Editor chat Summary: 24th June, 2020

This post summarizes the weekly editor chat meeting agenda here. Held on Wednesday, 24th June 2020 held in Slack. Moderated by @paaljoachim.

GutenbergGutenberg 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/ version 8.4.0 RCrelease candidate 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). 2

Gutenberg version 8.4 RC 2 was released today.
A huge thank you to @noisysocks for helping for tackling the huge release.

The next Gutenberg release 8.5 to be released on the 6th of July and will be included in 5.5. BetaBeta 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. will be on the 7th of July.

Project board for WordPress 5.5.

@ellatrix is maintaining a project board for 5.5 of issues/PRs that need to go into the next release.
@youknowriad is already satisfied with what has already been added to 5.5.
@michael-arestad there are a few issues he would like to see added. Such as PR: Try: Don’t show a clone when dragging.
@ellatrix We should begin polishing what we have now for the next release.
@mcsf we need to backport a lot of PHP changes to core and begin thinking about compiling dev notesdev note 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..

Monthly Plan

The monthly plan for June.

Task Coordination

@zebulan
I’ve been working on moving reusable blocks to their own tab in the inserter.
I’ve also been working on various PRs to fix cases where useSelect calls were missing dependency arrays or had incorrect dependency arrays.
BlockSettingsMenuControlsSlot: add missing useSelect dependency
useDisplayBlockControls: add missing useSelect dependency
Optimize useSelect calls (batch 1)
Technical issues in this PR blocking future improvements: Buttons block: lighten editor DOM even more. Once that PR is unblocked, I can resume work on this one: Buttons block: overhaul alignment/justification controls If anyone could help figure this out so we could try and get this done before WP 5.5, that would be much appreciated. Right now the Buttons blockBlock 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. alignment controls are confusing and broken.

@ntsekouras
I’m working on adding keyboard support for moving blocks.
Associated. Prototype: move blocks between levels with keyboard

@poena
Because this feature that introduces descriptions to block patterns would require changes to existing block patterns, a decision is needed so that it may be included in 5.5. We probably don’t want to make breaking changes after patterns are available in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..

@michael-arestad
We’re starting in on the “Create a new template” flow
If you have any thoughts or ideas, let me know.

@youknowriad
I worked a lot on end 2 end tests lately, hopefully they are more stable now
Finally landed the quick inserter PR.
I’ll focus in on 5.5 related tasks (backports, tests on Core…)
Polish and bugbug 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 on Gutenberg side.

@annezazu
I’m continuing to do triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. on needs-testing and unlabeled alongside officially placing docs about the FSE Outreach Program here. There are more to come that are being drafted and shared for feedback in #fse-outreach-experiment including a general FAQ.

@joen
I’ve been sheparding this drag and drop improvement along, and it’s looking like it can land, so I would just highlight it for your eyes once again.

@itsjonq
Continue efforts under the “Design Tools” label.
More recently, helping out with the drag/drop experience @joen and @michaelarestad mentioned.

@itsjusteileen
I’ve been testing in Full Site Editing (FSE) and helping @annezazu over in #fse-outreach-experiment. I also helped get Add reusable block tab to inserter moving and on the Project Board for 5.5. I also added Discussion: Should theme.json support conditional logic like theme supports and looking for input.

@ellatrix
I’ve been helping out with 5.5 🙂

@ajlende
Image editing tools.
Working on Image Editor Batch API for updating the REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/..
Discussion about in #core-restapi channel.
Outside of Gutenberg land: Add option for flipping the image to the crop view which can be re-added in a future Gutenberg PR after it was removed in Image editing: batch editing in cropper component.

@noisysocks
Regarding task coordination, this week I’m: Releasing Gutenberg 8.4.
Working on allowing Search to be added to the Navigation screen.

Open Floor

@Kiril Zhelyazkov
I need eyes on Block icons are reordered when adding new blocks. There are different suggestions for how it should be handled and I can’t decide which is the right way to solve it.
–> No replies yet.

@chrisvanpatten
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to attend the meeting this week but I want to call attention to this issue: Patterns should not display if their blocks are not allowed.
@youknowriad
Plans to take a closer look at the issue.

@mrwweb
Use .has-background to indicate any type of background. Introduce second class for type of background.
The Block-based Themes team agreed it makes sense and we’ve since done additional research and gotten feedback that seems to confirm this is a positive change. Because it is an issue that involves changing front-end CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. classes, it feels like this needs to get into the soonest release possible to avoid causing disruption. At this time, the general consensus is that the risk of adding it is very low, but that will obviously increase over time.
@zebulan
Comment: A has-background class sounds like a good idea to me.

@itsjusteileen
Eileen is asking for comments to this issue:
Discussion: Should theme.json support conditional logic like theme supports
@youknowriad
Comment: I don’t think we need to add condition logic to theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. aside block vs global specific settings but the editor settings are filterable whether they come from theme.json or not, so conditional logic is possible there.

@MrMark
Before I submit a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker., wondering if anyone knows the reasoning behind having a bottom margin on wp-block-columns and wp-block-column so that when you have columns within columns, it creates large margins below that grouping, etc.
@michael-arestad
Comment: I think it’s worth a ticket/issue. If anything, we could add some conditional CSS to remove the bottom margin from child column blocks. Or just remove the margin.
@jonoalderson
Comment: https://every-layout.dev/layouts/stack/ is handy for this sort of thing. Much cleaner than conditionals for parent-child structures.

@joyously
We need either more knowledgeable people or a document (user docs for editor) to send users who ask questions in the Gutenberg plugin support forums.

@paaljoachim
Having a buddy buddy system where developers can help and review each others PRs. Reach out to other developers through a polite direct message and ask for advice. We are all here to also help each other along our paths.

#core-editor, #core-editor-summary, #gutenberg, #summary