This post summarizes the latest weekly Editor meeting, held in the #core-editor Slack channel, on Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 14:00 UTC. These meetings coordinate collaboration in the development evolution of the Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ project. The meeting was moderated by @gziolo.
WP 5.4 Beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 2 Released
The release contained several fixes for the editor. A few notable items:
- Block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor: Columns in the Block Library that have unassigned-width will now grow equally.
- Block editor: The custom gradient picker now works in languages other than English.
- Block editor: When choosing colors is not possible, the color formatter no longer shows.
Everything can be viewed here. We still have some ongoing work in the must have board. Props to all involved in the process, with the big shootout to @jorgefilipecosta for wrangling all the boring work of syncing all those fixes in WordPress core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Friendly reminder for those who are aware and explanation to everyone else about the workflow during WordPress release cycle. Next release will be the last beta version. That means the first RC One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). and the string freeze is very close. Until WordPress 5.4 is out, we do the regular release for the plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party every 2 weeks. At the same time, we only backport A port is when code from one branch (or trunk) is merged into another branch or trunk. Some changes in WordPress point releases are the result of backporting code from trunk to the release branch. essential bug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes to WordPress core. It means that we don’t do regular publishes to npm for WordPress packages.
The dev notes Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. work is going well and post notes are already written. Thank you to all the helped this effort and wrote dev notes
Weekly Priorities
The February plan is still in motion:
- Expect Gutenberg G2 to land in the next weeks
- Global styles being a focus
- FSE ongoing project that will continue for a few weeks/months
Get involved in FSE work (blocks being added, themes being explored). There’s room for a lot of work there and not enough people at the moment. There is work being shared around the UX User experience flows for template-parts, and navigation. Providing feedback there can help move things.
Task Coordination
@karmatosed deep down in global styles-land we have new mocks. I’ve also been giving feedback where can on some tickets, keeping that triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. flowing.
@youknowriad
- Still working on my ongoing wordpress/icons project
- Added a bot that shows the impact of PRs on bundle size (I hope it’s not annoying you and that we’ll actually pay attention to the changes)
- Working on the last G2 details before initial merge (hopefully this week or beginning of the next one)
- A lot of reviews (SlotFill, FSE blocks…)
- Some block-based themes explorations.
Nothing blocking so far
@itsjonq
- Continue with Global Styles. Hands on with FSE integration alongside @nosolosw. Otherwise, planning/coordinating
- Helping folks like @youknowriad on G2 (Movers interaction specifically)
@nosolosw
- Iterated on a proposal for the resolver that enables authors to target specifics parts the post (“all block paragraphs”, “cite within blockquotes”, etc): PR 20290
- Bootstrapped a barebones global styles theme for demo purposes PR 22
- Prepared a PR to explore a different isolation mechanism and how the process of migrating blocks to use CSS Cascading Style Sheets. variables may look like PR 20273
- For next week, I’m going to carry on that work and potentially resume the PR to connect the server data to the UI User interface Controls PR by @itsjonq.
@getdave
- Merged a PR to enable the creation of Pages from within the Navigation Block.
- Seeking reviews on another PR to improve the documentation around the `<LinkControl>` component:
@mapk
- Working through Block Patterns with . He’s going to explore a simpler MVP "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia approach to get patterns in quicker.
- Exploring UX around template parts.
@brentswisher
- Getting caught up to start contributing again after being away for a few months while moving into a new house. You all move so fast! The last thing I had been working on was going through all the components to add them to Storybook.
- Doesn’t look like there has been a ton of movement there, thoughts if that would still be worth my time, or should I look for somewhere else to start contributing (FSE?)
@gziolo
- Working on documentation, dev notes, e2e tests for block variations API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways..
- Introduced stable BlockSettingsMenuControls slot
- Planning to help land changes for SlotFill refactor, want to finish Puppeteer upgrade, also want to work on optimizations for block editor build process in core.
Open Floor
Conflicts in Blocks with Vertical Aligned Columns
@leemon asks for a look at this Issue 19962, please. This bug affects many block plugins. I think it should be fixed in 5.4 @jorgefilipecosta This issue was already part of the must have board, unfortunately we did not fix it before the beta. If the fix is something very simple that we could include as a bug fix it would be good, but it is not something critical given that 5.3 already contains this bug.
Conflicts in Blocks with Vertical Aligned Columns
@isabel_brison General comment and feature proposal: gutenberg.run has been extremely useful for cross-platform testing, especially in an accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) context. It would be great to have something similar for Storybook too! A few months ago, before gutenberg.run was working, I investigated using Tugboat for generating PR previews. It might be a good tool for a storybook preview, as it’s fairly simple to set up.
@gziolo There are two parts there, it feels like it’s time to document and promote gutenberg.run. It works great! @youknowriad For the second part, we discussed building Storybook into WPAdmin somehow and just use a single tool (gutenberg.run) for all. @gziolo We had integration for Storybook but there were some issues with using commercial hosting. I remember that discussion. It sounds great. Let’s open an issue for that if it doesn’t exist.
Nested Blocks in FSE
@BMO Does anyone have any updates on nested blocks and the impact on FSE? For example, being able to use semantic HTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. in a template file? @jorgefilipecosta I think the solution is to provide head blocks and things like that @gziolo opened a PR 20218 that explores ways to make Group block flexible enough to cover this use case. @jorgefilipecosta making the group support several different tags may be a good solution.
@kjellr The current block-based themes spec doesn’t include anything about structural tags like <head>. That’s probably something we should consider separately.
@gziolo It raised the question how flexible it should be, should we allow any tag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.)?, etc. I’m sure other questions will follow, like how to mark those groups as landmarks, whether to include visually hidden heading and similar accessibility related optimizations to start we should define the list of core supported semantic tags used for grouping and how they would look in the inserter. I would also like to discuss it with the accessibility team on how we can ensure the best possible experience
@BMO To ask what is probably an obvious question, is the focus or intent to prevent arbitrary HTML inside of template files? Because everything could/should be handled with a block? @youknowriad the answer is yes, because it needs to be editable as a block, though we have custom HTML block, custom classNames, etc. @BMO The group block solution looks interesting because it keeps these things nested.
Block-Based Theme Bi-Weekly Meeting
@kjellr Since we’re on the topic: every other week there’s a block-based themes meeting where we’re discussing these things too. The meeting is held in the themereview slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel. For more information visit https://make.wordpress.org/themes/
