This post summarizes the latest weekly Editor meeting (agenda, slack transcript). This meeting was held in the #core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-editor 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 on Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 08:00 AM MDT and was moderated by @annezazu.
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/ 9.1
Gutenberg 9.1.0 was released today. Update your sites and stay tuned for a “What’s New” post for the release. As @youknowriad mentioned in slack, “193 commits and 77 contributors for just a single release”. Thanks to everyone who helped!
Monthly Plan
Key Project Check-in
Here’s the overarching plan for September. From there, people involved in the Widget 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., Global Styles, and Editor focused APIs gave more granular updates:
Widgets screen from @mapk:
- Legacy Widget 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. UI User interface has been updated to reflect 3rd party widgets as block variations.
- The UI around widgets inside each widget area has been updated with labels and borders.
- 3rd party widgets can be found in the Inserter now and added similarly to blocks.
Global Styles & Editor focused APIs from @youknowriad and @jorgefilipecosta:
- Improvements made for the APIs for Block Authors (block.json 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.) and theme authors (theme.json) to control the editor. Unfortunately, we might not be able to ship all of this on 5.6. theme.json APIs might come later.
- Functionalities were merged for Global Styles that allow the editor to be controlled from theme.json infrastructure e.g: colors, font sizes , gradients etc. This also opens the option of settings depending on the block, e.g: different colors for a paragraph and a heading.
- There is currently a PR for Global Styles that allows users to edit the color palette using the global styles sidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.. This is the first time that user control of editor settings is being allowed. This work exposed some limitations currently in place that are being solved with different PR’s.
October Preview
With the month winding down, I gave a preview of the “What’s Next” post for October:
- Navigation Screen & Block work is being put on pause in order to focus on the Widget Screen to increase the chances of inclusion in 5.6. There will be a full announcement post about this (why the decision was made, what factors were considered, etc) on Make Core! In the meantime, a call for testing post for the Widget Screen was shared.
- Preparation for 5.6 will be a big focus with 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. 1 coming up on October 20th and that acting as a cut off point for features being added. You can see the 5.6 “Must Haves” in this project board.
- Work will continue with Global Styles, Editor APIs, and Full Site Editing in a similar cadence as the previous few months.
Delaying 9.2 Release
Finally, @youknowriad mentioned that since Beta 1 for WordPress 5.6 is due on October 20, it’s likely that the next Gutenberg release will be delayed by one week in order to match the dates and include as much features as possible. This would mean Oct 19th will be the 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). for 9.2 and the stable release will be on Oct 21 since the packages can be incorporated into Core before Beta 1.
Task Coordination
Note: Anyone reading this summary outside of the meeting, please drop a comment in the post summary, if you can/want to help with something. Remember: don’t just focus on code contributions!
@karmatosed
@ntsekouras
@itsjonq
Continue to working on and exploring various aspects of Design Tools through the G2 Components project. Some aspects include:
- Improved coding experience with inline documentation.
- Optimizing performance to enable the creation of complex tools (e.g. 10+ box shadow settings).
- Exploring drag-based controls (and gesture handling).
- Refining existing systems (such as Context, State Management, Styling)
- Much of this has been written about on the G2 Components blog (versus network, site):
https://g2components.wordpress.com/ - Finally, hosting a Zoom tomorrow (at 2PM EST). It’s a casual thing and you’re welcome to join if you’re interested. If you can’t make it, no worries as it will be recorded.
@aristath
- Columns can now accept non-percent values for width. This will help FSE themes achieve more layouts .
- Focused on global-styles and how FSE themes can leverage them.
- Trying to improve FSE performance.
- Continuing work on splitting block-styles and only load assets for rendered blocks
@annezazu
Working on finalizing What’s Next for October, nearly have something ready to share for the core editor release process for a major WordPress release (major props to @jorgefilipecosta and @isabel_brison for working on this with me), various triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. efforts, and finally some light testing!
@vindl
Will be reviewing the PRs for exposing templates in site editor’s navigation sidebar as well as some updates to base navigation components: Search Control in Menu Titles & Add Back Button click handler.
@nrqsnchz
- Worked on design proposals for
Video Block: Subtitles #7673 - Made a design proposal for
Video Block: alternate sources such as ogv and webm file formats #9457 - Started working this week on
Allow users to customize keyboard shortcuts #3218
@addiestavlo
Continuing work towards allowing hovered template parts to have their titles shown in the site editor header The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes.’s document actions component as well as working to enable a spotlight mode type effect when editing template parts.
@jeremyyip
@mapk
- Query block patterns/layouts.
- Query block flows with @mariohamann
- Widgets screen reviews and testing
@youknowriad
- Working on stabilizing the support flags for (colors, font sizes.)
- Iterating on the ComboboxControl component and hoping we can remove all the
perPage: -1 api requests - I’ll continue on some of these, I’m hoping to get back to the Custom CSS Cascading Style Sheets. per block PR and block support flags support server side
@David Szabo
Experimenting with the Navigation sidebar. Working on adding templates to the Navigation in this PR which includes whole rework of the navigation and a new feature which allows us to edit templates that only exist as theme files. Other than the PR mentioned above, I’m fixing this and that related to Navigation sidebar and reviewing others’ PRs!
@jorgefilipecosta
- Reviewed multiple PRs that were opened.
- Continued the conversations on font related PR’s.
- Worked on expanding theme.json editor controls.
- Worked on user configurable color palettes.
- Next week I will continue iterations on the PR’s that are open. I will submit parallel PR’s to address the current limitations the user configurable settings exposed.
Open Floor
Should we create a Twenty Twenty-One Github 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/ project board containing issues that can help improve the upcoming new default theme? Raised by @paaljoachim.
After a brief discussion about the current repository for Twenty Twenty One, it was decided not to separate out a project board as there are people working across both core editor and the theme project who can help get any issues handled.
Request to provide feedback/discuss the Gutenberg developer documentation proposal. Raised by @justinahinon.
Justin posted this about a month ago and would like feedback on this before work begins. Thanks to this conversation, a flurry of people shared they would be game to help with different pieces including:
Anyone interested in helping with this work, please feel free to comment on the post directly or ping The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” Justin!
Request for a PR review for DateTimePicker with react-datepicker component. Raised by @retrofox.
For context, as @retrofox mentioned, “we started to look into the implementation just to highlight some events in the calendar, and why not add an events tooltip for every day. It’s tied to when the user wants to schedule a post.” However, after some progress, switching to a react React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/.-component dependency was considered for the DatePicker component. The reasons for this switch are detailed in the PR.
At this point, it would be very helpful to get feedback along with any possible issues that haven’t yet been considered in this approach. If you are able to help out here, please do so!
#core-editor-summary, #gutenberg
