Gutenberg Phase 2 Friday Design Update #3

I’ve been informed by some colleagues that this week has been super cold in areas around the globe. I live in Southern California and haven’t experienced it, but I truly hope you all are staying warm. The GitHubGitHub 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/ repo for 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/, on the other hand, is on fire (in a good way)! 😉

Widgets to blocks

There’s a lot of development movement happening right now.

In addition, the integration of the widget-blocks in the wp-admin are being figured out too. Right now, it looks like staying inline with the mockups provided during the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. might be the path to take (with some minor improvements of course). There’s also a desire to implement better a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) while we’re working on this as well.

Navigation 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.

This is a big one. While exploring the block itself, there’s been conversations in GitHub about how navigation is built. Is the block a simple one that just allows the user to select which menu they want to use? Or is the block where the whole menu is built? This decision effects the implementation of navigation building in Gutenberg going forward. One thing we know for sure is that everything is becoming a block in Phase 2, so these decisions are crucial right now. If you have some thoughts, please share them on GitHub.

Tightening up

It’s amazing to see all the areas in Gutenberg that are getting tightened up! Gutenberg 4.9 just released with a couple of beautiful design improvements: table striping and color swatch indicator. More design improvements are happening daily. Take a look at all the things.

Documentation

Some might say that Documentation isn’t really design, so why’s it here? But really, documentation should be a community wide endeavor. There are weekly edits being completed to make sure the future of Gutenberg has a solid foundation. Here’s what’s been done… and what’s being worked on. These are fairly simple textual explanations of Gutenberg. If anyone is looking to contribute with something non-code related, this is a great way to begin.

Communication consistency is key to this project. That’s why these weekly design updates are going out every Friday. Thanks for reading, staying informed, and contributing anywhere you can!

#design, #gutenberg-weekly, #phase-2