That’s true. I think, you know, and I. One of the things I have noticed, there is a developer on my team that I have been mentoring for years and really started learning WordPress specifically post Gutenberg. And what’s fascinating about watching her is that she struggles with some of the traditional ways of doing things, but can do them the new way. Right. So for somebody like that this might be terrible, you know, and I. It just becomes a context thing about what you know and how you’ve been progressing with different skills along the way if you’ve completely forgotten PHP or you know, various things. So I, I don’t know, I think this, this one is going to be a much bigger deal than I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. And there will be restrictions to that and I think the documentation will show that because it actually uses something the server side render component that actually was not considered best practice to use until now and the registration of PHP only blocks will actually use the server render component. So I think there is also something a little bit of a movement in the core contributing ranks about that. And it definitely needs some more. Yeah. Experimenting with it and exploration and. But it’s in there. One listened and maybe there’s something that can be pushed to the finish line outside the experiments. All the developers out there who were waiting for something like this go have at it.

Beth Soderberg: Oh. Interesting to see what people do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And I added a. The label needs developer documentation and a project manager on the team also removed it because it’s experimental. So the developers that created it have some leeway in backwards compatibility. And it’s experimental. It means it’s not documented. You cannot build on it. You need to be part of the experiment spirit about it to use it and not rely on it. That it’s going to be working like that for the foreseeable future. So yeah. It’s also that caveat on it. Just wanted to point it out.

Beth Soderberg: I just saw that that’s important because you’re going to have somebody who goes off and builds a whole new thing on it and then in two weeks it’ll break.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Which. Yeah. Any plugin developer that built plugins for Gutenberg has been doing kind of living through that for multiple years now. Yeah. So. But that’s 21.8 release with quite a few new features and the final release will be today on October 10th.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

And now we are coming to the section where we talk a little bit about what’s in development and discuss. And there are new blocks in the works and we know this because Matthias has. Matthias Ventura has published that discussion about new blocks that were previously thought about plug into territory. And now quite a few theme developers think that they are held back with their designs if there are not more additional blocks in core because then now they can style it in their themes and make it available on templates and all that. So Justin Tadlock also did an opinion piece on the Gutenberg Times for it about four weeks ago. I can link it again in the show notes. But we are getting new blocks and the ones that have been merged they’re not entirely out of experiments yet. Time to read. And we talked about it because it just was merged. We also talked about the accordion block that was merged a while ago and still in experiments. But there are two. Oh, we also talked about the terms query block that has been merged but we haven’t talked about the breadcrumbs block. And I’m really excited about that because it felt such a need in the template area that people are getting so confused where am I? And I have a better map and I have breadcrumbs and all that. Yeah, it’s such a useful tool and I’m looking forward to get that tested. And yeah, watch out on the test team. They’re putting some more calls for testing together to get this all in the hands of people who want to help with making it better.

Beth Soderberg: I’m excited about the breadcrumbs block too. That’s another one where I’ve had to do sort of weird things to make things work over time and it’s going to be nice to not have to do the weird things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was using Justin Tadock’s breadcrumbs block that he developed and he had some thoughts in this VR on how broad or restricted this new. This first version is going to be. And I think we all going to like it because depending on the context you can get additional. The breadcrumbs will change. And I really like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I’ve. I’ve used his plugin too. I forget which one it was. There’s a few independent plugins for breadcrumbs and my team has run into some weird edge cases of what they will do depending on your content structure. So I think that’s part of why the scope of the breadcrumbs block being limited at first makes so much sense, because the complexity of what you’re actually trying to do from a templating level, depending on where you are in a site and how your site is structured can get incredibly complex. I don’t remember which plugin it was, but we had a site. It may have been the Voter Guide. The Voter Guide within the site that completely killed everything. Like something about the logic of where we were just. And we had to use a different plugin just for that one site to make it work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I might have even re. Ended up doing something sort of manual instead. I don’t remember. But those plugins have been incredibly useful, but are also prone to edge case weirdness. Basically generating navigation on the fly. And if you don’t know where you are within the structure of the site from a structural standpoint, or if someone has made some odd decisions about where they’re putting things or how their hierarchy works, you’re going to end up with a really confusing breadcrumb.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you don’t have the controls to actually make changes. It’s just all this black box kind of mystery mute kind of thing again. Yeah, yeah. And I. While we’re running a little bit out of time or short on time, I just wanted to mention there’s also a dialogue block in the works. There’s an icon block in the works. My favorite one is the stretchy text. It sounds so weird, but it actually makes sense. It’s text that stretches over a certain container and it’s flexible depending on how the container works. So you could do this for hero sections, all that. And then here’s your bestest favorite. The tabs block is in the works. And then also my favorite is a table of contents block. Because I have these long posts all the time and I want to do the table of contents block. But it had some weird issues. That’s why it’s not in Core yet. And they’re trying to figure that out how that all can be done. It’s now attempted to be a dynamic one and allow usage outside of the post or page that is actually referring to. But for instance, in a template, you could put it in a single post template in the sidebar and you will always have a table of content for your posts. So I think that’s a really good use case for pages, when you have landing pages or tutorial pages or documentation pages that you don’t have to fiddle with it while you’re creating the content. And it’s just there in the template.

Beth Soderberg: This is one where my weird workaround for it. There’s one of the SEO plugins has a table of contents block built into it. I forget which one offhand, but I’ve used that before to get this type of functionality.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because it. Sometimes you really just need it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

So that’s it. That is the Gutenberg changelog 122. Thank you so much for being with me on this, Beth. And it was great to chat with you and talk about block themes and all these good things. Block style stuff. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on the gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is 122. I already said that. But if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and I forgot a question for you, Beth. And that is if people want to get in touch with you, what is a good place to do that?

Beth Soderberg: You can find me in the WordPress slack under my name, Beth Soderberg. And then you can find me at work at our website, which is Bethink.studio or bethinkstudio.com. but you know, it’s really fun when you can get the non.coms to work with your name.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yes, all right. So I’ll list of course, all those contact information, more in the show notes.

And thank you all for listening. Thank you for being here and see you when I’ll see you back. Well, in two weeks. Goodbye, and have a good time.

Leave a Comment