Block-based Meeting Notes – January 20

Channel: #themereview

Facilitated by @jffng

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 themes related updates in 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/

@kjellr and others compile a weekly list of Gutenberg issues and PRs that are relevant to block-based themes, the most recent is here: https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2021/01/15/gutenberg-themes-week-of-jan-11-2021/

Some highlights:

  • This issue summarizes the updates to how 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. will work, this will impact how themes and themers define styles on a global and per block basis: #28163
  • The navigation block has seen some good action and discussion as well with PRs such as #28169 and #27131
  • Until recently, block styles were being added to the bottom of the page, this change moves the block styles to the <head> as they should #28319

TT1 Blocks development

TT1 Blocks was added to the themes repository 🎉 https://wordpress.org/themes/tt1-blocks/ This hopefully widens the number of folks that can test and contribute.

Note that development is still happening 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/ in theme-experiments: https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/tree/master/tt1-blocks

Discussion: default scope of global styles properties

Global styles will provide a lot of control to the user to change their theme styles via the editor. This issue discusses what controls should be shown by default to users and it could use some more attention from theme designers & developers: #27512

It was suggested that some users may be interested in having access to all the possible options and that could be surfaced via an option to choose “Show all” or “Only Suggested”

It’s also worth exploring an “Apply to all” option for when I make changes to a block – so it updates the global styles for that block.

Another idea that was discussed is the possibility to remember the user’s common behaviours when editing their site / changing styles, to surface their “Most used” controls.

The whole discussion can be read here: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RP4Y3K/p1611156891074700

Thanks to everyone for joining! Please leave a comment if you have anything to add that is block-based theme related!

#block-based-meeting, #meeting-notes