Editor chat summary: 19th August 2020

This post summarizes the weekly editor chat meeting (agenda here) held on 2020-08-19 14:00 UTC in Slack. Moderated by @get_dave.

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/ 8.8.0 release

  • At the time of the meeting it had not been released but Gutenberg 8.8.0 is now available.
  • Release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. @itsjonq joined us and provided his highlights:
    • Full site editing has progressed with updates to Global Styles, the Post 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. suite, and Template management.
    • Initial work has begun on the new 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 – a project that’s part of a wider effort to add more block enabled sections to the WordPress experience.
    • This release also saw important accessibilityAccessibility 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) and mobile improvements to user-interfaces like the Toolbar, navigation menus, and Popovers.

Monthly Plan & Key Projects

Navigation screen, Navigation block and Widgets screen

@andraganescu provided the update:

Andrei also point us towards the Navigation screen and Widgets project boards where help for code review, testing and picking up issues is always welcome.

Global Styles & Editor focused APIs

@nosolosw provided the update on his two focuses for the month:

  • Land an initial user-facing tool to set styles globally.
  • Make progress on controlling the block editor, see tracking issue. The idea is to enable themes to control the editor via 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..

For people interested in this area of work, the tracking issue lists specific tasks to help with.

For people getting started, a good first Issue is to migrate core blocks to use the implicit style attribute for colors and/or font-size.

Full Site Editing

@michael-arestad provided the update:

  • An iteration on the multi-entity saving flow is in the works!
  • Several of the post blocks now have icons and descriptions.
  • A mockup for a document-level grid has been proposed.
  • I’m starting in on everything related to the block directory.

@annezazu also reminded us about:

CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.

No one was available to provide an update. If anyone would like to provide this async, then please leave an update in the comments.

Task Coordination

Open Floor

Thanks to everyone who attended.

#core-editor, #core-editor-summary, #meeting-notes