What’s next in Gutenberg? (March 2021)

This monthly update contains 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 March. 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:

Here’s an overview of different ways to keep up with Gutenberg and the Full Site Editing project. There is also an index page of Gutenberg development-related posts and a Site Editing Milestone overview issue that breaks down the upcoming work into more concrete next steps. 

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.-based 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. Editor

Work on the Block-based Widget Editor (Widgets Screen) is a continued focus for the month ahead. This effort aims to bring the flexibility of block-based editing to the widgets and 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. screens. The current efforts include:

Follow along:

You can find more information about the current work in progress in this exploratory issue for bringing blocks to the customizer and this summary issue for overall items for a block-based widget editor experience, as well as on this project board. Moreover, you can join #feature-widgets-block-editor in WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. for future Widget Screen-focused meetings.

Navigation Screen

Like the Widgets Screen, the Navigation Screen aims to help expand what’s possible with menus while bringing block functionality to yet another part of WordPress to allow for more adoption and offer a more modern experience. Because the Navigation Screen needs to work nicely with the Navigation block (and vice versa), much of the current effort from contributors here is focused on the Navigation Block. With this in mind, current efforts include:

Follow along:

You can follow the progress of this project on this project board or review the new Navigation Screen tracking issue and join #feature-navigation-block-editor in WordPress.org Slack.

Full Site Editing

As with the prior months, work on this major focus for phase 2 is ongoing and is expected to continue as a big-picture goal for 2021. Work this month will include the following focus areas:

Milestone 1 – Site Editing Infrastructure and UI

Milestone 3 – Global Styles

  • Iterate on the block supports mechanism.
  • Add content-width option to GS & 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.

Milestone 4 – Theme Blocks

  • Continue identifying and bringing required template features to the site editor and site-editor blocks.

Milestone 5 – Query Block

  • The Query Block MVPMinimum Viable Product "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 is ready! Next up, work will start to polish the experience with a focus on suggesting Patterns in block placeholder states.

Milestone 6 – Navigation Block

Follow along:

You can follow the progress of this project with this overview issue showing key milestones for site editing. For each major milestone, there are related issues you can follow if you want a more granular look at each next step.

If you’re interested in testing Full Site Editing, check out the FSE Outreach Program to learn more. If you have questions about Full Site Editing, check out this recent effort to offer answers.

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

Contributors

  • As suggested during the recent Hallway Hangout hosted by @bernhard-reiter focused on writing end-to-end tests, contributors are encouraged to file issues requesting end-to-end tests when spotting a regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. with the “[Package] E2E Tests” label.

Theme Developers

Design

Ways to Get Involved

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. In particular, if you’re interested in helping with triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. but don’t know where to start, there’s a course on Learn WordPress for how to do triage in GitHub! Check it out and join us.

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.

Meetings to join:

While you can view all meetings here, here are specific meetings to join depending on your interest. Remember that you need a WordPress.org slack account to participate:

  • CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Editor weekly Wednesdays @ 14:00 UTC in #core-editor focused on all-things Gutenberg.
  • Block-Based Themes meeting twice monthly on Wednesday @ 16:00 UTC in #themereview focused on preparing for Full Site Editing.

#core-editor, #gutenberg, #gutenberg-next