What’s next in Gutenberg? (August)

This is a monthly update containing the high-level items that 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/ contributors are focusing on for August. Please join us in our efforts and let us know in the comments if anything is blocking you from doing so. 

How to follow along with Gutenberg: 

As a reminder, here’s an overview of different ways to keep up with Gutenberg and the Full Site Editing project. Tied to this, there’s a new page courtesy of @bph, @williampatton, and myself that provides an index of Gutenberg related posts across various Make blogs. 

Addressing WordPress 5.5 feedback

WordPress 5.5 is set to be released on August 11th and any efforts spent here will be focused only on addressing critical regressions that might come up with this release. Ideally though, this won’t be an area that needs great attention for this month’s work.  

Follow along:

You can follow the remaining items for 5.5 here.

Global Styles & Editor focused APIs

As a reminder, Global Styles refers to the system that defines and manages global aesthetics allowing overall site styles, theme styles, and blocks to work well together. Last month, this was a smaller focus but, with 5.5 shipping in August, more time will be spent building out the Global Styles system and editor focused APIs. Some of this work will include the following:

Follow along:

You can follow the progress for this overall system in this overview issue. For more recent and immediate next steps, you can follow this issue describing the current state of work. 

WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. Screen

As part of expanding the 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. editor to other screens in the adminadmin (and super admin), work slowly but surely continues to improve the widget screen as part of a wider effort to add more block enabled sections to the WordPress experience. You can find initial ideas for what this might look like in this issue. Work will include the following: 

Follow along:

You can follow the progress of this focus by reviewing issues with the [Feature] Widgets label.

Full Site Editing

Work on this major focus for phase 2 is ongoing and is expected to continue iterating over the next months. We’ve wrapped up the major work needed to build the technical foundation of this project and are now moving towards expanding the UX & UI:

We’re watching the Theme Experiments repo as well to see how themers are attempting to build block-based themes. Thank you to everyone participating there as it’s a super useful way for us to determine prioritization. 

Follow along:

The high level, important tasks have been split into sections and highlighted on this overview issue. If you’re interested in being a part of testing Full Site Editing, check out the experimental outreach program to learn more

Navigation Screen

As a reminder, those who have been working on a new, block-based, menus page (nav-menus.php) in wp-admin are running a weekly chat in #core to begin better syncing up efforts. The meeting happens in #core every Wednesday at 7AM UTC. These meetings will be focused on triaging issues in GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ with the [Feature] Navigation screen or [Block] Navigation labels but are also open for discussing improving the navigation creation process in WordPress, increasing compatibility with Full Site Editing, and maintaining backward compatibility.

If this interests you, check out the following issues to join the discussion: 

Follow along:

You can follow the progress of this project on this project board, review the overview issues (Block Navigation, Navigation Screen) & join the weekly coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. chat.

Areas to be aware of:

Block & PluginPlugin 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 Developers

The Block Directory is coming to WordPress 5.5 and to help get ready @tellyworth shared this post discussing proposed guidelines and the following resources:

The Gutenberg Times covered this new feature in a comprehensive article that includes historical information to help understand what this might unlock for the community. 

Theme Developers

@poena wrote an extensive block-based theme tutorial to help others get started with building their own.

Ways to Help:

While the above items are our focuses, don’t forget that you can always help with triage, needs testing issues, good first issues and reviewing PRs. If there’s anything we can do to make contributing easier, let us know in the comments or in #core-editor chats. While we can’t promise to fix everything, we’d appreciate being aware of any blockers.

#core-editor #gutenberg-next