What’s next in Gutenberg? (May 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 May. Please join us in our efforts and let us know in the comments if anything is blocking you from doing so.

The priorities for the month heavily focus on the WordPress 5.8 Must Haves, including auditing Experimental APIs and merging Gutenberg into WordPress trunk.

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. 

Widgets Editor

Work on 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.-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 is a continued focus for the month ahead. The main efforts target stabilizing and documenting the editor and the 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. block editor, as well as:

• Audit and ensure backward compatibility.
• Customizer block editor:
  • Enhance legacy widgets fitting properly.
  • Implement a mobile responsive block toolbar.
  • Implement undo/redo.
• Add a plugin to disable the block-based Widgets editor.

Follow along

You can find more information about the current work in progress in this tracking issue, 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 Editor-focused meetings.

Navigation Editor

Like the Widgets Editor, the Navigation Editor 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 Editor needs to work nicely with the Navigation Block (and vice versa), much of the current effort from contributors focus on the Navigation Block. With this in mind, current efforts include:

• Continue defining Navigation Editor architecture.
  • Discuss over supporting future block types in the navigation editor.
  • Provide a better way to disable/enable Navigation Block features for the Navigation Editor.
• Reconsider the placeholder state to make it easier to create a new menu.
• Improve handling unsaved changes.
• Add a preview mode to show how the menu would look once it’s published.
• Add visual cues for the menu and page list items and always show the appender.

Follow along

You can follow the progress of this project on this project board or review the new Navigation Editor 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

• Ongoing work on phase 3 of the infrastructure.
• Explore how to expose the new FSE editors to users.
• Try a click-through-to-edit-children UX for reusable blocks and template parts.
• Site/Template editor welcome guide.
• Move post/page title to the top bar.
• Make it possible to delete new custom block templates and revert customized block templates in the template editor.
• Improve the persistent list view, including enabling it in the post editor.

Milestone 3 – Global Styles

• Iterate on the block supports mechanism, including:
  • Add margin block support with configurable sides.
  • Add letter-spacing.
  • Migrate more blocks to the hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. system: border for Cover and Image blocks, the margin for Separator block, and border & color for Pullquote block.
• Add CSS vars for root level settings.

Milestone 4 – Theme Blocks

• With most theme blocks moved out of experimental, it’s time to polish the Site Logo block’s design and bring feature parity with the Image Block.
• Similarly, the Site Title and Site Tagline blocks require varnishing to bring feature parity with other text blocks.

Milestone 5 – Query Block

• A collection of improvements to the block.
• Revisit the bundled Query Block Patterns.
• Create a UI that suggests patterns that are contextual to the currently selected block

Milestone 6 – Navigation Block

• Make the navigation mobile-responsive is an ongoing effort, collapsing it to a hamburger icon when on smaller viewports.
• Option to render the block using a classic navigation data source.
• Add a home link block.
• Support non-li inner blocks. 
• Mark invalid menu items and links to draft pages for better editing UXUX User experience.

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

FSE Roadmap

• The Full Site Editing Go/No Go demo took place a few weeks ago, and its summary, recording, and transcript published.
• As a follow-up of the demo, next steps towards 5.8 were determined.

FSE Outreach Program

• The schedule for the upcoming FSE calls for testing was announced.
• The summary of the 4th round of the FSE Outreach Program is available as well. 
• A new round of general questions around Full Site Editing can be submitted until May 12th.
• Expect a call for testing this month on the Widgets Editor.

Theme Developers

• The theme.json configuration file is becoming stable in the imminent Gutenberg 10.6:
  • The file structure change has been finished.
  • The file has been renamed from experimental-theme.json to theme.json.

Design

• To complement the forthcoming Pattern Directory and similarly to Query Block patterns being revisited, Template Part patterns are being explored.
• A number of design explorations regarding improvements to reusable blocks are in the works, including:
  • Add more functionality to reusable block settings.
  • Add a menu in the isolated editing view top toolbar for navigating to usage locations.
  • Show the Save button in the Reusable Block toolbar if there are changes.

Other

• The IE 11 Support Phase Out Plan has been published and IE 11 support will be removed from Gutenberg in 10.6.

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 Themes meeting twice monthly on Wednesday @ 16:00 UTC in #themereview focused on preparing for Full Site Editing.

Thanks @cbringmann for reviewing this post.

#core-editor #gutenberg-next #gutenberg