Jason Crist 6:34 pm on March 18, 2022  

Gutenberg + Themes: Week of March 14th, 2022

Hello! This is the 77th roundup of theme-related discussions, fixes, and developments 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/ coinciding with the 12.8 release.

New features:

Webfonts APIAPI An 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.: Font Configuration via 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.

#37140 adds support for a Webfonts API allowing themes to express configuration of the fonts to load using only theme.json!  This is pretty exciting.  It’s just a beginning; tooling still needs to be built around this so that it’s easier to manage from the interface but this is a strong step toward the (very tricky) concept of Font management for themes.

Included in the Zip: Global Styles and More

#39048 adds the theme.json to the resources exported from the Full Site Editor.  This is a step closer to having a fully operational theme exported from the FSEFSE Short for Full Site Editing, a project for the Gutenberg plugin and the editor where a full page layout is created using only blocks..  (Note: how that might work is being discussed… see below!)

#39173 takes that even further and adds an index.php and style.css file as well.

Pattern Registration with theme.json

With #38323 we can now register 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//patterns to a theme via theme.json.  This documentation helps clarify a bit.

Discussions:

Export what?

How do we build themes exclusively with the FSE?  This tracking issue explores what we need to do to get there.

An abstraction too far?

The abstract property appearanceTools in theme.json might not be the right approach. It’s convenient but potentially confusing.  Discussion started in 39586.

Semantic Abstractions?

The Standardization of Colors (among other things) has been discussed quite a bit but we still have no standardized resolution.  39372 opens a discussion regarding standardizing more of that in theme.json.   39371 does the same but for standardized spacing names and 39370 for typography.  Please add your voice!

General Resources: