The WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:
Found a bugbugA bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.?Create a ticket in the bug tracker.
This post is a recap of the live product walkthrough hosted by members of the release squad for WordPress 6.0. In this post, you will find a brief summary, a link to the recording, a chat transcript, and the transcript from Zoom’s closed-captioning system.
During this event, @matveb provided a casual, guided walkthrough of many new features that are planned for WordPress 6.0 (as well as some “stuff” that will likely be released thereafter.) Members of the release squad joined in as panelists for this interactive discussion which included Q&A submitted from among the 120+ event attendees.
Based on the positive experience among the panelists and attendees, I believe it is feasible that another walkthrough could take place closer to the release date as well as become a regular part of the communications cycle for future releases.
In future iterations, alternative platforms may be explored, such as a live stream service so the event can be viewed on Youtube, for example. Future events could also be longer to allow for deeper discussions and explorations of certain features or be themed to just discuss certain areas of the project.
Promotion of this event was limited as well, given the experimental nature of the format. Judging from the positive initial feedback, subsequent events can be promoted more broadly moving forward.
Following the event, there were some minor challenges in regards to obtaining a proper-resolution video for archival and sharing purposes and capturing a good transcript of the event. Those issues took longer than expected to resolve, but they are not blockers, and future events should likely not encounter these issues to the same degree.
The following issues are required to release specific functionalities, but they do not blockBlockBlock 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. or jeopardize the whole release:
Webfonts APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.: only enqueue fonts that are being used https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/39988
Apply duotone filterFilterFilters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. to placeholders for Site Logo & Post Featured ImageFeatured imageA featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. blocks: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/40061
Locking modal: toggle for applying settings to children
[Needs Decision] Add to Transform menu Group to Row option to have parity with sidebarSidebarA 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. interface
Chat ExcerptExcerptAn excerpt is the description of the blog post or page that will by default show on the blog archive page, in search results (SERPs), and on social media. With an SEO plugin, the excerpt may also be in that plugin’s metabox. & Transcript
Click to expand and review the chat and closed-caption transcription captured during the live event.
17:01:14 From Fabian Kägy To All Panelists : Hi all 👋 Thank all you for doing this!
17:01:27 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) To All Panelists : Hey Fabian! Great to see you here.
17:02:52 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) To All Panelists : If anyone would like to, feel free to share where you are watching from :)
17:05:15 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Lock mechan Reusable block..🙂
17:05:22 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : mechanisn
17:05:25 From Dan Soschin : Hello Everyone! Thank you for joining us today. If you have questions, please use the Q&A feature in Zoom (via the control panel) and we’ll aim to address as many questions as possible.
17:05:48 From Greg Ziółkowski : Hello everyone!
17:05:58 From Adam Zielinski : Hi everyone!
17:06:02 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Hey
17:06:04 From Chloé Bringmann To All Panelists : Hello!
17:06:04 From Piotr Boniu : Hello! 👋
17:06:06 From Ryan Welcher : 👋
17:06:26 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : If anyone would like to, feel free to share where you are watching from :) Accidentally only sent this to the panelists heh.
17:06:44 From JuanMa Garrido To All Panelists : 👋
17:06:51 From Dan Soschin : Hello from Tampa, Florida USA
17:06:53 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Located in Oslo, Norway.
17:06:58 From Greg Ziółkowski : Oleśnica, Poland
17:06:58 From Mahedi Foysal : Hello 👋
17:06:59 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : 👋Hello from Ames, Iowa USA.
17:07:06 From Hans-Gerd Gerhards : Hello from Aachen, Germany
17:07:08 From Adam Zielinski : Wrocław, Poland
17:07:08 From Dave Ryan To All Panelists : Hello from Phoenix, Arizona, USA✌️
17:07:09 From Isotta Peira To All Panelists : Hello from Barcelona
17:07:09 From Leonardus Nugraha : Hello from Indonesia
17:07:09 From Davi Pontes To All Panelists : Hello from Ribeirao Preto, Brazil 👋
17:07:10 From Piermario Orecchioni : Hello from Sardinia, Italy 😊☁️
17:07:12 From Chloé Bringmann To All Panelists : New York, NY USA
17:07:15 From Courtney Robertson : Hey folks ☕
17:07:16 From Angela Jin To All Panelists : Hi from Madrid, Spain 👋🏽
17:07:16 From David : Hello from Bucharest, Romania!
17:07:17 From Joen Asmussen : North of Copenhagen, Denmark 👋
17:07:20 From Daisy Olsen : Joining today from New Hampshire, USA
17:07:28 From Malick Elgmati : Hi from London, England!
17:07:30 From Piotr Boniu : Hello from Canary Islands 😁
17:07:33 From Matt Seitz : Istanbul
17:07:35 From Davi Pontes : Hello from Ribeirao Preto, Brazil 👋
17:07:42 From Dave Ryan : Hello from Phoenix, Arizona, USA ✌️
17:07:44 From Santana Inniss : Hello from Lisbon! 👋🏾
17:07:45 From Cate DeRosia To All Panelists : Hello from Grand Rapids, MI USA.
17:07:46 From Lauren Stein : Hey from Ontario, Canada! 👋
17:07:49 From Hauwa Abashiya To All Panelists : Hello from London, England
17:07:57 From Femy Praseeth To All Panelists : Hi from San Jose, California
17:07:58 From Josepha Haden Chomphosy To All Panelists : Hello from California, USA!
17:08:06 From Kemory Grubb : Hello from Hopewell, Jamaica
17:08:07 From Michel du Preez : Hello from Durban, South Africa!
17:08:10 From Hauwa Abashiya : Hello from the UK
17:08:14 From Cate DeRosia : Hello from Grand Rapids, MI USA
17:08:17 From Mahedi Foysal : From Dhaka, Bangladesh 🇧🇩
17:08:19 From Josepha Haden Chomphosy : I keep sending things just to the panelists. Sorry.
17:08:25 From Femy Praseeth : Hi from San Jose, California
17:08:32 From Josepha Haden Chomphosy : I’m joining from California, USA!
17:08:36 From David Baumwald : 👋
17:08:36 From Joni Halabi To All Panelists : Hello from Alexandria VA, USA!
17:08:37 From Mary Baum : Hey from St. Louis and the About page!
17:08:42 From Ahmed Chaion : Ahmed here 👋 Joining from Dhaka, Bangladesh! I'm one of the Triage Lead for 6.0 and really glad to be here
17:08:51 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : Amazing amazing! Keep it coming. So cool to see all the places :D
17:08:54 From Joni Halabi : Hello from Alexandria VA, USA!
17:09:00 From Paul Kevin : Hi from Nairobi, Kenya
17:09:13 From Stephen Page : Hola from New Hampshire, USA 👋🏼
17:09:52 From Tara King : Hi from Albuquerque, NM
17:09:53 From Sarah Snow To All Panelists : Hi from Palm Coast, Florida, USA!
17:10:18 From Hector Prieto To All Panelists : Hover animation proposal for style variations: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/39700
17:10:40 From Reyes Martinez To All Panelists : Hello from Madrid, Spain! 👋
17:11:41 From Mary Baum : Agree on the Post Content thing.
17:12:22 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : It would be nice to pull in a sample post. Select one from your site.
17:12:33 From Greg Ziółkowski : All those placeholders for post related data could get some customization because all of them look nearly identical
17:12:36 From Mary Baum : I have found myself trying to put blocks and patterns inside, like it’s a block, but that doesn’t seem to want to take any contents
17:14:22 From Dave Ryan : The other challenge I've seen folks have with Post Content is the blue border indicating active makes it seem Post Content doesn't go entirely fullwidth even though blocks within it might.
17:15:02 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/03/03/core-editor-improvement-choose-your-style/
17:17:01 From Carolina Nymark To All Panelists : Making changes, exporting theme.json and then readding that as a variation in your theme should work...
17:17:35 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : ^ yes! Thinking about it as an average user who might not want to do that.
17:17:51 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : Of course you immediately would know the best way to do that though, Carolina :D
17:18:48 From Courtney Robertson : I think this is where the palette generation would be helpful. Let the styles adhere to some mathematical version of contrast, etc. but integrate the palette.
17:19:00 From Utkarsh Patel To All Panelists : We can maybe leverage material design 3 which does pretty good job to generate or randomise colours based on single color.
17:20:00 From Mary Baum : Category templates! I’m the queen of body classses
17:20:00 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : If anyone uses Canva, they have a very cool color palette and font combination picker that is helpful in finding great combinations that you know work well.
17:20:33 From Courtney Robertson : Default header/footer and on categories or tags, a query block set to those would be nice
17:21:02 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : If anyone wants to explore more of these template options and help provide feedback ahead of/during the 6.0 cycle, check out the latest here: https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/03/31/fse-program-testing-call-13-authoring-an-author-template/
17:21:55 From Brian Gardner To All Panelists : Looking at this screen, how can we get descriptions to display for custom templates?
17:23:01 From Birgit Pauli-Haack To Brian Gardner and All Panelists : Could you add your question to the Q& A tab, please
17:23:57 From Brian Gardner To All Panelists : Sorry! :-)
17:24:12 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : Nice!
17:27:40 From Joen Asmussen : 🔥
17:28:06 From Dave Ryan : For the inbox zero, zeroed-out notifications crowd the always-present template-is-customized dot can be a bit stress-inducing too 😇 I'd love to see some iteration on the design that expresses that.
17:28:10 From Laura Byrne : Loving this live demo, hoping you all do this in the future.
17:28:15 From Ganga Kafle : ☺️ 👋
17:28:28 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : Hi Laura!!!! 👋
17:28:33 From Mary Baum : Agreed, Laura!
17:29:05 From Joni Halabi : Loving this demo too! Unfortunately, I have to jump onto another call, but this has been so great. Thank you for doing this!
17:29:20 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : Thanks for joining while you could!
17:29:21 From Channing Ritter To All Panelists : Thanks for joining, Joni!
17:29:33 From Rich Tabor To All Panelists : That’s cool — totally missed that shortcut.
17:30:43 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Great!
17:30:49 From Mary Baum : Bravo!! On the buttons
17:31:15 From Sachin Palewar To All Panelists : I read about Mega Menu coming soon. Am I being greedy? 😊
17:31:18 From Rich Tabor : Love that!
17:31:59 From Dan Soschin : Please submit questions with the Q&A feature in Zoom so that our panelists can see it! Thank you!
17:32:09 From Dave Ryan : The preservation of config is awesome — the Theme Style variations get used once or twice, but those will make an everyday difference 🎉
17:32:27 From Simon Wallace-Jones To All Panelists : Hooray on the collapsed list view and auto expansion.
17:33:27 From Seth Miller To All Panelists : Huge improvement!!
17:33:37 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Close and open a tree structure is very helpful!
17:38:11 From Ganga Kafle : Theme can now hightlight specific patters - Can you show this how it will be like?
17:38:13 From Ryan Welcher : Can you share that PR?
17:38:23 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : This is the PR: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/40034
17:38:53 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : For patterns, Ganga: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/38323
17:38:54 From Carolina Nymark : I found this very disruptive and I hope it is not the default for all new pages.
17:39:17 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : I agree.
17:39:27 From Nalini Thakor To All Panelists : Will be very helpful for themes to show specific patterns 😀
17:39:29 From Hector Prieto To All Panelists : @Ganga, to highlight patterns you can do as seen here: https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/gutenberg-new/#allow-themes-to-highlight-patterns
17:40:16 From Hector Prieto To All Panelists : Correct link: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/03/02/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-7-2-march/#allow-themes-to-highlight-patterns
17:40:19 From Rich Tabor : I wonder if a pattern should be able to set whether or not it should be applied to a Blank template (or define a template) 🤔
17:40:32 From Rich Tabor : Love it, thanks!
17:40:43 From Derek Hanson To All Panelists : When searching for patterns, does anyone else prefer the “Explore” option to open the modal? I like that much better.
17:42:08 From Rich Tabor : Locking is pretty cool yea
17:42:29 From Meg Phillips To All Panelists : +1 Rich Tabor patterns to specify template sounds helpful
17:42:34 From Derek Hanson : 👆Yup. That’s awesome.
17:42:44 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : I assume that also Edit contents lock will also be included.
17:43:32 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : PR on edit locking for reusable blocks: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/39950
17:43:33 From Derek Hanson : Meant this for everyone. Does anyone else prefer to search for patterns using the “Explore” button to open the overlay?
17:44:41 From Rich Tabor : I agree about the lock icon in the list view
17:45:33 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Clicking the Explore to open the Modal overlay is a nice none intrusive way of finding a suitable pattern.
17:47:30 From Rich Tabor : I’ve been using Cover blocks in lieu of Group blocks more and more lately
17:48:24 From Derek Hanson : I use Cover blocks a lot too, even if it is only for a color background. Feels more flexible than Group.
minutes remaining!
17:50:39 From Derek Hanson : Before mega menu I just want to see hover color options and editing the mobile overlay design.
17:51:26 From Davi Pontes : Hover, Active, all these states would be really nice to tackle, lots of people are looking for those.
17:51:31 From Seth Miller To All Panelists : Featured image size selector, that’s a. Nice feature (and that with the cover block)
17:51:35 From Piermario Orecchioni : Bringing back the navigation editing in the sidebar would be a major improvement. I still struggle with with the new interface on more complex or nested menus
17:52:22 From Mary Baum : That is AMAZING.
17:52:26 From Rich Tabor : Cover block w/ featured image is pretty cool for sure
17:52:29 From Nicholas Diego To All Panelists : Huge win!
17:52:31 From Seth Miller To All Panelists : Good feature for theme developers
17:52:54 From Adam Zielinski : It is amazing indeed
17:53:10 From Derek Hanson : One of the most requested features it feels like.
17:53:48 From Dan Soschin : 📣 Friendly reminder - we will post the recording and transcript of this walkthrough on WordPress.tv and the Make WordPress blog following the event (please allow 48 hours)
17:54:41 From Laura Byrne : Much appreciated Dan, I am excited to share this w/colleagues
17:54:47 From Dave Ryan : Pasting in hex codes that include hashes is a major improvement on the color picker -- going to make a huge difference as folks copy in a brand guide!
17:55:05 From Santana Inniss : Gallery gap looks really helpful!
17:55:07 From Laura Byrne : 100% Dan!
17:55:26 From Derek Hanson : Hey Laura! 🙂 👋
17:55:46 From Laura Byrne : Hi Derek 🙂
17:56:25 From Lax Mariappan To All Panelists : Thanks Laura
17:58:02 From Chris L : Big thumbs up for this incoming flexbox features. Does it means some future responsive settings coming too in WordPress 6?
17:58:37 From Joen Asmussen : There are two good tickets to follow for responsive improvements:
17:58:45 From Joen Asmussen : https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/34641 and https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/19909
17:59:30 From Chris L : Thanks
17:59:50 From Derek Hanson : Awesome!
18:00:35 From Marius Jensen : I just now realized I forgot to write "patterns and blocks" 🤦♂️ but yes :D
18:00:39 From Adam Zielinski : I have to drop for another call, it was great – thank you so much for presenting!
18:00:43 From Derek Hanson : Whoa, that is awesome.
18:00:49 From Sarah Norris To All Panelists : That’s really cool!
18:01:06 From Davi Pontes : That is amazing.
18:01:08 From Derek Hanson : 🤯
18:01:14 From Rich Tabor : That’s pretty cool — not 6.0 though right?
18:01:19 From Piermario Orecchioni : this is cool :)
18:01:21 From Meg Phillips To All Panelists : Awesome!
18:01:35 From Marius Jensen : I'm liking a lot of this, thanks !
18:01:38 From Anne McCarthy (She/They) : If you want to see more videos of what he is demoing now, check this thread out: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/39281#issuecomment-1084648592
18:01:38 From Lobsang Wangdu To All Panelists : This is great! Thank you all!!!
18:02:20 From Derek Hanson : Thank you. This was wonderful.
18:02:20 From Femy Praseeth : Such cool features in 6.0. What an awesome time to WordPress!!
18:02:21 From JuanMa Garrido To All Panelists : I loved this format. Congratulations!
18:02:27 From Lax Mariappan : Thanks everyone
18:02:28 From Piermario Orecchioni : Thanks!
18:02:28 From Isotta Peira To All Panelists : Thank you!
18:02:29 From Santana Inniss : Walkthrough Part 2!
18:02:30 From Chloé Bringmann To All Panelists : Thanks to you all for hosting this!
18:02:31 From Damon Cook To All Panelists : Thanks!
18:02:31 From Carolina Nymark : Thank you
18:02:32 From Chris L : Thank you very much !
18:02:33 From Sarah Norris To All Panelists : Thank you!
18:02:33 From Joen Asmussen : 🙏
18:02:33 From Hans-Gerd Gerhards : thanks
18:02:34 From Dave Ryan : Thanks! Exciting stuff 🙂
18:02:35 From Simon Wallace-Jones To All Panelists : Thanks. That was brilliant!!!
18:02:35 From Shannon Wynn To All Panelists : Thank you!!
18:02:37 From Laura Byrne : Thank you all! Loved it please do again1
18:02:38 From Mary Baum : This was great!
18:02:40 From Seth Miller To All Panelists : Awesome thank you all
18:02:41 From Meg Phillips To All Panelists : Please again. This is great!
18:02:43 From Paal Joachim Romdahl : Thank you!
18:02:46 From Angela Jin To All Panelists : Thank you so much!
18:02:47 From Nicholas Diego To All Panelists : Thanks for attending everyone!
18:02:49 From Chris L : Great job
18:02:50 From Derek Hanson : Brooding.
18:02:52 From Isotta Peira : 🤤
18:02:54 From Rich Tabor : Thanks! Love it!
18:02:57 From Leonardus Nugraha : Thanks all!
18:03:01 From Josepha Haden Chomphosy : 🎉
18:03:02 From Chris Morris To All Panelists : Thanks guys
18:03:03 From Estela Rueda : Thank you
18:03:06 From Isotta Peira : Ooos wrong chat ahahaha sorry! I wanted to say Thank you!
18:03:09 From Ganga Kafle : Thank you all
18:03:10 From Piotr Boniu : Thank you!
18:03:15 From Reyes Martinez : Thank you!
18:03:16 From Greg Ziółkowski : Thank you!
18:03:20 From Derek Hanson : 👋
18:03:24 From Meg Phillips To All Panelists : Thank You
18:03:24 From Piermario Orecchioni : Thanks!
The following transcript has been adapted from Zoom’s closed captioning feature. It may contain minor typographical errors or variations from the spoken material.
SPEAKERS
Anne McCarthy, Matias Ventura, Dan Soschin, Daisy Olsen, Channing Ritter
Daisy Olsen 00:05
Welcome everyone joining us today we’re going to give everyone a chance to get settled in and signed on. But the purpose of today is that we’re going to be sharing a pretty casual walkthrough and discussion of how things are shaping up for the WordPress 6.0 release coming up soon. As everyone is joining, I have a few housekeeping items just to cover quickly. First of all, this call is being recorded and will be made available later a Make WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.blogblog(versus network, site) post, it will be posted to WordPress.tv. And also, we’ll be trying to get that up on our WordPress YouTube channel as well. So please allow a few days for those links to be shared. But once they’re shared, they should be available for anyone that wasn’t able to join us today. Another point is that live captioning and text transcription have been enabled. So that should be available for everyone now as well. We do plan for today’s conversation to be interactive. So please use the Q&A question and answer option in your menu bar if you have any questions during the course of the discussion. And we’ll address those questions that are submitted as we go along. So you don’t need to hold them till the end or anything like that. So we’ll pick them up as people as folks start asking questions and they work into the conversation. So with all that said, I’ll quickly run through some introductions. I’m Daisy Olson, I’m a Developer Advocate focused on the WordPress community of developers. And I’m joined today by several members of the WordPress 6.0 Release Team. So we have lead architect of the GutenbergGutenbergThe 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/ Project, Matius Ventura. We have our core release coordinators Hector Prieto and McCarthy. We have DESIGN LEAD, Channing Ritter. And we also have our core editor triagetriageThe act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. lead with Nick Diego. And at this point, I would love to hand the mic over to Matias since he’ll be starting things off.
Matias Ventura 02:21
All right. Thank you, Lacey. And welcome, everyone. I’m pretty excited about this is we’re trying something new. And the idea is to just walk through sort of like the way we did the go, no go things before, but a bit more working session in this time. So I’m going to start by sharing my screen. All right. And let me know if anything becomes laggy or anything. So 6.0. We started these, like several weeks ago when we did the preliminary roadmap. And we had these major categories of focus around the editor, patterns, blocks, and design tools, mostly. So a lot got done. And there’s a few things that I think will need a bit more polish and work to be ready. So as an overview, we’re looking at, I think, around 11 pluginPluginA 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 releases, someone can correct me if I’m wrong. And that amounts to like around 400 updates and 500 bugbugA bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes overall. I will look at the main, the sort of my screen. Two of the main the highlight feature, I think, as we planned all along has been the style switcher thing, which is one of the most, I think, one of the most fun parts of 6.0. And also one of the most promising to see what people do with it. And your nutshell is essentially allowing people to switch their theme JSONJSONJSON, 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. on the fly. We’ll get to this in a bit more detail. Outside of this, I think we made some important progress around, like creating templates, expanding the palette of templates, and then a bunch of design tools across the board, like including the gap support a lot of container blogs, which are going to be pretty cool. And we also have the highlights of adding web fonts. There’s a few technicalities still being worked on, but it’s looking really good. And well we also have one that I think we mentioned it as going back to sort of like going back to the basics. But we finally managed to crack the sort of the problem of selecting text across blocks. So I think in some ways, this probably will be, I don’t know maybe like the major feature for many people. Especially if you’re not using like a blog theme, or you’re you’re not interacting with a lot of these design tools, there are many improvements at the just the very basic level of blogs that can be very impactful. So let’s dive into some of them. Want to start with a style switcher, I have these prepared. Alright. So the idea with a style suture is that we would include in 2022, some theme JSON variations. And the style switcher is a new panel that shows in the mid to submit a little bit just in case, the style switcher is here below the style preview card. And in 2022, we have these working sort of prototypes of styles. And it allows you to change on the fly completely the entire look of the site. This is really cool. This is changing is not just changing colors, it’s also changing the fonts is connected with a Web Fonts API. And also like other things like the size of post titles, because essentially, you can change anything like given the width of the site like this one has a narrower size and so on. This, I think this is working pretty well, I think we’re still figuring out some of the details on like, for example, the hover and active states, which are tricky. Because the idea is that we need to sort of have this abstract representation that condenses all of the things that could be happening. So it’s not just colors, so we shouldn’t overly index on colors, it should be something that gives you a sense of everything that might be able to change. And I think we have some chatting if you want to mention something, but I think we have some ideas for showing here. Like, like, I don’t know, like how many blog styles have been changed how many different settings different things sort of like a summary that we could also go into, like sort of the because the upgrade flow right now just says Gaston styles, which is really kind of underwhelming, I guess, it should probably break it down better into Okay, how much am I changing when I switched to one of these things?
Channing Ritter 07:40
Yeah, the multi-entity saving panel keeps coming up as a big area of opportunity here because like you said, there’s only one item listed. And it would be awesome. If you could see the background colors change, typography has changed as many box styles have changed, and maybe even approve those on a granular level. Like maybe you don’t have to accept all the changes. Maybe you’re just accepting the color changes and that sort of thing.
Matias Ventura 08:03
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it’s a nice place. Also, because right now, this is sort of coupled to the theme like this are the way that people would register. This is like the styles folder inside their theme folder. But eventually, we want this to be like, I don’t know, you should be able to pop up, like, um, browse styles from the theme directory from any theme, because that’s one of the cool things is that these styles are sort of inherently compatible with each other. So you should be able to apply one of these 22 styles to another blog thing. And that could be pretty, pretty interesting to see. So I think we have some details. Like, for example, I’m not sure like the Browse styles is the best placement here for the like, it sort of gives it a bit too much prominence. There are some stuff here that I think we need to refine a bit. And as well as these hover states. Probably I think we have some work pending that removes the state on this panel. And it only applies it when you’re switching and make might make more sense.
Channing Ritter 09:18
Yeah, maybe you get a more subtle animation on that main panel, and don’t get the full hover overlay. But I think the hover frame is really nice because it’s starting to add a lot more information about these style variations. And I think in the first iterations of the style variation panel, it wasn’t always obvious what the difference was between these variations. And so this extra hover frame is starting to add a lot more information about the differences between the variations.
Matias Ventura 09:49
So if we dig a bit more into our know, let’s pick one of these and go into the I don’t know the typography panel, so all of this is connected And here, you get the fonts that this is selecting. And this is some of the work that needs to be like the initial version of the Web Fonts API was sort of enqueuing, all the fonts that were registered on the site. So we need to add a layer where only the fonts that are actively used by your style variation gets and killed, because that’s a pretty important performance consideration. So that’s some, I think, some of the things that need to be adjusted in time. By the way, when I was like, playing with this one, I think that there’s some stuff here, that’s I don’t know, that could be much better like the post content. For example, I was expecting to preview, like how it looks with a large content. And the fact that the placeholder content is so sparse, I think makes that difficult, might be interesting to feed to consider a different placeholder for the boat.
Anne McCarthy 10:57
that’s come up with calls for testing too and I know, I’ve heard from different hosting folks that people are removing that by accident. I know block locking is on your mind to demo. But it seems to be something that I think updating the placeholder we go a long way similar what we’ve done with the featured image and other blocks.
Matias Ventura 11:15
Yes, there’s some here that are working well like the featured image, the site logo looks nice when you don’t have anything there. I think like the ones that are like smaller post title, I think works fine. And it’s pretty self-explanatory. But post content is really, it becomes very abstract, it’d be nice to Yeah, like to just write something that explains what this is and what is going to happen. So it functions both as a guidance. And also it allows you to see how some of these typography changes are going to look for like large chunks of text. Because here you cannot really easily get an impression of that.
Anne McCarthy 11:58
I’m wondering too, if when it comes to updating the future [unknown word] duotone, like that’s another blog that has a good example of actually being able to update as you go like, you can do it to unfilter. And it should adjust the post content. I’m sure there’s something we can learn there. That looks like it doesn’t update. So that’s something else that I think we also need to have is some sort of visual indication or making any changes to placeholders that are intelligent.
Matias Ventura 12:24
I think we had some work for this. It might be broken based on what style you’re using. Yes, sure, was themed in the outline?
Daisy Olsen 12:39
So there’s a question from the attendees, Johnny Halabi. asks, Is it possible for a theme developer to customize the placeholder
Matias Ventura 12:46
Text? Yeah, it’s a good question. Not really at the moment. I think we discussed before like, again, some of these placeholders could be more than just, again, say they could actually be example post or things that come from patterns and so on. I could also be a source sort of similar to how we have, I don’t know, example content in the paragraph, we can’t make serve from the [unknown word] or in headings like, like a could be tied to some of these and make something a bit more like the way least look something that I think the tricky thing is ensuring that the user doesn’t mistake it as actual content. That’s the biggest challenge. And in that sense, it would be better if like, at least four themes in the directory if they don’t really change the placeholder content so that you get that impression. Okay, this is the same content everywhere. But if we allow, if we turn this placeholder to something brother, it would be nice to also make it somewhat extensibleExtensibleThis is the ability to add additional functionality to the code. Plugins extend the WordPress core software.. I think some specific placeholders might already be laid, you can pass a placeholder attribute, your paragraph block supported, and so on.
Anne McCarthy 14:11
Also, note that the styles work that’s being demoed has documentation in place but more docs I expect to come and more examples, but I’m going to drop a link to a post where you can actually try this out if you want to explore this for yourself because you have to use a theme, a blog theme that supports multiple styles.
Matias Ventura 14:28
Yeah, and also I didn’t go through but there’s like of course it works with every template is already loaded like this. And I think in the case of 2022 like the background image, the sort of the cover Block Patterns also inherit from the so it’s a you can have some pretty interesting combinations and yeah, here like when it’s actual real posts, becomes a bit more that you can actually see, oh, this is you’ll get a different impression of the when it’s with real content. But overall, I think this is working pretty well, I think there’s some details to consider like adding more clarity around a summary of all the things that we can repurpose on the app reflow would be nice and go a long way. Anything I’m missing on the styles work?
Anne McCarthy 15:36
And other bins ready to request around saving your own custom one. That’s one of the things that’s come up that I’ve heard people itching for. But yeah, otherwise, I think covers it really nicely.
Matias Ventura 15:48
Yeah, I think saving your own is definitely something we should do. There has to be some more clarity. Also, if you modify some of these things.
Anne McCarthy 16:00
You know, that actually came up in the last call for testing because someone was modifying those initial colors. And then the patterns had names that were tied to the colors in the theme, which made it pretty confusing. So when we think about naming patterns, we can’t say, you know, headerHeaderThe 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. with a green background, we probably should have been a bit more intelligent, or at least figure out some best practices there.
Matias Ventura 16:20
Well, and even here, there’s like a, you can see my colors are affecting these. But here, there’s no summary that I have custom styles applied, there should be something that says, Oh, you have custom, you have customize the colors in this or that way, when you’re browsing styles, and from there eventually will allow you to create your own style from these.
Channing Ritter 16:46
Another cool idea that’s come up for this panel is the idea of randomizing the styles, which could be really fun, especially if we’re talking about kind of breaking out of this structure of the theme. And maybe it could be any color. And it starts to sort of bring up the question of like, does this have to stay within the family of themes? Or could we start to expand the styles more broadly?
Matias Ventura 17:11
Yep. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that we could also do further like when you’re switching this, because this also affects, some of the patterns that come with a theme. And you don’t get, I don’t know if it actually would work. If I do this, now you will close the panel. So I need to go again. But it’d be nice to also have a view where you can also see all the different patterns that the theme has registered, and how these modifications apply to them. So you’re not stuck with a single view of whatever template you might be on. But this is again, this is we’re getting further away from 6.0. I’m going to move back to the list of stuff before. So I think we’re already several minutes seen. Again, this site switcher is looking pretty good, I think we have some details to accommodate. Another important feature was because we introduce all these templates in 5.9, like the site editor itself, but the template, adding new templates was restricted to just a few of the major ones. Now we have expanded these two, we have like the categoryCategoryThe 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. and tagtagA directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) and taxonomyTaxonomyA taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. archives you can create more of these templates, we didn’t quite get to adding specific templates for a specific category, which I think is where this is really going to unlock a lot of possibilities for users. Like if you want to create a specific template for your whatever travel category. That’s still a work in progress. But now at least you get access to all of these which should cover if you’re building a theme bases. Again, almost everything that you would need is represented here. I think one thing we didn’t get to and it’s pretty underwhelming is that when you create a new template, it starts completely empty. And there’s some work that was pending to do, at least to fall back to start as a starting point to use the sort of the following template that comes in the theme hierarchy. So in this case, if I do category, it should pick up as a starting point, whatever I have as an archive or in my index file, at the very least, so I don’t start completely from scratch. This is also related to some other workaround like creating new pages and so on. But at least you can create these templates now. Which is nice to remove this one.
Anne McCarthy 20:00
I’ll do a quick plug because the current call for testing in the outreach program is about creating an author template and using the no results. Cree, woodblock, just pretty exciting. So if you want to explore it and have like a walkthrough of how to actually take advantage of it, I’ll drop a link in the chat. It’d be great to get feedback, just while we’re in the 6.0. Seipel. Yeah.
Matias Ventura 20:23
So I don’t think there’s much to touch on templates. But yeah, go ahead, sure.
Daisy Olsen 20:27
There is a question. So Courtney Robertson asks, is single post taxonomy a way to improve the support for a single Custom Post TypeCustom Post TypeWordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept.?
Matias Ventura 20:38
So yeah, so let me see what we have on. Not here, the site editor. Yeah, so right now the single post, it’s already created, so it’s here. Yeah, this is also one where we would want to the same way that you should be able to create a category for a specific slide, you should be able to create many of these for a specific Custom Post Type right now. It’s just the single post and I think, yeah, we don’t have singular, I don’t think singular is exposed either here. Yeah, so it’s just a single post that comes with the theme. So you can not tailor this to a Custom Post Type just yet. But it’s what should happen from there, you should be able to add a new template for a single post. And that would show your model where you get a selector for the registers available custom post types. That way you can do it from the theme perspective, but not from the UI. Yeah.
Daisy Olsen 21:47
So my trick when I am teaching this is to add an empty file with the correct name to your templates, and then you can start editing it from there and export it when you’re done.
Matias Ventura 21:56
Yeah. Yeah, it’d be good to follow up on this one. Because yeah, the set of templates right now is a bit limited compared to what you can do if you just go to the theme files. Cool.
Daisy Olsen 22:15
All right. We have another question from Derek Hansen. As templates and template parts begin to grow for a site, is there any thought around organizing that view into group sections, or something for easy searching? But seems like it could become a thing for large sites?
Matias Ventura 22:34
Yeah, I think there was. On some of the earlier implementations for template bars, we already had categorize them by area, so headers, and footers, and so on. It all existed in the cyber. So we’ll probably get to that. At some point, the same for templates one reason why we didn’t have everything at once is because this becomes very large. And again, for archives, you might want a specific archive for a specific date. So we need to start organizing and having some groups so that this doesn’t become a giant list. I think there are like definitely, many signs already shown. For this thing. Jay had been working on some of those. So yeah, it’s something upcoming.
Channing Ritter 23:25
In the future, you might even have the flexibility of our view options, for example, you might be able to make it a grid or make it a list or filter things, just as we add more functionality there. Right.
Daisy Olsen 23:39
So Brian Gardner asks, looking at the template screen, how can we get descriptions to display for custom templates?
Matias Ventura 23:50
Good questions. So I think this is also connected with the footprint of some of these templates like the way they are just HTMLHTMLHyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. files, you cannot add right now metadata, we have some pull request exploring, allowing sort of like the same way you have the template headers in PHPPHPThe web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher files, allowing that to specify the path of least some metadata and templates that will be the easiest, or maybe not the easiest, like the most ergonomic for someone creating some of these templates, it would be very easy for creating new ones to allow that because we can use each one of these when they are customize are just a post type entry. So we can use the excerpt or something like that to store the description. So yeah, that’s also because especially when this becomes a really large list, the descriptions are really useful, too, like for example, the single post separator is kind of hard to tell even if it’s the same template as these in terms of the hierarchy.
Anne McCarthy 25:08
It’s also pretty confusing for people who aren’t used to being exposed to the template hierarchy in general. And I know some feedback has also come up around when you make changes to the templates. And always show is just a very light, you know, clear customization and like a little dot, whenever a template has been customized. And there was some feedback around the desire for more context, what would it change by? Yeah, I think it’d be good to expand that a bit more and have some more information, more options.
Matias Ventura 25:35
Yep. I’ll move on to some of the other items because we have still a lot to go through. I think for the Web Fonts API, I don’t think there’s much to touch upon. I think one important thing to clarify is that the Web Fonts API is just a general API for WordPress. So he can work for classic themes, or blog themes or whatever it is not tied to this. It might be we might make it easier if you’re using a theme json, whether in a block theme or a classic theme, so that that already tells you what to include and what not to include. But the functions themselves are available for any theme, or even plugin to use. So that will be good to test beyond the site editor as well. And of course, like if you’re using the WordPress API, without the site editor, like assigning fonts and so on is more of the responsibility of the theme, as there is no UI for it. Okay, so I’ll jump into the editor bucket. Now. I think the biggest one that we have here is the, again, the ability to select partially between paragraphs, there’s going to be really nice, so you can merge them and so on. And that’s going to be pretty cool. I don’t think there’s much to say about these, it’s really nice how it’s implemented because it works with any rich text content. So in this case, a heading but if I have a third-party block that is using rich text, and there are many that do like it should also work because each block is able to define its merge function. So that means what happens when you either like split the heading or you combine the heading and so on. So this uses the same logic. So the footprint is pretty low. Thing is probably going to be one of the most impactful for people because, again, this doesn’t require any switching themes or anything, it just works with everything. Then we have some cool details like the thing the shortcut to link to any post or page in your site. So you can do that to quickly insert links. I think we might still be testing if this is the best shortcut to use. Or if there’s something else we can do. This also depends on the use of inline tokens that we made some progress for 6.0, but he won’t be ready. And inline tokens is again, the ability to add like if you want to add the current year here and make it be dynamic token, and so on. So we need to, to see if the short that scales well or not append ourselves keep because it’s mostly like some of these improvements were already in 5.9 but we continue to make it so and essentially what that means is that these pluses when you’re in inner blobs, context and so on, they don’t make the screen shuffle. They don’t cause layout shuffle, which has been pretty annoying. So it’s mainly already very easy. Well in the site editor that there’s a lot less jumping when you select things. Like if you go to the group and you get the plus there. So there was a lot of work in cleaning this up. And it should be better in 6.0 as well. Okay, keeps dialing between buttons. This is a relatively minor thing, but it’s like a quality of life. So if we have buttons, and I don’t know, let’s customize it with something like pick a gradient and a border radius. So the idea that if you create another button that it copies the style from the previous one so that you can have buttons that look the same consistently. Whereas before, when you would insert a new button, it would just use the vanilla styles. And this is applied to buttons, but it’s something that we should be doing in more places. I think there’s one nice example here. Let me see. Yeah, so this is also the way that when you transform something to another blog, that it retains some of the styling, like there’s been a lot of work in ensuring that you don’t lose these customizations. So these are mostly writing flow and editor quality of life improvements.
All right. Anything anyone would like to add to this, just let me know. I’ll keep going. We have a bunch of improvements to ListView. Again, I think one of those is me. Unselect. Everything. Like we have these that the ListView starts collapsed by default now. So it’s not overwhelming. But it can expand as soon as you select something. So it expands to the right place. This is pretty cool, I think it would help reduce it of how to give you a sense of the size structure immediately, while still being very easy to navigate outside of that. And on the topic of ListView, we also have shift select now works just really nice. And there were a few other keyboard shortcuts that got that word like you can, again, expand the selection and so on with a keyboard. So that’s nice. I think there are some details here that we could probably improve, like the ellipsis menu probably don’t make sense when you multi-select. Like maybe we should just hide them and focus on them because once you multi-select, you can drag all of this stuff together, and so on. So is there anything more on list view that’s worth highlighting?
Anne McCarthy 32:44
There’s some drag and drop as well, I think that was being able to select multiple and move it around. I know that was a big thing with the outreach program where people were messing with the site building stuff, they want to be able to move things around with ease. So that was one of the things that’s come up.
Matias Ventura 32:57
Yeah, I think it’s really come along. Like we have all the improvements, like the outline some days, like more connections between selecting, and so on. So it’s really coming along, I think. And yeah, I think there are some further improvements to do. But it’s becoming more minor, probably around these.
Anne McCarthy 33:24
I do think the more we could highlight site structure, unless you would be good, there was some feedback I got where if you’re creating a new template part for like a sidebar or something, somehow pulling in whatever HTML element you set it to might be helpful for folks. So they’re following best practices. Because I know that was something that right now it just doesn’t really show up. But if you have, you know, an anchor head or something else is more prominent. So it’d be nice to have some visual cue there.
Matias Ventura 33:52
Yeah, and we also had at some point using some different colors for reuse of template parts and so on that also helped convey a bit more the structure of a template, there is going to be a major part of working with patterns. Which we need a lot of progress on the design side, but the implementation won’t be ready for 6.0 but that’s one area that I’m really excited about. Like getting the sort of like using patterns and sectioning elements and being able to like we have something to them where they’re like shortly Okay, moving on. This we don’t need to demo but we have some cool improvements are the code editor is now available for the site editor so you can make tweaks faster. The preference panel is enabled and text label that you can switch [unknown] this actually on the site editor. So that takes buttons away. Everything becomes text. This was available on the post editor before. But now it exists on the site editor as well. So then bringing a bit more parity between the editors. While there is a new design for the post lock that’s nicer, have some better loading states with the spinner is updated and embeds now when you drive with it, actually copy one of things. So if we embedded, yeah, so you get like, a nicer, smaller footprint for the low link thing. Whereas before, would use a pretty large placeholder. And he would throw the layout around a bit. So that’s nice. This is interesting, but it’s not super useful yet, because we’re still doing work on. So that is that the quick inserter now on templates, it prioritizes patterns. So you can see all the patterns and quickly go into the while this is not connected actually. Like, but the idea is that you will be able to use the patterns and things that come from the theme in building sections. But we still need to do some work in categorizing them properly. Otherwise, it’s not the most useful. This is nice, like themes can now in theme JSON, specify some patterns from the directory to use. So they can that’s I think that’s self-explanatory.
Daisy Olsen 37:12
Before we move away from patterns, there’s a question from Rich Tabor. He says, I know there are some interesting page pattern efforts. And he references a specific PR, are you thinking this may make it into 6.0?
Matias Ventura 37:29
Yeah, I think we reduce the scope of it because the tricky thing with that pull request was and what Rich is talking about this. So if we go to a new page, that is when you create a new page, you would, if there are patterns registered that are associated to the post content block, you will be able to choose a starting point. The tricky thing is that for a page, you may also want to set the template for not just for the post content is for the whole page. So there are some design tricky things there that weren’t fully resolved. So the way it was working in the pull request was you would pick a template first. And then you would pick a pattern. And it became a bit convoluted. So I think scoping that down to just selecting a post content pattern, can be something that makes it into 6.0. I think the pull request was mostly there, it just needed some design tweaks. And the way it’s going to work is that if you have a pattern, see if I have something to refer to, no. But the idea is that if you have a pattern, and they gotta let you associate that pattern with post content is going to be used automatically in the page creation flow.
Anne McCarthy 38:58
Well, that’d be turned on automatically. Because I can imagine some cases where people it seems like in the comments as well, for folks would not want to have that as default.
Matias Ventura 39:06
Yeah, it will, you’re probably like, there will be ways to disable the whole mechanism. But if the buttons access, that would work, you can also disable the buttons. I think the interesting thing is that I think can also combine the ability of a theme. So this thing that we have here, so I think can define what patterns to include from the directory. And if these patterns are for the most content, you can sort of dynamically have a very rich base creation flow with minimal effort from a theme perspective. So I think that’s going to be pretty neat. But yeah, if we run it’d be nice to get it in time for the better and we can see if, if there is like a strong demand for disabling that or so on we can also pull it out from the better if necessary.
All right, I’ll move on because we’re barely on the blog section. I want to mention this because these are nice. I think everyone that has been using the plugin is already used to it by now. But the styles panel was improved, it shows a full preview when you hover and but it’s otherwise collapsed into this much smaller footprint. Whereas before it has large previews that if you have many styles reduced it would take almost the entire sidebar. So this is pretty nice design improvement here on the panel. The block locking UI, this is alright, I guess we can show some of these with a pattern is going to be better. They pick one. One of these so the block locking existed since before what we have now is the ESA UI for doing this. And once something is locked, you cannot move it you cannot remove it you can only like I don’t know, type a new name. And that’s it. It’s a pretty cool feature that is self-serve. I think you can also like size will also be able to toggle whether this functionality is disabled for a specific user role. So if you want to say I don’t know, all the administrators should get to see this UI, and editors and authors who just like one see anything that’s going to be possible. I think there’s some things that I think we should consider that we haven’t quite implemented. For example, one is like if you look like the wrapper, in this case, the group right now we don’t really love the group. But it feels like we should have an option here to say also you want to lock all the children as well. I don’t know, Channing if you consider that because you work on this side. But that feels like something people would want to see if I lock everything here. Yeah, go ahead.
Channing Ritter 42:32
It comes into play a little bit with edit locking, which there’s a new PR right now exploring introducing an edit locking for reusable blocks. And that one would make it so that you can’t select the inner contents, which can be really helpful, especially for reusable blocks.
Matias Ventura 42:47
Yeah, well, this one is slightly different, because you want to select the inner blocks. But in this case, I lock this whole thing. And but this element is not locked, I can still move it like and you might want to say oh, I want to lock the same set of things. I want them to cascade to all the children. So I still want to select them, be able to edit the text, but not be able to move. In other words, one by one. Like this one is fine, it respects but it’d be nice to be able to say maybe it’s a toggle, like apply the same settings to all the children or something like that.
Anne McCarthy 43:28
This has definitely come up and feedback is something that I think especially for agency types that they would like to have. So I think they’d be really keen to explore expanding.
Matias Ventura 43:38
Yeah, and one more thing that occurs to me, I think we should show the same lock icon here. Like because if I’m looking at the ListView. There’s no difference between these things. But this one is locked, and this one is unlocked. So we should probably also render the lock icon on the list view, in this case on the group on the heading. Especially because you can also do it here you can unlock, but it doesn’t show you the state.
Anne McCarthy 44:10
This would be nice too, as well. Especially if you can’t move it around. I’m wondering how ListView would even you wouldn’t know it would just feel buggy basically.
Matias Ventura 44:25
What do you mean Anne?
Anne McCarthy 44:27
Like, if you lock it and you say don’t you disable movement, and then all of a sudden you have ListView open and you’re trying to drag and drop? In theory that would be really, I imagine it’d be really jarring. I’m wondering what’s going to happen if you try to move sign it’s locked.
Matias Ventura 44:39
Right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it’s like we should take a look at the list view and how it interacts with locking. Because we should show the state we should disable dragging in the first place. Stuff like that. I think this is fine because you cannot remove it so yeah, it’d be nice to again another improvement to the to the ListView I think one we don’t always highlight them but I think there are many transforms that were added in this release that are pretty cool because transforms when something doesn’t have a transform it feels or the opposite when something does have a transform it feels like a nice oh nice I can I think we have many of these that are cool like logo to title like that allows you to like quickly move between like you want to transform these to the site title and so on like the blogs don’t necessarily have a lot to do but these are like conceptually it makes sense that you can go from one thing to another my image disappear. Like excerpt to content was also another tagcloud, two categories to archives paragraph to go group row, there’s a lot of these that are really useful. You run into them all the time. I actually notice one that we don’t seem to have. And it will be nice to have. Like if I select I don’t know, the group. I cannot transform a group to a cover. And I feel like that’s going to be a very common operation.
Anne McCarthy 46:41
You said to cover at several block.
Matias Ventura 46:43
Yeah, yes. Yeah, because I like if, again, right now we don’t support things like background images on, on rope and so on. And it’s. So you would want to switch to a cover if you want to if I want to add a background to this or whatever. And that’s like not having it here only having columns feels a bit lackluster. So any group into a cover would be a nice transform to offer, I think I will only do it for six reductions occurs to me. We’ve already seen these with the keeping styles when transforming blocks. In addition to that, we’re also respecting the HTML classes when you transform blocks now, so that’s also nice. It includes like if there are common style variations between blocks that should also be respected. And so I’m going to skip these we have some improvements to the navigation. Like allowing you to be for you were only able to say if you wanted like the hamburger icon thing. Now you can also have a text label to trigger the overlay of the menu.
Anne McCarthy 48:05
There are also better loading states. That was another thing that when the other benefits of the Improve loading state are the spinner whenever you’re importing a menu shows up the same way, which is pretty cool. Rather than just being blank, which is I think what it was before showed no visual indication.
Matias Ventura 48:21
Yeah. I think this one I, I think it’s good as well like the post day before, like you were pretty restricted. Now there are some better presets that you can use. And also, you can add your custom one directly from the editor before you could do that from if you edited the theme file. Now you can do it from the UI directly. Or you can also use just the the default that comes from your site configuration. I think this is quite nice. It improves the experience of dealing with light and it also shows all the potential of just improving specific blocks that we can do.
Daisy Olsen 49:09
Quickly backing up to the navigation block there’s a question about whether or how soon Mega Menu might be an option. I know that’s a big thing.
Matias Ventura 49:22
Yeah. I don’t know honestly, I think there’s still some rough interactions that we need to sort out for basic menus before getting there. So I think it might take one or more releases to iron that out. We have a lot of improvements now on the navigation like mostly quality of life improvements. How the menus there’s stuff we want to though we haven’t gotten into it yet but like this panel, this is not quite finished and it probably won’t make it into 6.0. But the idea is that you can surface the navigation in a better way, wherever you are, and you can modify the contents of the navigation. But this is still a work in progress. So I think we need to get those mechanics really, really well. Before we can fully embrace mega menus, I think it’s probably also an area where block libraries can get ahead or try things and see what works. Okay, I’m jumping ahead how much we don’t have much time left, right?
Daisy Olsen 50:40
It’s about 10 minutes. Yeah. Okay.
Matias Ventura 50:45
Well Featured Image. And I think today, we also merge the using the featured image on a cover block, which won’t work was one of the most requested. So if I go to the, or no single post, like if I want a single post, I can add something with a cover. And I can tell it to use the feature image. So this would make these block pull from the feature image when a feature image is set on the front end. And I can do stuff like I don’t know what the let’s find a different overlay so that it’s visible. So you can set duotone or whatever all the things you can do on the cover block. But now it’s connected is not just regular media, it’s connected with the feature image. So that’s that would allow you to add stuff, text here, whatever, or move the post title inside and have the post idle on top of the feature you mentioned so on. So I think this is going to be a major highlight, it’d be nice to get a lot of testing on these though because it didn’t have is going to be part of the 13.0 plugin release. And we need to test it and show that it’s ready for primetime.
Anne McCarthy 52:15
Itching for a round-up post on 6.0 features to test as well. So you’ll see things like that on there with instructions.
Matias Ventura 52:21
Great. I’m going to skip the query block. There are some improvements here, like with multiple author support, taxonomy filters, these are nice, in general, we have some new blocks and a beat, we have 12 new common blocks. Some of them are a bit rough, but the plan is still to get them into the plugin and get some initial testing. sort of similar to how we did in 5.9, that we can pull out some of the blocks that are not ready. Because this is sort of the equivalent of the query block. So all the post content post after post date, but for comments. So there’s quite a bit there to dig through.
Let’s jump quickly to some of the design tools because I think this is where we have some of the most exciting stuff. While some of these are like just improvements to colors, which have been like the color panel is much nicer now it doesn’t take footprint on the sidebar is collapsing to the site and groups. It shows the color name. So there’s a lot of tightening of the experience, which works for me see if this has access to border. No, but it works on anywhere that we’re displaying color. So this becomes much more usable in general. Better width controls, while the gap support to me is like again, another cool feature like the ability to have like by default, galleries have spacing. So if you want to remove the spacing and have the school compositions or whatever, like the [unknown] is one of the coolest parts are any works with the same mechanisms that other blocks work. I want to focus quickly on all the stuff because this was one of the major focuses for 6.0 was improving a lot of the layout containers and the interactions between them. So what this means is for example, let’s duplicate this one. So let’s say we have these three things. We multi-select them. Now you get these options here. So you can group them. This is the group that existed before, this is a row, and this is a stack using Flexbox. The row is pretty neat. I think we have an issue with the defaults though, because by default, this doesn’t look like a row. And that’s because the allow to wrap isn’t, is toggle by default, we should probably change these especially for this operation because it’s very easy to get into this state. And then again, with block spacing, you can reset it so you can get very quickly into Flexbox situation here. That’s nice. And again, you can well here is not showing the transform because it’s here, but it should, or you can go back to group or the vertical stack. Whatever it is. So see, like, once you go to row, it doesn’t seem like it’s working, because we’re setting these. So we should probably adjust. I think there’s an issue about adjusting this. But it also works with an end with whatever, which is another thing we probably need to adjust is, if you’re in this partial text selection, maybe we should not show them. Then we have this cool thing where if you focus on the blocks, it shows that you have the whole block selected with the movers so that you can still move all of them together. So in that case, it kind of makes sense. But maybe we can disable them for text only blocks. I don’t know there’s something there to consider. But let’s definitely note down that we need to, to make these toggle off by default, at least for this flow for the flow of transforming stuff that you’re seeing. Because otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t feel like you’re changing a row. And I think the other thing that I lost was, I had this set the width, and I lost it when I transform them. If I can do I don’t know it’s too far back. Yeah, so I have them in in this sort of with and transforming them lost the alignment. So we should, that’s another bug to look into, we should respect the alignment and disable these. So they should be the thing that you get when you transform to that. Well, another nice thing is that we have more support some B’s including see, we have margin support and groups. We have typography support and groups as well color. So you can set all of these by default, so that they can in this case, this is set to something specific. But if these weren’t if it was just default text, you will be able to control all the text from these. Not the cover from the group. Okay, we have to mean do we have more like if we have any questions to get?
Daisy Olsen 58:18
We have? Yeah, so we have two questions left. One of them’s jumping back a little bit. But first of all, ask Derek Hansen’s question, which is will there be support for editing borders individually on a block? So maybe only the left right top bottom?
Matias Ventura 58:35
Yes, I think there are we have some design and in progress work for that. See if I don’t think we have it here. Nope. Only in the group. Yeah, so that’s, that’s definitely something we need to do. Like we want to make, for example, stuff like the quote, the border left on the quote right now with this update to the system. It’s just defined by the theme. It’d be nice if that was just a proper border, left property that you can disable and toggle. So yeah, that’s definitely something coming up.
Daisy Olsen 59:16
Okay. And then one last question. From Marius Jensen, will the site editor so hold on second, oh, well, the site with the site editor, the power of patterns are going to become more so with the pattern directory. The sidebar approach makes it harder to discover and compare patterns. Are there plans to improve this? So?
Matias Ventura 59:40
Yeah, this is a great question because it leads to like I can show some of the prototypes that we’re working on, on how to bring the sort of creating with buttons more front and center. And this is one example of how you could sort of explode a template into all these constituents. So here you will see all the different patterns that are involved. And the pattern selection is going to be both connected to these and connected to these in a better way. Also the ability to let’s go back up, you will be able to sort of switch patterns directly from here. And so there’s a lot here that I think is going to be really cool. I don’t know how much we have connected on the prototype. But yeah, the idea is that you can like swap different patterns and so on. And also, if we go to the browse old patterns we have like, the broader categories of them if you want to insert so patterns, I think are going to continue to become a very major force of how to build these things. We didn’t quite get to these for 6.0. But it’d be nice to that’s one of the things that I’m most excited about actually doing. Because it gives you both a sense of the size structure, you can move things around easily if you drag them and reorder them and so on and just drag other buttons and sort of build with them.
Daisy Olsen 1:01:19
Right so we are at time do you have any final comments you want to make before we sign off for today?
Matias Ventura 1:01:29
No, I think like the, for the future, we’ll probably need to do like a bit more like an hour and a half maybe to have the more space for also was a lot of me talking, and not many other folks.
Daisy Olsen 1:01:47
Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And we’ll get the links to the video up in the next couple of days. And let us know how this went. If you think that we can do this again in the near future. It was a lot of fun for me. And thanks for everyone.
Matias Ventura 1:02:07
I’m realizing my camera went completely dark.
Channing Ritter 1:02:11
Take a dark back. Everyone who helped organize this, this is really fun.
Dan Soschin 1:02:17
And a quick thank you to our panelists and to Matius. And thank you to Daisy for moderating and to Birgit and Gutenberg Times for helping wrangle some behind-the-scenes logistics. And thank you to everyone. We had over 100 different attendees drop in and out. So again, we’ll post the recording and share that out very soon.
Matias Ventura 1:02:45
Cool. All right, this was fun. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye.
