Gutenberg Phase 2 Friday Design Update #18

Happy Friday everyone! ヽ(•‿•)ノ Why so happy, you ask? Because Gutenberg 5.7 has been released this week!

In response to the accessibility audit there have been many great accessibilityAccessibility 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) improvements. Everyone recognizes there’s still a ways to go, but it’s on the right path with so many issues already resolved.

Some of the impressive enhancements in 5.7 include:

• The new block appender for the Group 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..
• Support for adjusting column widths in the Column block.
• Improvements to the Latest Posts block.
• Support for Headers and Footers in the Table block.
• And many more…

Navigation block

While still in a rough PR, the Navigation block is being thought through and iterated upon. It’s using a new pattern to control the inner blocks (individual menu items) which can use some feedback. Chime in on the PR in 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/.

Unselected

Selected

Widgets to blocks

If you’re itching to fiddle around with the wp-admin interface for widgets that are now blocks, and you have the 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/ 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 installed, you can access it through the plugin’s wp-admin menu here:

There are still a lot of bugs, but it should present the concept well. The new widgets screen is still limited in its abilities right now.

Also, if you haven’t read the UX flow for widget-to-blocks proposal, please do! I’m looking to connect with some plugin developers that use widgets to get their feedback soon. If you have some ideas of who I should contact, let me know in the comments.

Tightening up

There’s been a lot of focus on navigating through nested blocks recently. Some of the wonderful explorations include a PR for dashed borders to help the user see the nested levels, and a clickthrough PR which makes it so much easier to select the parent block and then dive into nested blocks purposefully. These two PRs will add so much to the experience!

---

Thanks for reading, staying informed, and contributing anywhere you can!

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