Welcome to our last edition for the year 2025. I am not ready to reflect on the whole year, however, I am excited for 2026. There will be many new features coming to WordPress with the three major releases and also plenty of bug fixes and quality-of-life enhancement towards consistency.

The first edition for 2026 will have to wait a bit and it is scheduled for January 24, 2026, roughly a month from now, due to my vacation and training schedule.

I wish you and yours wonderful Holidays and a happy, prosperous and healthy New Year!

Yours,
Birgit

Steve Burge and Dan Knauss interviewed me for the PublishPress podcast. We covered WordPress 6.9’s six new blocks (accordion, term query, time to read, math, comment count, and comment link) plus editorial notes for team collaboration. The release marks a restart after Automattic’s contribution pause.

WordPress 7.0 ( April 9, 2025) will bring template management improvements and a tabs block. The AI team is building foundational infrastructure—Abilities API, MCP Adapter, PHP AI SDK, and experiments plugin—enabling plugins to integrate with AI assistants. Real-time collaborative editing remains in development, facing technical hosting challenges. The recording is available on YouTube.

Roadmap WordPress 7.0 and two more releases in 2026

In his lates post, Matias Ventura, lead architect of Gutenberg, laid out the plan for WordPress 7.0. It’s aspirational and not all the items will make it into the next major version of WordPress. The very detailed plan covers the project’s shift into Phase 3: Collaboration, a vision for real-time co-editing, and enhanced communication through site notes. Ventura underscores the modernization of the administrative experience via a unified design system and expanded DataViews. By integrating a standardized AI API and advancing responsive editing tools, WordPress 7.0 aims to unify the design and development process. Ultimately, the release promises to deliver a more cohesive and performant platform through refined navigation and versatile new core blocks. Here are the broad topics of the plan.

• Collaboration 
• Admin
• APIs
• Navigation Block
• Customization
• Blocks
• Media

Jonathan Desrosiers also published the proposed schedule of the 2026 releases. Following the schedule, we have two more dates to put on our calendars: Beta 1 for WordPress 7.0 will be on February 19, and RC 1 is scheduled for March 19, 2026.

Provided the Release squad approves this schedule. I also can offer a timeline for the WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth: First draft will be available for public preview on February 26, 2026, and the post will be published on March 26, 2026.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Gutenberg 22.3 and beyond

Hector Prieto led the release of Gutenberg 22.3 (December 17). In his release post he highlighted:

1. Dedicated Fonts page for easier typography management
2. Image editing improvements
3. Responsive Grid block
4. Other highlights

Dave Smith, core conditrbutor on the GGutenbergProject explains in his video
The changes leveling up Navigation in WordPress 7.0,He wrote in tthedescription: “Navigation is one of the most important — and most frustrating — parts of building a WordPress site.In this video, I walk you through what’s changing, why it matters, and show the real work already underway — including early prototypes and demos.” Check it out.

Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders

Jamie Marsland is at it again with short videos and teaching you new skills. In his latest video “How to Create a High-Converting Landing Page With WordPress (Free Blueprint)” he gives you step -y -tep instructions for an easy way to create high-converting WordPress landing pages using only core blocks. He built a distraction-free landing page based on the StoryBrand methodology, so each section has a clear purpose and guides visitors through a simple story as they scroll.

Sarah Perez, consumer tech editor at TechCrunch, reported that “WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, is now being used” and it features Automattic’s AI tool for natural language web development. Introduced at the “State of the Word” event, Telex allows users to create complex Gutenberg blocks, like pricing calculators and logo carousels, without coding. Perez highlights how “vibe coding” makes site building accessible for non-tech users, enabling them to create professional results. With the new Abilities API, Telex marks WordPress’s move toward AI-driven workflows that streamline the design process.

Courtney Robertson Developer advocate at GoDaddy released the plugin Post Formats for Block Themes, which brings back old-school post formats to modern WordPress block themes. It restores useful features for galleries, quotes, and videos often missing in newer themes. You’ll find smart auto-detection, unique block patterns for each format, and a handy Chat Log block for easy transcripts. By combining these classic tools with today’s full-site editing, this plugin helps creators maintain a great design and add variety in a simple and accessible way.

Valentin Grenier, a WordPress developer from Toulouse, France, just dropped his first plugin: Simple block animations. It’s a cool, lightweight tool for adding some fun scroll-triggered visual effects to your Gutenberg blocks without needing to mess with any custom code. You get five different animation types, like fades and slides,, thatyou can tweak with durations and delays. Built using the Intersection Observer API and good old native CSS, it keeps things running smoothly by loading assets only when they’re needed while also being mindful of motion preferences to make it accessible.

What’s new in WordPress Playground

Felyph Centra posted a few video on WordPressTV to showcase various features of WordPress Playground

Previewing GitHub branches with WordPress Playground. This video demonstrates a method to streamline development reviews. This technique addresses the common pain point of needing complex local environments or relying on static screenshots to share work in progress.

Introduction to WordPress Playground landing page. The new landing page explains the capabilities of the platform and what is possible with WordPress Playground.

Using WordPress Playground to work with AI agents. Centra shared how you can use the WordPress Playground to integrate with AI agents. with an example that uses GitHub Copilot agents. Using this flow it executes small tasks for a plugin, such as refactoring code or updating documentation. WordPress Playground can serve as a base to validate the AI agent’s code changes using E2E tests.

In the post Action required: github-proxy.com shutdown Centra lays out the migration to switch over from a third-party proxy server to Playground’s built -n CORS handling. Your existing blueprints are safe, though. If you worked with Blueprints you can also learn how to reference GitHub repos, folders and files with native Playground resources.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

In this week’s livestream JuanMa Garrido explored how to create commands for the Commands Palette. WordPress 6.9 brought the Command Palette to the whole WordPress space and not just restrict it to the Site Editor. Now all plugin developer can register commands together with their plugin’s features.

Justin Tadlock published the monthly roundup on What’s new for developers? (December 2025), noting WordPress 6.9 “Gene” and pointing to the 6.9 Field Guide and State of the Word. Highlights include the new AI Experiments plugin, Breadcrumbs block improvements heading toward stability, and an experimental Tabs block. Tooling updates cover WPCS 3.3.0, Data Views/Forms and Field API enhancements, @wordpress/boot routing, and a visibility key rename. Themes and Playground also saw notable updates.

Ryan Welcher shot a video What’s New For WordPress Developers – December 2025, covering the parts of the blog post.

As a reader of this newsletter you might already know about WordPress Studio, the fast, free, open-source local development tool, that’s based on WordPress Playground. Nick Diego recorded a Getting Started with WordPress Studio video and walks you through  creating local sites, configuring your environment, and using the tools that come bundled with the app. You’ll also learn how to unlock advanced features with a free WordPress.com account, including syncing with WordPress.com and Pressable, sharing live preview links, and using the built-in AI Assistant to accelerate development. Whether you build plugins, create themes, or manage client projects, Studio helps you work faster and smarter.

In her post, Build Custom Event Lists & Grids With One Block: Event Query Loop Block Ultimate Guide, Lesley Sim shared a comprehensive tutorial for managing EventKoi’s specialized query block within WordPress. The post details how to create custom list and grid layouts using various query parameters, such as date ranges and recurring event instances, without any coding. By explaining the block’s internal structure and the flexible Event Data block, Sim illustrates how users can achieve precise design control and dynamic content display.

In his latest post for the WordPress Developer Blog, Word Switcher: Extending Core Blocks with Interactivity, JuanMa Garrido provides a practical guide for beginners on enhancing standard WordPress blocks using native tools. Garrido demonstrates how to combine the Format API for editor controls, the HTML API for server-side processing, and the Interactivity API for frontend animations. Developers learn to create a “word switcher” effect that cycles through text variations without relying on heavy external libraries. This approach ensures a lightweight, performant, and professional workflow that bridges the gap between simple content entry and modern, reactive web design.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

How did the upgrade to WordPress 6.9 go for you and those around you? Did anything break? Or are you waiting for 6.9.1 to come out?

Once in a while I get a question on how I keep up with the fast progress and the vast range of updates in Gutenberg and WordPress Core. Here is one source of information I am grateful for: Contributors working on the Gutenberg project started posting their so-called “Iteration for WordPress 7.0” issues on GitHub. I bookmarked this list and once in a while I will check up on the progress, especially when I get lost in the weeds of single PRs and need to align again on big picture goals. It’s not a comprehensive list, though.

From the conversations at State of the Word 2025, I learned that the community is embracing the educational initiatives of Campus Connect and WordPress Credits. Seeing more generations stream into the ecosystem warms this perpetual community organizer’s heart. Equally exciting is the foundational work the AI Team has accomplished to ready the ecosystem for the era of Artificialle Interlligence (AI) when LLMs and helper agents elevate research, publishing and amplification for people.

What did stand out for you after watching the State of the Word video? Email me or leave a comment.

Below is another walk-through of the buzz around block editor, plugins and Playground. Enjoy, and have a wonderful weekend.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 6.9 “Gene” was released during State of the Word 2025, with most of the release leads present at the in-person event. You can revisit the moment on YouTube 41:35 minutes into the recording, with the demonstration of the major features by Matias Ventura.

Nicholas Garofalo wrote State of the Word 2025: Innovation Shaped by Community. Matt Mullenweg and Mary Hubbard, our Executive Director, delivered WordPress’s yearly update, which included an exciting live launch of WordPress 6.9. The keynote dug into how we’re mixing in AI with features like the Abilities API and MCP adapter, highlighted the awesome growth of our global community across 81 WordCamps, and showed off cool tools like Telex that help you create AI-powered blocks. Some major highlights were new collaboration features, upgraded developer APIs, and more ways to connect learners around the globe to opportunities on the open web.

Rae Morey, The Repository, reports on the annual keynote in detail in her post State of the Word 2025: AI, Education, and a Community Holding Steady Through a “Rollercoaster” Year.

You can watch the entire State of the Word event on YouTube.

James Le Page elaborated in SOTW 2025:The Year WordPress Became AI-Native how WordPress delivered four foundational AI components in version 6.9, six months after forming its first dedicated AI team. The Abilities API creates unified registries for AI agents, while the WP AI Client provides provider-agnostic LLM interfaces. The MCP Adapter exposes capabilities externally, and the AI Experiments Plugin demonstrates practical implementations. Looking ahead, version 7.0 will introduce client-side abilities and a Workflows API for chaining actions, positioning WordPress to remain central as AI reshapes content consumption and creation across the open web.

Save the Date! January 13, 7pm UTC Join  James LePage and Jamie Marsland for a hallway hangout on all things WordPress AI. If you are interested, comment on the tweet or ping Jamie Marsland.

In WordPress 6.9 Is Out! The Main Features You Need to Know, Karol Kroll gives you a walk-through of the new version on his YouTube channel.

Maddy Osman reported on What’s New for Bloggers, Creators, and Site Owners in WordPress 6.9. and highlights collaboration tools like block-level notes and hide-show toggles, new creative blocks including Accordion and Term Query for enriched storytelling, plus performance improvements loading styles on demand.

In his post Ability to Hide Blocks in WordPress 6.9, Aki Hamano, sponsored triage co-release lead, shared more detail about this new WordPress features and how to disable it.

Rhys Wynne discussed the release of WordPress 6.9, noting it contains more visible features compared to version 6.8. He highlights three key improvements: the Notes,; the Accordion block, and the Command Palette.

On the Hostinger Blog, Bud Kraus explained the many features of WordPress 6.9, highlighting Notes, Accordion and Terms Query blocks and the Command Palette. Kraus emphasizes developer enhancements like the Abilities API, improved Block Bindings, and removal of legacy Internet Explorer code. He notes this release marks the official start of Phase Three collaboration features while balancing practical user improvements.

Carlo Daniele reported on the latest WordPress release for Kinsta. In New features, new blocks, new APIs: here is what’s new in WordPress 6.9, he discusses key features like the Command Palette, Notes, and new blocks. He also covers updates for developers, including the streaming block parser, custom Social Link icons, the Abilities API, Block Bindings, and improvements to the Interactivity API and DataViews.

Earlier this week, I worked on the release of Gutenberg 22.2. You can read my release post on the Make Blog: What’s new in Gutenberg 22.2 (03 December)?. The highlights are:

• Cover block video embeds
• Breadcrumbs block enhancements
• Styling options for the Math block.
• Other Notable Highlights, like Button block pseudo-state styling and DataViews upgrades.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders

Bernhard Kau, a PHP developer from Berlin and community organizer, started an Advent Calendar to showcase recommended plugins. The Dec. 3 edition featured Block Editor: Reverse Columns on Mobile – a small block options plugin. He likes it for its ability to solve mobile layout issues with just 250 lines of code, managing columns, group blocks, and media-text arrangements. Instead of needing to add custom CSS classes manually, the plugin uses simple checkboxes to order image and text correctly on mobile and supports RTL languages and various flex layouts. While some believe fewer plugins are better, Kau prefers targeted solutions that do exactly what he would code himself, making features easy for content editors on no-code sites without overcomplicating the functionality. If you need a guide through the forest of plugins in the WordPress ecosystem you should follow Bernhard Kau’s blog.

Jake Spurlock released Placeholders, a WordPress plugin that simplifies wireframing ad layouts by offering fourteen Gutenberg blocks for common IAB advertising sizes. Each block shows clean wireframe-style placeholders with accurate dimensions, customizable colors, and alignment options, all without needing an actual ad setup. This free plugin empowers designers and developers to create mock placements for design phases, client presentations, and layout testing. Future updates may add custom sizes, layout templates, and ad management features. The plugin is available on the WordPress repository.

Joop Laan has created a new plugin called Inline Context. It adds expandable tooltip popovers to your content for easy definitions, references, and clarifications without interrupting reading. You can highlight text, provide rich-text explanations, and categorize notes with custom icons and colors. This plugin is great for editorial sites, documentation, and research platforms. It’s fully keyboard-accessible and ready for translation. Laan also offers a live preview of the plugin in Playground to see it in action.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Last month, JuanMa Garrido and Jonathan Bossenger invited user to the Developer Hours: WordPress 6.9 Block Bindings & Interactivity API. The recording is now available on WordPress TV.

Ronald Huereca discusses the Admin-Wide Command Palette which now operates in the entire admin area with CMD/CTRL-K. He shows how to disable the palette selectively using the wp-core-commands script handle, enable it on the frontend, and create custom commands using React hooks and registerPlugin. Huereca includes code snippets for different contexts—block editor only, admin excluding editor, or both—and suggests using separate script endpoints for new commands in existing block plugins to prevent iframe issues.

Brian Coords shared a tutorial on creating a Woo Product Category Image Block with WordPress 6.9, using the Block Bindings API and a new Terms Query Loop to show product category images without custom blocks. The method registers bindings using PHP on the server to get term meta thumbnails and uses JavaScript for the editor preview through WooCommerce’s data package. A block variation allows for easy insertion. Coords mentions this solves issues where taxonomy term images aren’t standard in WordPress, but he notes the increasing clutter in the block inserter due to more specialized variations.

Felix Arntz address on LinkedIn frequently asked question, on how he built the Gutenberg-like UI in his AI Services plugin for WordPress. In a new npm package called wp-interface he provided an abstracted solution anyone can use to get started integrating it into their plugins.

On his livestream, Jonathan Bossenger tested WordPress 6.9 and showed how to use its Block Bindings updates in a custom plugin. He explored custom post types and meta fields, worked with block bindings, and updated custom fields. Watch him solve debugging issues, add a year field, and improve a custom plugin.

In his blog post WordPress Development Without a Computer, Alex Kirk, long time WordPress contributor, outlines how he envisions AI-assisted fixes on the fly on a WordPress site. “With AI coding assistants that run in the browser—like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot Workspace, or similar tools—combined with WordPress Playground for testing, you can now do WordPress plugin development without a computer.” Kirk provides a step-by-step instructions on how to make it possible today.

In his livestream, JuanMa Garrido discussed the Interactivity Router package, highlighting its ability to load content without full page reloads. He demonstrated client-side navigation in query loop blocks and interactive lightbox behavior. The session included enabling client-side navigation, performance comparisons, and practical API documentation examples.

What’s new in Playground

In this 2025 Year in Review, Playground architect Adam Zieliński lists transformative achievements including supporting ninety-nine percent of WordPress plugins, running PHPMyAdmin and Laravel alongside substantial performance gains through OpCache and concurrent workers. New PHP extensions like XDebug enable modern debugging workflows while state-of-the-art MySQL emulation powers comprehensive database management. Developer tools now include file browsers, Blueprint editors, and one-click Gutenberg branch previews.

The community contributed translations across six languages, earned forty-eight contributor badges, and demonstrated Playground at WordCamps globally, establishing it as essential infrastructure for testing, teaching, and building WordPress.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

JC highlights several exciting features in WordPress 6.9, focusing on significant developer and editor experience improvements, including the full iframe editor, routing, DataViews, the Interactivity API, pattern logic and content-only mode, and the Abilities system. A personal favorite is the new Accordion Block.

The discussion then moves to the latest Gutenberg releases. 

Gutenberg 22.1 introduces the new core/tabs block and brings enhancements like JS/CSS editing for the HTML Block, updates to the Twitter/X embed icon, and various improvements to DataViews and Breadcrumbs.

Gutenberg 22.2 focuses on performance, block editor polish, accessibility, and developer experience. Key updates include expanded functionality for the Breadcrumbs block, support for background video embeds in the Cover block, and new controls for text justification and width in the Block Editor. It also refines the block-locking functionality with changes to pattern management, such as replacing the ‘Ungroup’ option with ‘Add edit section’ for specific blocks.

Tune in to get the full rundown on how these releases will shape the future of site building in WordPress.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

• X
• GitHub
• WordPress
• Instagram
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

• Website
• A Developer’s Guide: The Future of the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor
• WDS-BT on GitHub
• Previous Appearances
  • Gutenberg Changelog #108 – Gutenberg 19.3, WordPress 6.7 – Block Themes for Agencies, WordCamp Asia
  • Gutenberg Changelog 116 – WordPress 6.8, Source of Truth, Field Guide, Gutenberg 20.5 and 20.6

Announcements

Gutenberg Changelog podcast now also available on YouTube

WordPress 6.9

State of the Word Dec 2, 2025, at 20:00 UTC

Release Candidate 3

Source of Truth is out.

Field Guide

WordPress Importer can now migrate URLs in your content

Gutenberg-Releases

• What’s new in Gutenberg 22.1? (18 November, 2025)
• Gutenberg 22.2 RC 1

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 125th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 releases or versions. I’m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, Curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. It’s a special delight to have JC Palmes with me on the show today. JC is the principal Technical Manager at WebDev Studios. Welcome back to the show, JC. How are you today?

JC Palmes: I’m doing good, Birgit. I am very busy but still alive. So that’s a win.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can imagine.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Happy to be here and talk with President Gutenberg again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Super. Yeah. Great to see you have your perspective on all the things. I just want to point out that on WebDev Studios they have just posted a developer’s guide to the future of WordPress with Gutenberg block editor, and in a in a short summary it’s why they switched or why WebDev Studios is so involved in React applications and in block themes and in the block development because it has a lot of advantages, and so there is the code shift to reactive components. I think one of the advantages that I see is that actually WordPress is giving so many components that as a plugin developer or agency developer you don’t have to make those decisions on the UI anymore. You can just follow along with the ideas. Is that accurate when I say that?

JC Palmes: Yeah. So that article I really like that a lot. It reflects what we see on most of our enterprise scale projects where blocks function like React components and they function like react components now. And theme JSON is basically the design system contract. So performance improves massively when you just when you move away from the old page builder stack for multisites and you know, big editorial teams, this kind of structure is really the only way things stay sane long term. So yeah, that piece captured that direction really well and it’s just the performance alone is just massive.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: Massive performance improvements.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think we talked about it the last time you were on the show when you already created the starter theme that’s based on block theme for the organization. So that’s what you start out with. And I will share the link to.

JC Palmes: The GitHub repo wsbt. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes in the show notes and I think that also encapsulated all the good ideas around it. Have you developed a little bit more on that? What other features kind of went in.

JC Palmes: Not recently but it’s in my list of to do’s. It’s just I’ve been very busy with projects and stuff, so I will need to. Because there are some fixes that moved into Core but we had to do very custom fixes and some of those are already in Core. So we will have to remove those and make sure that it’s aligned with the new version of WordPress and of course fully tested.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can see that there are always a few things that are not working in WordPress or you have to build a workaround. You know it’s coming but you need something now. You need to build a workaround and then when it comes into Core that they say, oh, okay, that custom code goes away and in comes Core. But it still needs to be backwards compatible also for your clients. So. But I think that’s a pretty good trade off to actually then have WordPress keep updating the part of the code. Yeah.

JC Palmes: And the way that WordPress is kind of moving towards a future proof version, it’s easier to add in fixes now and take it out when Core takes over. I haven’t had any sites break currently. That’s using our base theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s awesome.

JC Palmes: Even with the core updates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s all pretty much isolated and you don’t have to worry so much about things. Yeah. Awesome. So, yeah, we will share the article about the developer’s guide on the future of WordPress and Gutenberg block Editor in the show notes. We will also share the starter theme that WebDev Studios has, and I don’t think we talked about it here on the show or maybe with somebody else. That’s the theme switcher plugin that came out from WebDev Studio, which is a way to have different themes, multiple themes.

JC Palmes: Yep. In one site. It’s a really robust plugin and I think a lot of enterprise level companies are going to like it just because they can test, you know, if they’re not ready for Gutenberg blocks and they’re still on the old WordPress computing system, if they want to try this out, then they can have a full site theme and together with their old theme and change it out one page at a time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I understood. That you can have a gradual migration over to the new system to a block theme and see how your content performs and how your content creators actually work with it before you make the switch for the whole site. I think that’s pretty smart to do, especially when you have thousands and thousands of posts and more than two editors kind of.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really helpful to have a gradual shift because we all don’t like change, sudden changes. You know, we like to be in the. Okay. I need to get accustomed to things.

JC Palmes: This thing, that theme switcher is kind of, it’s allowing these people to test the waters first before diving right in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you can make the blue block theme that is kind of added to the. The other theme kind of look almost identical like the other one. So you have the shell and then can see how the. The rest of it works. Yeah, it’s pretty nifty. Yeah. So that I will share also with our listeners on the show notes. And I’m glad you’re all doing such a great job in advocating for the block editor and share all your wins with the community. 

Announcements

All right, so I have a few announcements, dear listeners. 

So the Gutenberg Changelog is now also available as a podcast on YouTube. Last week I uploaded all episodes. Well, I didn’t upload one at a time. So YouTube has this feature where you can point it to an RSS feed and then it gradually kind of uploads them itself on its own. And because Google abandoned their podcast space maybe two years ago and only now I have migrated it, but it was fairly easy to do and the only change I had to make was to allow the RSS feed to actually have all the episodes in there so YouTube could grab them. But I also needed to do that anyway because I also switched over from the seriously simple podcast player on our episodes to the Pocket Cast player. So Pocket Cast also needs all our episodes so we can have the slug or the short link for the embed code in there so that you will see also on the website. 

And I also wanted to say hi and welcome to all the new subscribers. We had a lot more listeners in the last month and I would really. Yeah, it’s awesome. I’m so happy that after a period of two years stagnating, kind of always have the same amount of listens and downloads, and now all of a sudden it’s really great to connect with you, dear listeners. And if you want, leave a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, we will read it aloud here and I also want to connect with you and learn about your ideas or what topics you would like us to cover more. So you can also send this all to the email address. The official email address for the podcast is changelogatgutenbergtimes.com so now enough about me. Let’s talk about my book. No, I don’t, I don’t do a book.

JC Palmes: I would read your book.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I, I sometimes. Well, I almost did a book. Yeah. For WordPress 6.9. But we will talk about that. 

WordPress 6.9 Release

So WordPress 6.9 is coming. We are a few days away, like five days or something away from the WordPress 6.9 release. It’s out as release candidate three. We are recording this on November 28th and the release is scheduled for December 2nd. So today is Friday. For Tuesday, that’s also the date when State of the World will happen out of San Francisco live streamed and probably with a few demos from WordPress 6.9. Also with the Outlook for 2026, but for our listeners, the field guide is out. It came a little later than for other releases, but on the Gutenberg Times I also published the WordPress 6.9 source of truth, which has a whole lot of details about what changed on the block editor for end users and also for theme developers, what they can style and all that. So if you want to read it, it’s 22 to 33 minutes to read through it and it has 5,000 words, over 5,000 words. So that’s half that. It’s not a book, but it’s a book. It’s almost a book.

JC Palmes: It’s a lot of words.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a lot of words. But also screenshots and videos so you can really learn a little bit more about what’s in the editor. And I also have a ton of links about the developer-related updates. So JC, what are your favorite or exciting updates coming to WordPress 6.9?

JC Palmes: Well, my first, my top one would probably be the terms query improvement. I thought that was still on Gutenberg 22.2. It’s now on 6.9. I mean it’s a big deal for me because I’ve built custom versions of this so many times because you know, the current query block, they’re not strong enough for what we need. So with that coming into Core, that’s kind of big.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The term query block, it almost works like the query block, but not with posts, but with description tags. Yeah, with the terms and also so you can have the title, you can have the count and you can also. The term description was already available as a block, but now you can also put it in a dynamic page where you can list all the good categories and things that you need. Yeah, and it’s good for filtering I would think, for the huge sites and it also sites.

JC Palmes: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: But else the accordion block. I’ve built so many versions of the accordion block as well. So having that in core just means lesser custom blocks. And you know, it’s. It’s going to be consistent markup because it’s core and I’m pretty sure better accessibility and styling, so there’s no surprises.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think the accordion block really lives from how you’re going to style it. So the style variations are much easier to create than custom blocks. On the developer blog, Justin Tadlock actually did a tutorial on how to style the accordion block, and he also has a snippet on how to add the schema for FAQs to the accordion block. So I will share that in the links in the show notes. He explains how to do the theme JSON styling, also the style sheet, as well as what’s still missing, how you do it in CSS and also how you can do it in a plugin or in a pattern rather. And so it’s a really good tutorial for someone who kind of starts out and hasn’t done so many accordion blocks like you did. Yeah. What else are you going to be?

JC Palmes: So another big one for me is I know it’s not yet in core, it’s in the plugin still, but the preparation is already in core. It’s the full iframe preparation for the integration in the post editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Why is that important for you?

JC Palmes: Because it’s going to mean cleaner isolation, fewer CSS leaks, less theme and admin bleed. Bleed through with styles. Because we’ve been battling that. Yeah. So we’ve had quite a bit of issues with admin CSS sneaking into custom blocks and vice versa. So this direction makes me very happy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, good, good. I’m glad. The contributors will be happy to hear that, especially Aki and Ria and Ella, who kind of have been working on that for so long. And thank you. I let him know.

JC Palmes: One other thing, I’m not sure. Did the tiny MCE thing make it into core or will make it into Core?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, not yet.

JC Palmes: Oh, not yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think that it’s not automatically loaded. That part. Yeah, I think that’s slated for 7.0.

JC Palmes: Okay, I’ll wait for 7.0. I’ll be very happy. Well, I’m happy now that there’s ongoing work because in one of my projects, again, I’ve been fighting with a lot. I’ve been fighting with tiny MC issues for months, especially when you have more than 10 classic blocks and ACF with tiny MC on top. Everything just starts lagging or breaking in very strange ways. So please make it happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So what else is there are any APIs that are coming to 6.9 that you are excited about?

JC Palmes: API. Yeah. Abilities API. That one is interesting. Is that in moving Core? Yeah, it’s moving core. Yeah. I know. It’s still kind of experimental. Oh damn. Yeah, I’m sorry. Really excited.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Good.

JC Palmes: Yeah. So what I like about this because it’s now in a kind of unified declarative model with permissions. So plugins are no longer as scatterbrained with capabilities, capability checks everywhere. So this is going to be a cleaner way to define what a user role can do. That’s more of what I need it for. It’s one feature that I’ll probably be playing with a lot more. Data views and routing. Those two.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Data views are on NPM. So if you as a plugin developer or agency developer want to use it, they can be included into your REACT apps. And there’s not only the data views but also the data forms where you get validation with it and then you can do your modals. For data entry. It is a whole new design system for the admin and for admin pages. It will not be kind of a switch over right away. Yeah. So from. From the site editor to the whole thing like the command palette. It definitely needs a lot of testing and quite a few plugins. For instance, Jetpack uses it. Some screens at WooCommerce use it now and then. I also know that other plugins are actually working with it to use the data view’s components and design for their plugins.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Because if this becomes a standard for building admin UIs, we can finally stop reinventing these tables every year and you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Don’t have to maintain the bulk of the code. So it’s only the business logic pretty much. And to maintain for you. Anything else that you want to talk about?

JC Palmes: Performance improvements are off the charts. On smarter script and style loading, they’re now going to load automatically in the footer. Right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: And then there’s the fetch FOID that I only learned about earlier today. It’s kind of interesting. And yeah, the reducement of the layout shift for videos. Oh, caching is now better cache support, especially for multi sites. The multi site cache is going to be. Can be cleared out for the whole site, not just for per site. Right. Yeah, I think that’s going to be huge. Yeah. We’ve Been having quite a bit of multi site projects lately, so that’s going to be. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So do you see any applications or adoption of the Notes feature, the content top level commenting?

JC Palmes: Well, for content editors that would be a help, I guess. I haven’t really paid a lot of attention to that part. I paid more attention to the developer parts and more of the UI. Yeah, that. I’m not sure if I’ll use it, but probably. Well, I don’t really take notes, so.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, good, good. So I think that’s all we’re going to talk about WordPress 6.9. I talked with Ella about it and I also talked with Sarah about it and with Beth Soderberg. So the last four episodes we have talked about quite a bit about 6.9. So now that it’s here, it’s really kind of. We’re going to be shifting what’s coming to 7.0, but not in this episode except for what’s in Gutenberg plugins. 

Before we head into what’s released, I wanted to point out to our listeners that the WordPress importer has received a major upgrade and that came out of the Playground team. The Playground has this blueprint steps called Import WXR, which actually uses the export of a site that is done exporting with the WordPress importer. But the problem was when you import it to Playground, all the links would break and so the team added a URL replacer to the importer plugin and it not only is a very smart replacer, it does not only replace the page links, but also the URLs or the links that are in navigation blocks that are in background image CSS. And so it’s, it’s actually really helping. You don’t need any other plugin to actually import an export from a website. Yeah. So you can put it into Playground and then have a fully functioning site without having trouble. And if the images are still on the original site, it kind of grabs them and puts them in as well like the normal importer does. But it also replaces the URLs to the image. So it’s really a major shift on the WordPress importer. I think I abandoned using the importer about four or five years ago for other plugins when I was moving sites. But this seems to be a much smaller way now because it also streams that. So it’s really fast on the importing part.

JC Palmes: I’ll have to check that and test it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s released now in 0.9.5, and I’ll share the link in the show Notes to the PR that implemented that URL report. There’s actually a better way. Adam Chylinski, the brilliant programmer of Playground, has actually a post on the Core blog where he kind of lays out how he did it. 

What’s Released – Gutenberg 22.1

All right, now we come to the Gutenberg 22.1 release. Do you want to lead us into what’s new and what we’re going to talk about? We start out with a new block. It’s the core tabs.

JC Palmes: Oh, the core tabs. Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Have you been waiting for that too?

JC Palmes: Hey, yeah, yeah. We do have quite a bit of custom blocks as well that are tabs usually for education sites where they have multiple content that they need to add into tabs. We’ve used the navigation block before to kind of hack it up and use it as a tabs block and sometimes just very custom tabs block. But this is going to be way better because it’s now native and core. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, okay. Yeah, I have seen a lot of tabs on some websites, but I personally. But I also don’t build a whole lot of websites with a lot of content. So I was wondering both for the accordion or the tabs block, but I can see that it’s actually a good use case for vertical navigation where you can then just have use it on the left hand side and then you click on it and opens content on the right hand side and it makes it so much faster because it doesn’t need a reload. It’s already on the website.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, that’s pretty cool. So what else? 

Enhancements

There are enhancements to the design system for the admin stuff and also the static and lazy routing for the data views. But that’s all very, very developer-oriented. Okay. So the block library, with this release there comes image prefetching for clicks to expand the images. So if you. If a user or a visitor actually hovers over your gallery or your images and so there is an indication, oh, maybe they want to click on it and so it kind of prefetches the image. So after the click the loading is almost instantaneous. It’s actually somebody called it cheating, but it’s not. It’s kind of anticipating what a visitor wants to do and be helpful. Yeah. The next one is Breadcrumbs. So Breadcrumbs is still in an experimental new block. The same with the tabs block. You have to enable the experiments in the Gutenberg plugin and it now can handle homepage and show the last item attribute and add 404 search and other archive pages to the breadcrumbs if they are in the context of that particular page where it’s loaded.

JC Palmes: Yeah, well, I’ve built a lot of breadcrumbs as well, so this is going to be great once it’s. It lands in Core.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I know. I have used Justin Tadlock’s breadcrumbs block quite a bit and he has also been part of the team who’s kind of looking at how that’s working and if it’s good ready for Core and all that. So yeah, I really like it. Especially if you’re large sites like any other, you need breadcrumbs to guide your visitors back to safety, so to speak. If they get too deep into the site they want to. How they get back to it. Yeah, the next block I’m really excited about. Well, the HTML custom block is already in Core, but what they did now was they added JavaScript and CSS editing to the block. So you can actually.

JC Palmes: That is nice. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Build your own little app in one block kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s pretty cool.

JC Palmes: That’s going to get a lot of use for me just for playing around.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, you can do some great prototypes with that and then get the code in the right places. But yeah, it’s really cool. For those who are looking for a Twitter embed, it will be replaced by the X embed icon in text. I think after three years it’s probably time. Yeah.

JC Palmes: Once this hits Core, I’ll have to remove the function that we’ve added for that particular feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Do you want to take the next one?

JC Palmes: It’s collaboration of the notes that I don’t use, but. Right, right, definitely interesting. And I see it being used for collaboration for those use notes, but not for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: With this release that comes. I need to put it this way. So normally you want to disable things also when there are new features, there are always some people who need it also to be disabled, but it’s also some. You don’t want the notes to show up in distraction free mode or in the code editor. So this release in the Gutenberg 22.1, for those two things, notes are disabled. There’s also keyboard shortcuts and support for tree navigation and form submission shortcuts and all that. But those are the two outstanding changes to the notes that won’t be in 6.9. Well, let me verify that. No, it was backported both of them were backported to the release candidate. So it’s in 6.9.

JC Palmes: Maybe I’ll check it out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely do. Yeah, you want to know what your customers are doing with it. And there’s also a def. Go ahead.

JC Palmes: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. I’m just going to say that it’s good that they also added in a. An ability to disable it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there is a dev note by Adam Silverstein, who was one of the instrumental developers there. There were also contributors from Asia there. And so there was a whole team building on that. The team was from the company Multidots and they have been working on it for probably a year. And the developer note by Adam Silverstein is really very specific on how it was implemented. If there are new filters and hooks to figure out more about the dev notes, if you need additional features and how it all kind of came together, what’s the basis of it. And so it’s a really interesting note. If you are a developer and working with WordPress. The next thing is the text area control. I like that you now can add to the text area in. But that’s for the data forms, I think. Yeah, no, it’s in. Yeah, it’s in the components actually. So it can be in the editor as well. If you have a text area that you now can add a minimum height to it. So it can also grow from there. Yeah. Do you want to do the next bolded one?

JC Palmes: Yeah. Okay. So the color picker also got a really nice upgrade. You can now paste an entire color value directly into it and it’s in any format. Right. So Hex, RGB, HSL. Can it do named colors? It can, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I don’t think so.

JC Palmes: Oh, that would be awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That would be awesome.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we need to try it out. Yeah. To do. If you can do lime. Lime yellow.

JC Palmes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what’s great is that, you know, you don’t have to click into a specific input, just paste it. Enter inside the picker. Yeah, I had to sometimes because when you do colors, right. For websites and you have not added a specific color to the color picker for the theme, I have this browser extension where I just hover on the color and get the value and then the color picker would not. I do not like the value that I input into it. So having the ability to add the entire color value directly is going to save me a lot of time and doing that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And also it avoids typos. Yeah, but. Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll look up colors all the time. Yeah. And then want to just hover the hex value and then post it in. But yeah, you have to. It’s good. 

So the term name, the extensibility on the term name, I’m not sure it’s really extensibility, but it adds the level options for the heading levels and I think that was in 6.6 where that actually made around because the extensibility is that you can control the levels that a heading can have. So normally when you use a heading heading block it starts with H2 and you always need to use the drop down to change it to H3. Yeah. And with the level options you can actually control that through theme JSON. Or to only do term level being H3 all the time. Yes. Without having to change it every time you use the heading level.

JC Palmes: A very nice improvement for content only patterns is normally when you’re editing a content only pattern, a lot of the design controls are hidden because you know, the structure is locked. So. And that’s the whole point. One of the annoying parts of it is trying to tweak colors.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you can do it now.

JC Palmes: So. Yep, you can do it now. That’s going to be a huge experience for. Well, for content writers.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: Really.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you don’t have to enable it. Yeah. With custom code either.

JC Palmes: Anyone is able. Yeah, exactly.

Bug Fixes

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So we come now to the bug fixes and there are a ton of bug fixes. Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, there are also a ton of them that were backported to WordPress 6.9. And for the accordion block, it adds CSS for the default styles. It also has some font style inheritance for button and inner text blocks. I think that that’s a little bit of a red flag. No, not red flag, but it was a little bit. The benefit from the accordion block in core was that it didn’t have any opinion on style. But the problem was that if you use the accordion block in a classic theme, then it wouldn’t have any styling unless you put it in a classic theme. So there was one idea was to just put some default styling in, but they were so restrictive that they can’t be overwritten by theme JSON values for another theme. So that kind of was a little bit of a problem. I’m not quite sure how they solved it or if they’ve solved it before the next version comes out, before the 6.9 comes out, but that’s kind of part of it. And the inner blocks of buttons or text blocks, they inherit the style of the above accordion block. So it’s kind of that.

JC Palmes: Okay, so right now. Well, prior to this fix, it’s not inheriting the font style from the heading or the other way around.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it was the font styles for the. The font style from button, accordion header, toggle. That’s the whole heading. It didn’t go to the next header, I think. Yeah. And it’s a typography appearance. Yeah, it’s fixed. Yeah. Okay.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Embeds, there’s beds to go and shrink. That’s going to be helpful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the embed blocks, they were pretty restrictive in their styling. And now when they’re inside a flex group block, they can grow and shrink with the size of the group block.

JC Palmes: Together with the group block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That is really cool.

JC Palmes: Because less CSS.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, less CSS and also increased responsiveness. Right. If the group graph gets smaller, then also the embed gets smaller and it doesn’t bleed into the template.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Does it keep the aspect ratio? I hope it does.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think that’s something to be tested and kind of figured out. Yeah, I haven’t tried it yet.

JC Palmes: Yeah, me too.

With one of the things that I kind of really hate about. Not hate. Hate is such a strong word. I don’t like about the embed block is you know when you have a video and then you shrink it and it’s not shrinking and it. If it does shrink, it loses the aspect ratio.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next thing is more like CSS specificity for the text alignment classes. And also I think that corrects something that was done before that the text alignment and paragraph would go away. And now it kind of. Now it comes back and with a better robust CSS styling. And then for the heading block, the background padding was pretty strong out of the box. Yeah. And now they kind of are more specific to the block. So also more styling freedom for the theme developers. Right.

JC Palmes: Yeah. Those quality of life improvements.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think there was a question from Twenty Twenty-Two.1. Yeah. The routing part is still all for the data use is still all in experiments. So you need to enable those. If you want to play around with that, if you want to test it, it’s playing around seems so unserious. Yeah. But if you really want to test it, if you can use it already. So, yeah, that was it. 

Gutenberg 22.2

And we come to Gutenberg 22.2. We are talking through the changelog of the release candidate 22.2 will come out on December 3rd, so one day after 6.9, but it’s normally that the release candidate is pretty solid in what’s coming in into the final release, just for testing purposes that they actually do a release candidate one. So this one is big. It has 161 pull requests from 49 contributors, 4 of which are first timers. Congratulations to your first contribution. And the release focuses more on performance and block editor polish and has a series of accessibility developer experience improvements. But it’s intended to test ahead with that. 

Enhancements

There were some enhancements again through the breadcrumbs block. It’s kind of really fantastic how that is going to grow and be feature rich when it will come to WordPress 7.0, but you definitely try it out. It now has an archive link if there’s enabled in post and can do attachment handling and post type archive links and support a pagination as well. So it’s kind of really cool. What else is in there?

JC Palmes: The cover now supports background videos from embeds and yeah, that’s a major upgrade for the cover block because until now background videos only work if you uploaded a file directly to the media library. And now with this new update you can use embedded videos like YouTube, Vimeo and other or supported embed sources.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. That’s huge. Pretty much, yeah.

JC Palmes: Yeah, that’s huge. It used to be a custom block for us and having the ability to do this when it lands on core is going to be really huge.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Here goes the custom block again out.

JC Palmes: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

JC Palmes: And I’m absolutely happy to remove custom blocks and move into native core blocks when it’s there because it just did the improvement and the quality and the markup just consistent and it’s really nice when you know, things work together.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And especially the custom block you don’t want to have. Not every shared hosting has. You can upload videos well or if they’re uploaded, they’re rather pedestrian I would say, because they need to be downloaded and so if you use an embedded one. So the YouTube or the Vimeos of the space are actually hosting your video and it. It doesn’t take all the bandwidth and all that. So it’s a really cool quality of life enhancement as well. For those who don’t have so much oomph on the hosting. Yeah, yeah.

JC Palmes: I mean this should have existed years ago. Then again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, there are a lot of things that should have been fixed a year or two ago. Yeah. There’s also a new enhancement for the math block so you could style of course the text of it, but not the full block around it. And that has now style options as well. So you can change the background and the dimension and the border and the red border radius. It’s all available now for the math outside the math block. It’s not coming to 6.9. That’s for the future release, but it’s test it out and see how it comes to pass. And the next one you would like, you’d like that.

JC Palmes: Yeah, I like this. A lot less CSS and markup for me. So that button block got a big improvement. And theme builders, you know, theme builders like me, every one of us have been asking for forever because we can now style pseudo states like hover focus active focus invisible directly in theme JSON for the button block and its variations. Because before this, the only reliable way to style hover or focus styles states, I mean, was to either drop in custom CSS into theme JSON or in a custom CSS file. Yeah, style sheet. That kind of great idea of keeping design controls inside theme JSON as much as possible. I would want to keep design controls inside theme JSON. But with this improvement, we can now design these states that the same way that redefine normal button styles and variations. The outline button can now have hover states too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The next two items are about the data views. There are a lot more in the data views section of the changelog, but there are two things. One is because it points out that you now can insert certain information into the table. So the table column header allows you now to add columns left or right of your location that goes into that. The data view screens are much more customizable out of the box than any admin page in the current WordPress admin would do. But I really like that part where you can say where the columns go and all that. So you have a real more control over it as a user or as a site owner.

JC Palmes: Yeah. I also like the new layout option, the activity layout, because that’s basically a timeline view. Right. It’s similar to the list layout but with styling and behavior tuned for things like say revisions logs, events, audits, anything chronological. Exactly. You get a vertical timeline track on the left, almost smaller media inline primary actions, and really a clearer focus on the event field that anchors each entry is disabled though. But I guess it’s kind of like a timeline view, so it really shouldn’t jump around. And that. That makes sense that the cool part, I think it’s that it’s not just visual. The layout has its own interaction rules. Only the title is clickable. The whole row ssn’t. And the keyboard navigation is handled differently because the UI behaves differently than a list or a table. It’s a timeline. Yeah, it’s, it’s. I think it’s one of those layouts where once you see it, you realize that WordPress has needed it for years, a long time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s definitely for historical data that you would want to have in some kind of a layout. Yeah. So cool. Thank you for pointing that out. We’re coming now to the pattern section and the PR says add edit section to the list view instead of ungroup. So there is. I think it’s still an experiment, I’m not quite sure. But the pattern padding management kind of changes a little bit. If you have a section that is. And we come to add what is a section block in the list view, those section blocks are now available to be edited and not that you have to unravel the pattern if you want to edit it. So that’s pretty cool. So what are section blocks? And I asked some developers who had been working on it about it and I asked and looked at the documentation and then the section is determined by the section block selector. Well, that is kind of if the. What is the is section block selector. Yeah. So it’s a pattern, a template part or a block that has a template lock on it that says content only. And so it moves around and can be edited, not edited, but styled in its whole. The content creator doesn’t have a whole lot of controls about it. It’s a special block that acts actually as a container with specific editing restrictions, primarily used in template and site editing context. So. So that was a new terminology for me to think about.

JC Palmes: It’s new to me too, but with the way that you’ve explained sections, I’ve only really called it lock patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Yeah. Locked from. You can edit.

JC Palmes: Yeah, you can edit the content, but not the. The way it looks. Yeah, the design. Yeah. The structure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And there’s a whole lot of effort around that content only lock to kind of bleed into other places, be it in pattern, be it in the editor. How can you switch from one to the next? You need to point out that those are actually content only locked ones. So we will see a lot more about that in the coming months for this particular content only modals. You know, so I’m kind of. This is pretty much a preparation for that in terms of what particular PRs will come about that?

JC Palmes: Yeah. I mean it’s, it’s more of a guardrail when you don’t want styled structured patterns to just explode because it gives the option to ungroup it and then clients come back and say that it’s not working. So this is good. It’s more predictable behavior for a section.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Client section now cloning a section now that’s one thing. It also has a, certain pattern endpoint so you could do pattern wide changes to things. We saw it with 6.7 in the zoom view. When you were going through the Twenty Twenty-Five theme and go into Zoom view, you were able to add a pattern but then change the color of it because it would loop through the various color variations of your style variation. That totally. Yeah. I was totally amazed by that. To get new colors in there and you don’t have to worry about things. But that’s kind of the idea about it.

JC Palmes: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. And then there were really, really small changes to the block editor. It now has a card icon.

JC Palmes: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It also supports the width and the dimensions. So you can control that for padding. Yeah. And also the text also has a justify attribute now or control. So those are really quality of life things. And they were. Yes, until you use them you don’t know you. You miss those things. But. Yeah, but that is how you use them.

JC Palmes: By editing a few thousand pages.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

JC Palmes: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I think that was everything that came. Well, we want to talk about Twenty Twenty-Two.2. Is there anything else that you found?

JC Palmes: I think we’ve talked about the ones that I really find interesting for the other functions, new stuff. They can read the build guide. But those that we’ve talked about are really the ones that jump out to me and I find really interesting or very helpful for my workflow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, wonderful. Excellent. I’m glad that we got that. 

So before we end the show, I want to point out that there’s a state of the world coming next week with the keynote. That’s the annual keynote of Matt Mullenweg and it coincides for the first time with a major release of WordPress, the 6.9 release. And it will be live-streamed from San Francisco. I think the tickets for the in-person meeting have already been sold out for a while. But you can follow along on the live stream on YouTube. It starts at 20 or 8pm UTC. So it might be for our AAPAC contributors and WordPress users, it’s a little late in the day. It’s also almost past my bedtime in Europe because San Francisco is nine hours away from me. Yeah. So there’s this time zones quagmire that we always have to deal with. But if you see it on Tuesday or on Wednesday, I don’t think it changes in between. And there’s nothing really urgent in there. So take the time and call it on the rerun.

JC Palmes: Yeah, I’ll probably watch it live because I’m in that time zone.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, you’re in that time zone. Yeah. Yeah. 

As always, our show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is episode 125 – 125, and if you have questions, suggestions or news or comments. Yeah. If you want us to include them, send them to changelogatgutenburgtimes.com that’s changelogatgutenburgtimes.com, and I say huge thank you to JC Palmes to come on the show and talk through those two releases with me and share what you are looking forward to for 6.9 and also share all the good work that is from WebDev studios that can help other agencies to also streamline their processes. 

Thank you so much, JC, I hope you have a wonderful day or night and all the listeners. Thank you for listening. 

Bye bye.

In case you celebrated it, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, lots of turkey, sweet potatoes, beans, stuffing, gravy and pumpkin pie. Or any kind of pie really . And lots of love and laughter around your family and friends.

I just want to give a huge shoutout to all the WordPress contributors who teamed up to roll out this next big version of WordPress for the hundreds of millions of websites out there and all their users and visitors. Every update is a big deal and only happens because of teamwork, good vibes, honesty, and trust. Not everyone who contributes is a coder; some work on documentation, translate stuff into loads of languages, create tutorials, and so much more. WordPress 6.9 is dropping on Tuesday if everything goes smoothly!

Other contributors have already started on the next version, 7.0. We don’t know yet exactly when it will come out. In their last check-in meeting Core committers discussed a release date in March or April of 2026. They are also thinking of going back to three releases per year.

Have a splendid weekend ahead, and I am so grateful that you are here. Your presence makes me want to write every week. Be well.

Yours,
Birgit

My team mate, Jonathan Bossenger and I were on this week’s panel for This Week in WordPress #356 episode, together with Taco Verdonschot and Nathan Wrigley. It includes “Birgit Pauli-Haack gives a whirlwind tour of her epic WordPress 6.9 Source of Truth “. There was a lot more of course.

Videos and posts about WordPress 6.9 release

WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 3 is now available! The WordPress 6.9 Field Guide has arrived, too.

Rae Morey, The Repository has the skinny for you in WordPress 6.9 RC3 Arrives as Field Guide Drops and Final Release Nears.

Hector Prieto published the Dev Note Miscellaneous Editor Changes in WordPress 6.9, highlighting various refinements to the block editor. The release improves keyboard navigation, selection, and focus handling, adds small UI polish, and refines patterns and templates behavior. It also updates APIs and deprecations to keep block development consistent, enhances accessibility and stability, and smooths authoring flows, ensuring theme and plugin authors can better integrate with the evolving editor experience.

Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher livestreamed their WordPress 6.9 Walkthrough. They guided viewers through the key updates arriving in WordPress 6.9 ahead of its December 2 release.

In his livestream this week, Jonathan Bossenger tested the Block Bindings coming to WordPress 6.9. He tested the new enhancements in the date and image blocks, as well as custom source registration. Throughout the stream, Bossenger troubleshot and documented his process, exploring how these updates can lay the foundation for future developments. You can join him as he navigates through the intricacies and potentials of these new WordPress features!

In his video WordPress 6.9 New Features, Pascal Claro demonstrates all new features for the Block editor coming to a WordPress instance near you.

Maruti Mohanty held a Learn WordPress workshop on How to Prepare Your WordPress Site for WordPress 6.9. The recording is now available on WordPressTV. You will learn how to use the Beta/RC releases to test your site for the upcoming releases. This will be a practical walkthrough to build your staging, test for compatibility, and plan a safe rollout.

In his post The Foundation for AI-Powered, Composable, and Editor-Friendly Websites, David Levine covers the WordPress 6.9 release and its focus on incremental yet impactful improvements to the site editor and performance. The post highlights refined pattern management, better style controls, and workflow enhancements for building and editing layouts.

The Abilities API will launch with WordPress 6.9. TrewKnowledge has published a simple guide for builders, publishers, and product teams. It explains how “abilities” bring together capabilities and permissions in the editor and admin, allowing for better control over tasks. With examples and clear advice, the article helps agencies and product teams create safer workflows, customize roles, and improve user experiences.

Rae Morey, The Repository, reports on how WordPress 6.9 to Introduce Notes, Bringing Asynchronous Collaboration to the Post Editor. Notes let users comment on specific parts of content, reply in threads, and mention teammates without being online together. The feature builds on Blocks and Phase 3 collaboration goals, aiming to replace scattered feedback via email or chat with contextual, in-editor discussions that improve editorial workflows and multi-author content reviews.

Codeable Expert James Roberts also covered the release for his co-workers in WordPress 6.9: What To Expect, outlining key updates to the Site Editor, patterns, and design tools that make building full sites more intuitive. The article also explains what agencies and clients should do to prepare, test, and safely adopt the new features.

Gutenberg and other WordPress updates

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

In his video, WordPress 6.9 and More: Key Updates for Developers, Ryan Welcher gives you TL:DR of the latest What’s new for developers? (November 2025) post from the WordPress Developer Blog.

Gutenberg 22.2 RC 1 is now available for testing. It comprised 161 Pull Requests by 49 contributors, four of whom are first-timers. The release focuses on performance, block editor polish, and a series of accessibility and developer experience improvements. It is intended for testing ahead of the stable 22.2.0 release on December 3 and is not recommended for production sites.

In the next Gutenberg Changelog episode, I had a chat with JC Palmes, the principal technical manager at WebDevStudios, about how their team has totally jumped on the Blocks and block themes bandwagon. It’s been a game changer for their workflow and super helpful for their clients’ editorial teams, too. We also shared favorites features of the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release and the latest Gutenberg updates, 22.1 and 22.2. So, keep an eye out for the episode arriving in your favorite podcast app this weekend!

Have you been avoiding the WordPress Importer when moving sites? It received a major enhancement from Adam Zieliński and other contributors. Zieliński published the announcement on the Core Make Blog: WordPress Importer can now migrate URLs in your content. This enhancement made it feasible to us the WordPress importer for the Playground blueprint step importWxr and it is now also compatible with content built in block themes, as URL in navigation blocks and image references in background-image css are also converted to the new site.

WordPress for #nocode site builders and owners

If you need to add FAQ schema to your Accordion Block, Andrew Viney, developer from Bristol, UK, has you covered with his accordion-faq-schema-toggle plugin.

If you are a developer yourself, you can use Justin Tadlock’s Snippet: Schema.org microdata for Accordion block FAQs

Mohammad Shoeb announced that the free WPMozo Blocks Plugin for WordPress just got five new Blocks. The update introduces Hero Heading, Logo Showcase, Notice, Highlight Text, and Flipbox blocks, focused on speed, flexibility, and visual appeal. These blocks support layout and style customization, icons, gradients, hover effects, and responsive controls, enabling users to build standout sections, alerts, logo grids, and interactive content without performance loss or complex configuration.

Wes Theron published another nice tutorial for content creators on YouTube: How to add social icons to your WordPress site. He shows “you exactly how to add and customize social icons on your WordPress.com site, making it easy for visitors to connect with you across all your social platforms.”

Designing Block Themes

Bud Kraus wrote a tutorial on Scaling typeface gracefully with fluid typography that explains how to make font sizes adjust smoothly to different screen sizes using CSS functions like clamp(). He elaborates on how to use continuous scaling instead of fixed breakpoints, which helps improve readability and minimizes size jumps. The article provides examples for headings and body text, covers design tips, and shows how to implement fluid typography in WordPress themes.

Karol Król mentioned he was inspired by my talk at WordCamp Gdynia to explore the Create Block theme plugin some more. He created this tutorial on how to easily transfer Block Theme changes to another WordPress site

Elliot Richmond created a Block Theme Cheat Sheet for WordPress that collects key block theme concepts, file structure, and template examples in one place. It outlines essential theme.json settings, common templates and template parts, and useful block patterns for building modern block themes. The resource is designed as a quick reference for developers who want a practical, copy‑and‑paste style guide while learning or refining their block theme workflow.

Building Blocks

Bryce Culp of WebDev Studios created A Developer’s Guide: The Future of the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor. He explains modern block patterns, theme architecture, and tooling, emphasizing best practices for performance, reusability, and accessibility. The guide helps developers transition from classic approaches to a Gutenberg-first mindset, leveraging React-based blocks, block.json configuration, and evolving WordPress APIs to build scalable, future-ready experiences.

Jos Velasco, DreamHost, found a way to simplify WordPress Plugin development with Telex and shared his workflow in this post. He has some tips and consideration on how to best work with the AI Block builder.

What’s new with Playground

Fellyph Cintra announced that Debugging with Xdebug is now available in WordPress Playground letting WordPress developers better understand what’s happening when something breaks. Now you can pause WordPress, look at what’s going on, and move through each step of the process in a browser. It works with simple tools or code editors, needs little setup, and is great for learning, testing ideas, and fixing problems more easily.

Cintra also published Playground CLI, adds ImageMagick, SOAP, and AVIF support. These additions make it easier to work with images, talk to other online services, and test modern image formats in temporary WordPress sites. Together, they help developers and site builders try more real-world features without complex setup on their own computers.

The latest article by Fellyph Cintra reveals that Playground allows developers to create temporary sites with specific Gutenberg branches in their browser. You can use special Playground URLs or blueprints to access nightly or feature branches, test new editor features safely, share consistent environments, and give feedback earlier in the Gutenberg development process.

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s trunk branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

AI in WordPress

Jeff Paul announced AI Experiments Plugin v0.1.0 . Team rep in the AI Team, James Le Page wrote on X (former Twitter) “This is a pretty big release. It’s the first time all building blocks are used together and represents a really great reference for developers that surfaces in features that you can use right now.”

Ovidiu Galatan posted the Release announcement: MCP Adapter v0.3.0! This update brings official WordPress support for the Model Context Protocol. Version 0.3.0 is all about making things smoother with transport, better observability, and handling errors. They’ve unified the HTTP transport, put together a standard way to deal with WP_Error for MCP error responses, and revamped the observability handlers. Plus, they’ve standardized hook names, rolled out some detailed migration docs, and squashed some bugs, making sure everything works nicely with Abilities API v0.4.0 as part of WordPress’s awesome AI Building Blocks collection!

On his blog, James Le Page shared a two-part series about the Abilities API. The posts explain how WordPress “abilities” have changed from old permission systems to a clearer way of defining what users and tools can do. They describe abilities as easy-to-understand labels for capabilities used in core, plugins, and the editor. With examples of AI features, the series shows how abilities help developers provide safe actions, manage access, and create smoother user experiences.

• The Promise and History Of Abilities (1/2)
• Using Abilities To Build AI in WordPress (2/2)

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Munich got hit with the first snow for this Winter. It started slowly on Friday morning, and by the afternoon the flakes got larger and the white started to cover tree branches, roofs and cars. It might all be gone by tomorrow, though, as the weather forecast shows -7 °C (19.4 °F) with sunshine. I am still a Floridian Weather whimp, but I like the snow covering the overcast gray of an Autumn day. I just won’t go outside if I can help it.

WordPress 6.9 is almost there. If you need a full run down of the changes in the block editor, I’ve got you covered with the WordPress 6.9 Source of Truth, with screenshot and videos. It clocks in at 5,200+ words. The table of contents as well as the in-post tags will help you navigate it. And I am always here to answer your questions.

But wait there is more below,

Have a fabulous weekend, and if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, stay warm.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

First-time release lead Jonathan Bossenger worked on the Gutenberg 22.1. version. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 22.1? (18 November, 2025) he highlighted two major block updates and a performance improvement for the image block.

1. New Tabs block
2. HTML block updates
3. Image prefetching when expanding images in the editor

WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 2 was released this week. December 2 will be here soon enough for the final release.

Joe Dolson published a list of all the Accessibility Improvements in WordPress 6.9. More Dev Notes can be perused on the Make Blog

Sarim Javaid, Digital Ocean posted WordPress 6.9: What’s new, release date, features, and why it is important for your site on the Cloudways blog. “You’ll get faster load times, more streamlined site management, and new developer tools like APIs and automation features. Also, teams will benefit from block-level commenting for better collaboration” he wrote.

In this week’s stream, Jonathan Bossenger dives into testing WordPress 6.9, specifically focusing on the DataViews functionality. He starts by setting up his live stream, organizing processes, and installing necessary updates. Then, he explores the JavaScript packages involved, particularly the React components that power admin pages. Join him as he fumbles around, copy-pastes examples, and strives to get a basic implementation of DataViews working. If you enjoy watching someone learn through trial and error, give this video a like and subscribe.

JuanMa Garrido livestreamed about What’s new for Devs in Wp 6.9: Interactivity API

Upcoming WordPress 6.9 events

Maruti Mohanty plans a Workshop for November 27 at 10am UTC on How to Prepare Your WordPress Site for WordPress 6.9? via Learn WordPress meetup.

Also on November 27 at 12:00 UTC, JuanMa Garrido and Jonathan Bossenger invite you to the Developer Hours: WordPress 6.9 Developer Updates. A second edition, covering updates to Block Bindings and Interactivity API.

If you missed the first edition, it’s now available on WordPressTV: Developer Hours: WordPress 6.9 DataViews/DataForm & Abilities API.

The State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg‘s annual keynote will be live streamed from San Francisco on December 2 at 8pm UTC. For the first time, we are celebrating SOTW alongside the official release of WordPress 6.9 on the same day. Expect demos, and even get an early preview of the future beyond for WordPress. All followed by a Q & A with Matt Mullenweg.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Justin Tadlock just dropped his awesome new Media Data WordPress Plugin, which is all about pulling in embedded metadata from your uploaded media files—think EXIF data, ID3 tags, camera settings, dimensions, and a lot more. The plugin comes with two blocks: one to hold everything together and others to showcase specific bits of metadata. Plus, it works seamlessly with WordPress 6.9’s block bindings, so you can easily make custom connections between blocks. It’s up on GitHub while waiting for approval in the directory.

Core contributors are getting ready to move the Post Editor into an iframe in WordPress 7.0. This change is all about giving the editing experience a fresh, modern vibe and cutting down on distractions from admin styles and those third-party scripts. Aki Hamano, a core committer, laid out the plans last week in a developer note: Preparing the Post Editor for Full iframe Integration

Rae Morey, The Repository, reports on the various concerns from other contributors in Core Contributors Prepare to iframe the Post Editor in 7.0, Prompting Backward-Compatibility Concerns.

As a follow-up, Aki Hamano started a discussion on GitHub on Documentation to help with the migration to Block API version 3 #73138, with comments from Ella van Durpe and Riad Benguella with ideas on how to navigate the migration.

In her post Introducing Accelerate: Redefining Experimentation in WordPress, Gianna Legate, Head of Content at Human Made, explores how the new Accelerate platform bridges WordPress and modern marketing. The plugin enables marketers to run A/B tests, personalize content by geography, and promote high-performing blocks directly within the editor, shifting WordPress from content-centric publishing toward data-driven customer engagement without requiring external tools or custom development work. The premium plugin is free for up to one million monthly page views.

Hans-Gerd Gerhards announced an update to his plugin Dynamic Header & Navigation for Block Themes, a lightweight WordPress plugin developed specifically as a navigation solution for most Block Themes. “I am very pleased that my plugin now has more than 100 active installations.” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Johanne Courtright published her The Complete Guide to Groundworx Carousel Block. She walks through setting up responsive carousels using Splide.js and Gutenberg, exploring nine professional templates and eight responsive breakpoints for precise control. The guide covers styling via theme.json, creating custom templates using CSS Grid, and building reusable block variations for your team’s consistent configurations across WordPress projects. The plugin is available in the WordPress repository: Groundworx Carousel v 2.0 was released last week after a complete redesign.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Ellen Bauer‘s talk at WordCamp Kansai is now available on WordPressTV: Building a WooCommerce Store Using Block Themes and AI Site Building. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to use a lightweight starter block theme and AI site-building tools to create a fully editable WooCommerce store design that you can refine directly in the WordPress editor.

Rich Tabor continues his explorations. The second post is all about the Application Menu. “An application menu would act as a consistent anchor—an always-present spot where you can see the full range of available actions. Not a replacement for other controls, and not a move to strip the interface down.” he wrote.

Ryan Welcher livestreamed part 3 of his quest to use every Interactivity API feature in one site

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Before you dive headfirst into all the big and small changes and pick your favorites, make sure to read these preliminary thoughts about this post and how to use it. If you have questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.

Huge Thank You to all collaborators on this post: Anne McCarthy, Sarah Norris, Ella van Durpe, Ben Dwyer, Jonathan Bossenger, Justin Tadlock, Dave Smith and a lot more. It’s takes a village…

Table of Contents

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

• 11/25/2025
  • Added Dev Note on miscellaneous block editor changes
  • Added link to the Field Guide
• 11/24/2025
  • Added Dev Notes on HTML API updates and pn PHP 8.5 Support
• 11/21/2025
  • Updated screenshots and videos for Stretchy Text section, reflecting changes in RC2.
• 11/20/2025
  • added accessibility updates section.
  • Added Dev Notes on Admin Search query, IE-related updates and URL escaping functions.
  • Updated the featured image to the latest version of the highlight grid.
• 11/19/2025:
  • Added credits
  • Added tags to headings,
  • Added Dev Notes on WordPress email, UTF-8 support
  • Added horizontal scroll bar feature to Math Block
  • Fixed some typos.

Important note/guidelines

Please do not copy and paste what is in this post since this will be shared with many people. This should be used to inspire your own content and to ensure that you have the best information about this release. If you do copy and paste, keep in mind that others might do the same, opening the door for some awkwardness around duplicated content out on the web. 

• Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high-level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.
• Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more.

Overview 

Note: As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 6.9.

WordPress 6.9 introduces several new features and performance enhancements.

Key new features include:

• Collaborative Feedback and Content Control: Block-level Notes facilitate team feedback, allowed blocks UI, Abilities API, visual drag and drop, binding blocks to external controls.
• New Blocks: Discover Accordion, Terms Query, Math, and Time to Read blocks.
• Typography Enhancements: Benefit from new text-fitting typography.
• Dashboard-wide Command Palette: The Command Palette will  help users streamline their workflow across WordPress Admin pages. 

Performance improvements include:

• Optimized Loading: On-demand block-style loading and faster emoji detection.
• Efficient Scheduling: Optimized cron execution.

Furthermore, WordPress 6.9 lays the groundwork for future AI integration with the new Abilities API, which enables secure automation through machine-readable WordPress capabilities.

WordPress 6.9 is set to be released on December 2, 2025. 

Of note, this release includes Gutenberg plugin versions 20.5 – 21.9.

Important links:

• Roadmap to 6.9
• WordPress 6.9 Development Cycle
• What’s new for developers: June, July, August, September, October, November)
• 6.9 Field Guide
• State of the Word 2025 will include highlights and demos of the most important features of this release. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube 

Assets 

In this Google Drive folder you can view all assets in this document.

Tags

To make this document easier to navigate based on specific audiences, the following tags are used liberally: 

• [end user]: end user focus. 
• [theme author]: block or classic theme author. 
• [plugin author]: plugin author, whether block or otherwise.
• [developer]: catch-all term for more technical folks. 
• [site admin]: this includes a “builder” type. 
• [enterprise]: specific items that would be of interest to or particularly impact enterprise-level folks
• [all]: broad impact to every kind of WordPress user. 

How can you use these? Use your browser’s Find capability and search for the string including the brackets. Then use the arrows to navigate through the post from one result to the next.

Command Palette everywhere ^[all]

A couple of years ago the Command Palette was first released for the Site Editor. It provides content creators and administrators with a quick search and command execution tool. Invoked by Ctrl+K or Cmd+K. It is now available from any admin screen and helps streamline content creation as well as administering a WordPress site. It provides shortcuts to places otherwise only available by navigating multiple menu levels deep. 

Technically, this change extracts navigation commands from `@wordpress/edit-site` to `@wordpress/core-commands`, making them universally accessible. This architectural shift sets the foundation for admin-wide command integration in WordPress 6.9 and beyond, potentially reducing the need for repetitive clicking through admin menus.

• For developers the new useCommands hook was introduced. (71603)

Block editor updates

Notes ^[all]

Asynchronous collaboration comes to WordPress via the new Notes feature and rings in the 3rd Phase of Gutenberg. Site owners, Editors and Authors can collaborate by leaving comment directly on the post or page, attached to the blocks in the editor. The notes are threaded, resolveable, and can be reopened as well. Add an access notes from the Block toolbar and via the sidebar. Post authors will receive email notification when notes are added to the content.

Notes are by default enabled for Posts and Pages. They can be enabled also for other content post types via the `register_post_type` function. 

register_post_type( 'book', array(
	'label' => 'Books',
	'public' => true,
	'show_in_rest' => true,
	'supports' => array(
		'title',
		'editor' => array( 'notes' => true ),
		'author',
	),
) );

register_post_type( 'book', array(
	'label' => 'Books',
	'public' => true,
	'show_in_rest' => true,
	'supports' => array(
		'title',
		'editor' => array( 'notes' => true ),
		'author',
	),
) );

More details on handling Notes programmatically can be found in the Dev Note: Notes feature in WordPress 6.9.

Visual Drag & Drop ^{[end user]}

Drag-and-drop just got smarter. Blocks now show live visual feedback as you reposition them, making layout building more intuitive and precise. You’ll see exactly where elements land before releasing, accelerating the creative process. (67470). Currently, this only works for single blocks. Drag and Drop of multiple blocks is slated for WordPress 7.0.

UI for managing allowed Blocks in Templates and Patterns.  ^{[end user][site admin]}

WordPress now makes managing allowed blocks simpler with a new UI tucked in Advanced settings. Previously, developers had to edit block markup directly in code view—not user-friendly. This updates makes things easier for website admins, theme builders, and agencies enforcing specific block rules in patterns and templates. While agencies already handled this via code, the new interface offers a nicer interaction model. It’s part of WordPress’s broader mission: letting users build complex sites without touching code at all.  (72191)

Hide and Show Blocks ^{[end user][site admin]}

WordPress 6.9 introduces long-awaited control to hide blocks in the editor while preserving their structure within templates. This initial implementation provides content creators and designers with the ability to manage blocks that are not always displayed, such as seasonal content or conditional elements.

Instead of deleting and recreating blocks, users can now simply toggle their visibility, retaining all settings. This foundational feature paves the way for more sophisticated conditional display options in future releases, potentially including role-based or time-based visibility controls. (71203) 

Additional CSS control moved
^{[end user][site admin] [theme author]}

Theme builders might go searching for the Additional CSS controls. They were moved into the ellipsis menu in the header of the Styles page on either side of the screen (71550) 

Copy Styles keyboard shortcut
^{[end user][site admin]}

A new keyboard shortcut helps with pasting styles from one block to another and can speed up content creation workflows: cmd/ctrl + options/alt + v (69196) 

Block Style Variations in Style Book
^{[end user][site admin] [theme author]}

To make the Stylebook even more comprehensive, it now surfaces block styles for core blocks as well as custom blocks. This makes it possible to change block style variations site-wide in one screen (70448).

The Starter Patterns modal for all post types. ^{[theme author] [plugin author][enterprise]}

With WordPress 6.9, contributors addressed a limitation in the starter pattern modal, which previously appeared exclusively when creating pages. This restriction is now removed from the `StartPageOptions` component, enabling the modal to display across all post types where patterns exist. The fix resolves a regression introduced in earlier pulls, expanding design flexibility for WordPress content creators working with diverse content structures.(69753)

Why iframe the Post Editor?
^{[plugin author][enterprise]}

The process to restructure how the WordPress post editor works started a few years ago.  WordPress 6.9 begins transitioning the editor into this isolated iframe, with full completion coming in WordPress 7.0.  Think of an iframe like a sandbox—a separate container within a webpage. Currently, the editor runs in the same space as WordPress’s admin interface, causing styling conflicts. This separation prevents admin styles from interfering with content editing, making the editor preview match what readers actually see. Plugin developers need to update older blocks to work with this new setup or they might stop functioning properly. 

The Dev note Preparing the Post Editor for Full iframe Integration has more details. And in the comments many immediate questions have been answered. 

Relevant bug fixes for backward compatibility checks ^{[theme author] [plugin author][site admin]}

Certain bugs have been around for a while and developers often have found work arounds. Now that those bugs are fixed, it might be possible that the work around don’t work any more and it’s feasible to remove it. 

• Comments Pagination: Remove unwanted bottom margin from links. (70360)
• Remove screencast.com embed block variation. (70480)
• Tag Cloud: Remove unnecessary full-width padding. (69725)
• HTML Block: Remove space below textarea. (70055)
• Fix : Calendar block: Colors do not change between global styles and theme.json. (70184)
• Image Block: Preserve line breaks in media caption. (70476)
• Search Block: Move search setting to inspector. (70144)

New Blocks ^[all]

WordPress 6.9 brings six new blocks to WordPress editor: an Accordion block and its nested InnerBlocks, a Time-to-read block that also can show the word count of a post or page, the Term Query block, and the Math block to display mathematical formulas in science and essay posts. Comment handling also became easier with two more blocks, Comment Count and Comment Link. 

Accordion Block

The Accordion Block has been long awaited and it is now available to all WordPress users. It’s a nested structure using Accordion Block, Accordion Item, Accordion Heading and Accordion Panel blocks. 

An Accordion block has multiple Accordion Items, each comprising of a Accordion Heading + Icon and an Accordion Panel with the content. 

The default styling is minimal and opens a lot of design possibilities for theme builders to cover all the use cases. On the Developer blog you’ll find a tutorial of the various methods for styling an Accordion block, using the example of an FAQ page (64119)(71222)(71388).

The Snippets section of the Developer Blog shows how to add Schema.org microdata for Accordion block FAQs

Term Query Block

Traditionally, creating category and tag pages has been complex and required custom queries and workarounds. The new Terms Query block offers a built-in way to display and organize categories and tags, similar to how the Query block manages posts. (70720)

There are also supporting blocks: 

• Term Template block
• Term Name block
• Term Count block

Together with the already existing Term Description block, this additional support for display of categories or tags is particularly useful for directory and magazine sites who provide content filters and subpages for their readers. The interface provides an `order` and `order-by` sorting in a single dropdown. All blocks have the necessary design tools for styling and the Term Count block also has a toggle to make it a link. For those working extensively with taxonomies, the ongoing hierarchy discussion outlines future enhancements to taxonomy handling in WordPress.

Time to Read Block

The Time to Read block, available in the Gutenberg plugin for a long time went through an extended accessibility review before it was added to WordPress Core. 

It now has a toggle control to display a range of time rather than a fixed average reading time. It also comes with a variation to display a word count for the post or page it’s used on (71606) (71841). 

Math Block

With the Math Block content creators can now add mathematical formulas in LaTeX syntax to their post and pages. The LaTeX syntax can also be used together with the inline Math format.

Longer formulas are handled with a horizontal scrollbar.

Comment Count and Comment Link Blocks

Two new comment blocks help theme builders to handle comment count and comment links separately. Both blocks have been available in the Gutenberg plugin for a few years and only for the Site editor. Earlier this year, they came out of experimentation and were made available for all editor screens. So now a content creator can for instance include a links to the comment section on top of the post and be more deliberate in allowing access to comments only on certain posts. 

Updates to existing blocks

For WordPress 6.9, contributors standardized most blocks’ Inspector settings to use the ToolsPanel component, bringing visual consistency across the editor. The shift grants users granular control over displayed settings while simplifying how developers inject additional options into existing groups. The ToolsPanel aligns Inspector controls with the Styles sidebar, already leveraging the component extensively, creating a cohesive authoring experience. (67813)

Stretchy Text for Heading and Paragraph blocks. ^[all]

Both Heading and Paragraph blocks now support a new “Stretchy” variation that stretches text to the full width of its container. The transform tool from the button tools bar allowing users to convert text into this stretchy format. 

Content creators can find these variations also in the Block inserter or via the Slash command. 

Stretchy Text offers designers and content creators an additional creative tool, opening up numerous possibilities for visually appealing text, especially when paired with suitable fonts. 

Developers can add support for this feature to any Custom text block via block.json. (73148)(73056) (73067)(72923)

{
	"supports":{
		"typography":{
				"fitText": true,
		}
	}
}

{
	"supports":{
		"typography":{
				"fitText": true,
		}
	}
}

Button Block ^{[end user] [siteadmin]}

Button Block now sports HTML element selection in Advanced settings, letting creators choose between semantic <a> links and true <button> elements. This tackles accessibility headaches where users mistakenly treat buttons as links, confusing screen readers. The dropdown educates users about proper usage, empowering developers and non-coders alike to build accessible interfaces without custom code (70139).

Cover Block improved video handling ^[all]

The Cover Block now supports poster images for videos, enhancing accessibility for users with slow internet or mobile devices. These images can be easily added by dragging and dropping the file onto the Poster Image control, streamlining the post creation process (70816) (71039)  (70939).

Details Block ^{[end user][site admin][plugin author]}

The Formatting features are now enabled for the Details Block, similar to the Paragraph block. Users can now use special formatting like Strikethrough, Sub or Superscript, and highlighting. This also opens up the list to be extended via plugins. 

Gallery Block ^[all]

This next WordPress version adds the support for gallery-wide aspect ratio setting to the Gallery Block. User can now set the same aspect ratio for all images in the gallery with one click from the sidebar. (71116) (72104).

Theme developers can control the availability via theme.json. The code snippet shows an example of removing the default choice defaultAspectRatios and only offering two choices in the editor.

"settings":{
        "blocks" {
            "core/gallery":{
                "dimensions":{
                    "defaultAspectRatios":false,
                    "aspectRatios": [
                        {
                             "name": "Square - 1:1",
                             "slug": "square",
                             "ratio": "1"
                        },
                        {
                             "name": "Wide - 16:9",
                             "slug": "16-9",
                             "ratio": "16/9"
                        }
                  ]
             }          
         }
    }

"settings":{
        "blocks" {
            "core/gallery":{
                "dimensions":{
                    "defaultAspectRatios":false,
                    "aspectRatios": [
                        {
                             "name": "Square - 1:1",
                             "slug": "square",
                             "ratio": "1"
                        },
                        {
                             "name": "Wide - 16:9",
                             "slug": "16-9",
                             "ratio": "16/9"
                        }
                  ]
             }          
         }
    }

Heading Block CSS specificity fix ^[all]

WordPress 6.9 fixes a specificity issue with the Heading block’s background padding. Previously, padding styles applied to headings with backgrounds were affecting other blocks that use heading elements, such as the Accordion Heading block. This fix ensures that background padding is only applied to actual Heading blocks.

The CSS selector for applying padding to headings with backgrounds has been made more specific. The selector now targets .wp-block-heading.has-background instead of just heading element tags (h1, h2, etc) with the .has-background class. 

Dev note: Heading Block CSS Specificity Fix in WordPress 6.9

Navigation Block ^[all]

The Navigation block in this WordPress release has been significantly  improved. Builders can now find the create page functionality directly from the link UI dropdown and the process of creating a page is streamlined by an additional “publish immediately” checkbox. (71188)(71487)

Similarly the button block inside the navigation block also has the option to create a new page. It’s a slightly different approach, but it helps with streamlining site building work. (69368)

Site builders can now customize aria-labels independently of menu titles, which is great for accessibility. The text box is located under Advanced > Menu Name (66935)

The hamburger icon now consists of individual SVG lines, opening up more styling and animation possibilities. Plus, the automatic panel expansion for Navigation options in site editing makes the workflow smoother. (71791)(56346) (69343

To improve the robustness of the Navigation, the Navigation Link Block is now creating the URL dynamically and even if the slug of the page changes the link will be automatically updated.(72422) A similar mechanism also was applied to the Navigation Submenu block. 

The submenu control of the background is now much easier. A new slider control for the overlay helps with the design. (69379)

In template part view, a new button Edit Navigation helps users to update Navigation block settings and menu items directly from this view.

Query Loop Blocks ^[all]

Blocks primarily used in a Query Loop context received a few quality-of-life enhancements and accessibility controls. 

Content Block

The Content block in WordPress 6.9 now features a `tagName` selector in its Advanced Settings. This allows theme builders to replace the default div wrapper with semantic HTML elements (like main, section, or article), improving accessibility, SEO, and content structure. This powerful tool enhances how blocks align with web standards. (70698)

Date Block supports custom dates.

The Date block has undergone significant enhancements. It now supports custom dates, and its existing Post Date and Last Modified Date variations have been updated to utilize Block Bindings. This change involved creating a new binding source, core/post-data, which exposes the publish date as date and the last modified date as modified for any given post (70585).

Query Title get Post Type label

The Query Loop block now supports a new Post Type Label variation. This feature enables users to display the post type of the current item within the block, which is especially helpful for showcasing the post type name when creating custom post type archive templates. (71167)

Query Total

The total number of query results return are displayed via the Query Total block. In WordPress 6.9, this block received color controls for styling. (69500)

RSS Block ^{[end user]}

The RSS Block is a block to display another website’s RSS feed in a post or template. This version holds two small updates: An added option to display the links in a new tab or window and to control the `rel` attributes. RSS feeds from third-party sources sometimes include HTML entities in their titles. In a bug fix, the RSS Block now displays titles correctly. 

Separator Block
^{[theme author][site admin][plugin author]}

A small update to the Separator block opens the styling options for designers: The HTML element can now be changed from a `<hr>` to a `<div/>` tag in not only increasing the range of design option but also accessibility. (70185)

Social Icons Block ^{[developers][enterprise]}

The update to the Social Icons Block enables now extenders to register custom Social Icons variations. This way, any group of Social Icons that are relevant to the site owner can be created and used in the content, for instance icons of various Podcast directories, or to add icons for payment systems not available in core. 

On the WordPress Developer Block developers will find a tutorial on how to register their own social media icons. Plugin developers can now remove existing icons and register their own. (70261)

A bug fix now makes sure the social icons honor theme.json styles for typography. (70380)

"core/social-links": {
		"typography": {
			"fontSize": "var(--wp--preset--font-size--x-large)"
		}
},

"core/social-links": {
		"typography": {
			"fontSize": "var(--wp--preset--font-size--x-large)"
		}
},

Table Block ^{[end users][site admin]}

The Table block received more robust handling of Markdown table parsing, specifically retaining alignment from a Markdown table. 

| A – Left | B – Centered | C – Right | D – None |

| :——- | :———-: | ——–: | ——– |

| 100      |     150      |       200 | 250      |

| 200      |     250      |       300 | 350      |

| 300      |     350      |       400 | 450      |

| 400      |     450      |       500 | 550      |

| 500      |     550      |       600 | 650      |

The above Markdown example parsed into the block editor canvas is automatically converted to the Table block.

Video Block ^[all]

The Video Block can now handle multiple language tracks with the option to set one as the default track. It’s also possible to add a poster image to the video block to improve accessibility for visitors with slow internet connections (71039) (70939)(70227).

Theme.json and Global Styles
^{[developers][enterprise][site admin]}

Form elements in theme.json

WordPress theme development reaches new enrichment with theme.json support for form element styling. Developers can now target text-based controls and select/dropdown elements through the styles.elements property, defining colors, borders, and typography directly in Global Styles. 

This eliminates custom CSS dependencies, allowing search forms, comment forms, and plugin-generated forms to automatically inherit the site’s design system. (34198) (70378) (70379) Below snippet shows an example for the textInput element. 

"elements": {
	"textInput": {
			"border": {
				"radius": "0",
				"style": "solid",
				"width": "1px",
				"color": "red"
			},
			"color": {
				"text": "var(--wp--preset--color--theme-2)"
			},
			"typography": {
				"fontFamily": "var(--wp--preset--font-family--inter)"
			}
		}
}

"elements": {
	"textInput": {
			"border": {
				"radius": "0",
				"style": "solid",
				"width": "1px",
				"color": "red"
			},
			"color": {
				"text": "var(--wp--preset--color--theme-2)"
			},
			"typography": {
				"fontFamily": "var(--wp--preset--font-family--inter)"
			}
		}
}

An additional resource is the tutorial on the WordPress Developer blog: How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover

Border Radius presets supported

It’s now possible to define border radius presets in the `theme.json` for your theme. The user experience changes slightly with the numbers of presets: up until eight, a user can enable the border radius along a slider. For nine and more present the user uses a drop-down select menu. Users can always access custom value input through the custom button to the right of the control.

As an example you can add the following to the `settings` property of your `theme.json` file. (67544). \

{ 
"settings"{
	"border": {
		"radiusSizes": [
				{
					"name": "Small",
					"slug": "small",
					"size": "2px"
				},
				{
					"name": "Medium",
					"slug": "medium",
					"size": "4px"
				},
				{
					"name": "Large",
					"slug": "large",
					"size": "6px"
				}
			]
	}
}

{ 
"settings"{
	"border": {
		"radiusSizes": [
				{
					"name": "Small",
					"slug": "small",
					"size": "2px"
				},
				{
					"name": "Medium",
					"slug": "medium",
					"size": "4px"
				},
				{
					"name": "Large",
					"slug": "large",
					"size": "6px"
				}
			]
	}
}

• The Dev note has been published: Theme.json Border Radius Presets Support in WordPress 6.9
• A step-by-step guide can be found on the WordPress Developer blog: Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9. 

Button element inherits typography

With the release of WordPress 6.9, the button element defined in the default `theme.json` can inherit typographical styles from its parent. (70676) 

The full styles for the element now look like this:

{
	"styles": {
		"elements": {
			"button": {
				"typography": {
					"fontSize": "inherit",
					"fontFamily": "inherit",
					"fontStyle": "inherit",
					"fontWeight": "inherit",
					"letterSpacing": "inherit",
					"textTransform": "inherit",
					"lineHeight": "inherit",
					"textDecoration": "none"
				}
			}
	}
}

{
	"styles": {
		"elements": {
			"button": {
				"typography": {
					"fontSize": "inherit",
					"fontFamily": "inherit",
					"fontStyle": "inherit",
					"fontWeight": "inherit",
					"letterSpacing": "inherit",
					"textTransform": "inherit",
					"lineHeight": "inherit",
					"textDecoration": "none"
				}
			}
	}
}

A closer look at performance optimizations
^{[developers][enterprise]}

WordPress 6.9 speeds up your site through several technical improvements. Scripts load more efficiently with priority ordering and move to footers when appropriate. Stylesheets load only when needed, particularly in classic themes, while styles for hidden blocks are omitted. The inline style limit increased to 40K. A new optimization system enables previously impossible efficiency gains. Database queries, UTF-8 processing, and cron tasks all improved. The Video block also eliminates layout shifts. Overall: more efficient performance across the board.

Details are in this Dev Note: WordPress 6.9 Frontend Performance Field Guide.

Improved accessibility across Core and Block editor

WordPress 6.9 delivers substantial accessibility enhancements across Core and Gutenberg, implementing 33 Core improvements and 44 Gutenberg refinements. Core updates address administration interfaces, customizer tools, login and registration workflows, media library functionality, and bundled themes.

Key changes include enhanced screen reader notifications, improved CSS-generated content handling, refined focus management, and superior color contrast adjustments. Gutenberg advances feature new accessible blocks, component redesigns, and data views improvements ensuring consistent editor interfaces.

Updates span Cover blocks, Site Title, Navigation elements, Button blocks, and Columns, alongside Component refinements addressing modal dialogs, font size pickers, and link controls.

Data Views enhancements prioritize checkbox visibility and text-based actions. Editor modifications involve iframe CSS classes, pattern modal behavior, and focus management within Global Styles panels.

These comprehensive improvements reinforce WordPress’s commitment to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines standards, enabling creators to develop inclusive content while providing developers cleaner, more accessible code foundations for theme and plugin development.

Details on the developer note Accessibility Improvements in WordPress 6.9

New and updated APIs for Developers
^{[developers][enterprise]}

Abilities API

WordPress 6.9 features the Abilities API, a new foundational system designed to standardize how plugins, themes, and the WordPress core register and expose their capabilities. This API provides a unified, machine-readable registry of functionalities, ensuring consistent discovery, validation, and execution across various contexts, including PHP, REST API endpoints, and upcoming AI integrations.

More resources: 

• Dev Note:Abilities API in WordPress 6.9
• AI Building Blocks for WordPress

Block Bindings API

Updates to the Block Bindings API include enabling it for a few more core blocks. The refactor of the Date block is one of those examples. (70585)

Another is enabling Image block’s caption data to be available for Synced Pattern Overrides. (72476).  

The function `getFieldsList` was available via the Gutenberg plugin and has been merged into WordPress Core now. Also, the attributes UI in the Block editor is now more flexible and handles any attributes from plugin developers. [Details will be available on the DevNote.]
More details can be found in the Dev Note: Block Bindings improvements in WordPress 6.9

DataViews and DataForm

WordPress 6.9 marks substantial progress for DataViews and DataForm components. There are no user-facing updates. Plugin developers can use the components for their products and on admin pages. 

The Field API now handles array, boolean, email, media, date, datetime, telephone, password, URL, and color types with comprehensive validation support. 

DataViews gained sophisticated filtering with type-specific operators, infinite scroll capabilities, and improved table layouts featuring alignment and action column pinning. 

DataForm received new layout options including modal panels and card designs, alongside controls matching the expanded field types. 

The new DataViewsPicker component is a selection-focused variant of DataViews designed for building item picker interfaces. It extends the familiar DataViews API with selection management and action buttons, making it ideal for workflows where users need to browse and pick items from a dataset. 

These enhancements collectively strengthen the block editor’s data management infrastructure, enabling developers to build more capable interfaces while maintaining consistency across WordPress’s content administration.

Dev Note: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 6.9

Interactivity API

Updates in WordPress 6.9 the Interactivity API with standardized directive IDs using triple-dash syntax, enabling multiple directives on single elements. The deprecated data-wp-ignore directive is removed. New TypeScript helpers AsyncAction and TypeYield improve asynchronous action typing. Client-side navigation improvements include dynamic stylesheet and script module loading, support for nested router regions, new attachTo options for overlays, and enhanced getServerState and getServerContext functions for proper state management across page transitions.

The Dev Notes provide more details and code examples. 

• Interactivity API’s client navigation improvements in WordPress 6.9
• Changes to the Interactivity API in WordPress 6.9

Output buffering for the rendered template 

WordPress 6.9 introduces a new way for plugin developers to handle HTML output, called the “template enhancement output buffer.” It standardizes output, meaning instead of plugins creating their own temporary storage for HTML, WordPress now provides a built-in system. If a plugin developer wants to use this feature, they just need to add a special wp_template_enhancement_output_buffer filter before the template is loaded. This system is designed for making small improvements or additions to a page, not for essential parts of the website’s functionality. If a website doesn’t want to use this buffer, it can disable it by filtering wp_should_output_buffer_template_for_enhancement to be false. 

For older (classic) WordPress themes, this buffer is now enabled by default. This allows them to load block styles only when needed and move them to the <head> section of the HTML, which can significantly reduce the amount of CSS on a page. Even if the page has already started loading, you can still send HTTP headers (like Server-Timing) while the output is being buffered. #64126). #43258 (PR#8412) More details are available in the Dev Note. 

Blocks: Efficiently find and traverse blocks in a document. 

The Block Processor class is now available in WordPress 6.9 to efficiently scan through and manipulate block structure in a lazy and streaming manner. For certain workloads this should dramatically improve the performance of processing code, and even more importantly, prevent out-of-memory crashes in the worst cases. [Core#9105] (61401). 

It’s an more 

Do you need to do any of the following kinds of things? Check out WP_Block_Processor!

• Checking if a post contains a block of a given type.
• Counting or detecting all of the kinds of blocks present in a post.
• Modifying a block of a given kind within a post, not touching any of the other blocks.
• Finding the “wrapper element” surrounding the inner blocks and adding a class name to it.
• Extract sections of a document as blocks, modify it, serialize it back, and replace the original blocks with the new HTML.

Dev Note: Introducing the streaming block parser in WordPress 6.9

More Developer Notes for WordPress 6.9 release

• Modernizing UTF-8 support in WordPress 6.9
• Consistent Cache Keys for Query Groups in WordPress 6.9
• Miscellaneous Developer-focused Changes in 6.9
• More-reliable email in WordPress 6.9
• Admin menu search query changed
• Legacy Internet Explorer Code Removed
• URL-escaping functions can support HTTPS as the default protocol in WordPress 6.9
• Updates to the HTML API in 6.9
• PHP 8.5 support in WordPress 6.9
• Miscellaneous Editor Changes in WordPress 6.9

There are a few dev notes in the publishing queue, including a list of accessibility updates. This post will be updated once available.

We are getting close to the WordPress 6.9 release. Below you find links to published Developer notes. You can also wait for the Source of Truth to be published next week to learn about besides developer changes coming to WordPress 6.9.

On a personal note, I had great fun facilitating the first WordPress Meetup in München after an 11-month hiatus. I met the wonderful people who co-founded the meeting back in 2014, the same year I started co-organizing a meetup in Naples. It’s quite a mixed group of bloggers, developers, designers and agencies. I am glad to now have a local meetup to go to every month and learn more about the German WordPress users and businesses. If you don’t have a local WordPress meetup, you might consider starting one. It’s a lot of fun networking with like-minded people.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Gutenberg 22.1 RC1 is now available for testing.

WordPress 6.9 RC1 is now available and it’s time for you, if you haven’t yet, to test your themes, plugins and custom code against the new version. The contributors also published Dev Notes for this release.

The Source of Truth for WordPress 6.9 is in review and on the publishing schedule here for November 18th, 2025. You can take a sneak peek of the draft on Google Doc, in case you need it earlier to comply with any of your publishing deadlines.

State of the Word 2025 will include highlights and demos of the most important features of this release. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube.

Dev notes for WordPress 6.9

More dev notes are available on the Make Core blog.

• Theme.json Border Radius Presets Support in WordPress 6.9.
• Heading Block CSS Specificity Fix in WordPress 6.9
• Interactivity API’s client navigation improvements in WordPress 6.9
• Changes to the Interactivity API in WordPress 6.9
• Preparing the Post Editor for Full iframe Integration
• Block Bindings improvements in WordPress 6.9
• Theme.json Border Radius Presets Support in WordPress 6.9
• DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 6.9
• Abilities API in WordPress 6.9
• Prettier Emails: Supporting Inline Embedded Images

Dev notes on accessibility updates, frontend performance enhancements, the underlying architecture of the new Notes feature, updates to the HTML API, the new Block Processor, and PHP and UTF_8 supports are still in the works and are expected to be published next week together with the Fieldguide.

I mentioned them before, there are a few tutorials on the WordPress Developer blog about how to use WordPress 6.9 features.

• How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover
• Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9
• Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
• Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

The latest monthly roundup post is What’s new for developers? (November 2025) was again stoke full of information. It covers al lot you might already know, but also lesser-known updates, like PHP-only block registration, enhanced Gallery aspect ratios. WordPress Playground gains file browser capabilities; AI team stabilizes core packages implementing server-side Abilities API.

Jonathan Bossenger published an introduction to the WordPress Abilities API that’s coming to WordPress in the next release. You’ll learn what this new Ability will unlock for developers and how to use it in your plugins and themes now.

Block editor-related talks from WordCamp Canada

The team of WordCamp Canada published the recordings of the talks on WordPress TV here is a selections:

Back on the Block: My Reasons for Returning to the Full Site Editor with Joe R Simpson. This interactive presentation explores WordPress’s current state, Full Site Editor capabilities, and emerging features like AI and the Style Guide.

Building for Content Editors: Why Designers and Developers Need To Care More with Jesse Dyck. Block editors offer powerful flexibility but require deliberate curation through guardrails and customization to prevent brand inconsistency, accessibility failures, and editor overwhelm while empowering content teams to work efficiently.

Interactivity API for common DOM interactions with Austin Atkinson. Leveraging WordPress’s Interactivity API to handle typical front-end interactions—like clicks, hovers, form submissions, or dynamic content updates—by directly manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) rather than relying on separate JavaScript frameworks or libraries.

The Block Developer Cookbook: WCEH 2025 Edition with Ryan Welcher. Expand your block development skills with hands-on guidance and real-world examples.

Plugins, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In episode 445 of the WPBuilds podcast, Nathan Wrigley interviews Nick Hamze, a lawyer-turned-Pokemon-card-shop-owner who builds peculiar WordPress blocks using AI. Hamze championed fun over convention, running Automatic’s merch operations before launching Izzy’s Gym. Armed with Telex, he constructs dozens of quirky blocks—dice rollers, glitchy text effects, custom integrations—in minutes. He dismisses distribution concerns, arguing WordPress needs personality restored; creation trumps monetization. Hamze advocates democratizing development: AI enables everyone, not just coders, to build niche solutions.

In his post Breadcrumbs Reimagined. Again., Justin Tadlock announced the update to version 4.0 of his Breadcrumbs block plugin. The update makes previously developer-only features available in the editor, including customizable labels and options for post taxonomy. The public API has been simplified, now offering easier function calls and JSON-LD support for SEO. While the change may affect some users, the plugin now allows for advanced breadcrumb setup without needing coding skills, while still providing robust tools for developers. Check out the full changelog with all the updates.

Andrew Butler, a Content Strategist over at WordPress VIP, reported on the future of collaborative editing and how it’s making teamwork way easier. Think Google Docs-style editing right in WordPress! Now, multiple folks can jump in and edit posts together, seeing each other’s cursors and presence indicators in real time. Plus, those in-line Notes are super handy for providing feedback without having to leave the editor. WordPress VIP tested and implemented what will come to WordPress core in upcoming releases. Anne McCarthy mentioned contributor efforts in her Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025)

Joe Fylan shared via WordPress.com blog, 12 Cool AI-Powered WordPress Blocks Made with Telex, showcasing Automattic’s free browser-based Telex tool that transforms plain-language descriptions into functional WordPress blocks. Featured blocks range from interactive games like Minesweeper and personality quizzes to practical tools like recipe publishers, weather forecasters, and scroll indicators. If you have an idea for block but are not a programmer, you can create, customize, download, and share blocks without coding knowledge, making block development accessible to everyone.

If you are keen to learn how to do some more comprehensive prompting, Check out Tammie Lister‘s site Blocktober.fun where you can look at her collection of blocks and the instructions she gave to the AI.

Jake Spurlock shared an update on his Raptorize plugins to bring it into the block ear: Raptorize It: 15 Years Later, Now With Blocks. “Look, I could tell you it’s about maintaining legacy code or demonstrating modern WordPress development practices. And sure, those are valid reasons. But really, it’s 2025 and the world still needs more velociraptors on websites. Some traditions are worth preserving.”, he wrote. You can see it in action on my other site. Switch on sound for the full experience.

New in the WordPress Plugin repository: Any Block Carousel Slider by Arthur Ballan, aka Web Lazer, a freelancer from Rennes, France. It stands out as it is implemented with CSS only. A “carousel slider block plugin that instantly converts supported native WordPress blocks (Query Loop/Post Template, Group, Gallery) into a responsive carousel slider without adding a dedicated block or loading a JavaScript library.” Ballan wrote in the description. I tested it with a few images and it’s super fast.

Wes Theron published another short tutorial using WordPress. This time on how to create a custom 404 page, a page that’s displayed when someone comes from a bad or broken link. He walks you through the process of changing the template and also shows a few examples you can use as inspiration.

Themes, Blocks and Tools

Rich Tabor started a new series called WordPress Explorations, “where I’m exploring new, far-out ideas about WordPress”. In his first post, Pages & Layers, Tabor explores a WordPress interface concept addressing user confusion: navigating pages requires leaving the editor entirely. He proposes a persistent sidebar with tabbed navigation between pages and block layers, allowing seamless page switching and creation without context-switching.

As a follow-up to his post on styling an accordion block, Justin Tadlock published Snippet: Schema.org microdata for Accordion block FAQs. It’s a short example of how to add structured data for FAQs via the HTML API in plugin of functions.php.

In his livestream Using every Interactivity API feature in one site: Part 2, Ryan Welcher continues his series on the Interactivity API and his attempt to build something that uses every directive and feature it offers. Part 1 is also available on YouTube.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Ellen Bauer shares her experiences from WordCamp Kansai and speaks on the impact of AI in making WordPress site building more accessible. They also touch on improvements for theme authors, plugin developers, and the upcoming WordCamp Asia. The episode wraps up with community announcements and a look ahead to features planned for WordPress 7.0.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Ellen Bauer

• On X (former Twitter) @ellenbauer
• Bluesky
• ElmaStudio
• Previews appearances on the show
  • Gutenberg Changelog 117 – WooCommerce Starter Theme and Blocks, WordCamp Europe, and Gutenberg 20.7 and 20.8
  • Gutenberg Changelog #105 – Gutenberg 18.9, Block Themes and WooCommerce
  • Gutenberg Changelog #88 – WordPress 6.4 and Gutenberg 16.4 and 16.5.
• Talk at WordCamp Kansai: Building a WooCommerce Store Using Block Themes and AI Site Building

Announcements & Community

• Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025)
• The Plugin Check Plugin now creates automatic security reports after each plugin update.
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer 
• Wayback Machine Joint
• Introducing Blueprints in WordPress Studio 1.6.0
• Talks about Playground Blueprings by Birgit Pauli-Haack
  • Streamlined Block Theme Development: Using WordPress Playground and GitHub for No-Code Version Control of Site Editor Changes
  • From Zero to Demo: Mastering WordPress Playground Blueprints
  • Create a demo with Playground
    

What’s Released

• WordPress 6.9 Beta 4
• Tutorials on WordPress Developer Blog
  • How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover
  • Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9 
  • Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
  • Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9
• What’s new in Gutenberg 22.0? (5 November)

What’s in the works or discussed?

• WordPress Scripts: A vision for a v2 version
• Developer Hours: WordPress 6.9: developer updates

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 124th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 22.0 and WordPress 6.9 and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. 

Today on a Saturday morning, Ellen Bauer joins us from New Zealand. She works for Automattic as a product manager, works with themes, blocks and the AI site building tool. And as a former agency owner and professional theme builder and designer, she brings important perspectives to the software powering millions of merchants at WooCommerce of the World. She’s also a longtime friend and I’m delighted you join me again, Ellen, to the show. Welcome and how are you today?

Ellen Bauer: Thank you very much. That was a lovely introduction. I should copy that for my who I am. I actually like that. Thanks, Birgit. I’m very well. It’s very early in the morning for me, so please bear with me everyone. If I’m babbling a little bit. I yeah, I’m very well. I’m actually very recharged because I just returned from Botkin Kansai in Japan, and I added a little personal holiday on top of that with my family. So yeah, that was a lovely time away and it’s always good to connect to the community and attend WordCamps because yeah, you just feel recharged and inspired. So yeah, I’m feeling really excited and I’m happy to be on that podcast here again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Always so glad you’re here. So don’t worry as long as you don’t snore. We are, we take anything that you want to say.

Ellen Bauer: Inspired my by my Japan travels. I’m having a green tea next to me so that should keep me running.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I have green tea too, but that’s now from a shop that I saw in Taipei two years ago at WordCamp Asia. So I’m really kind of every time I have a cup of tea, I’m thinking back on that. 

WordCamp Kansai, WordCamp Asia

So you gave a talk at WordCamp Kansai about building a WooCommerce store using block themes and AI site building. So how did it go and what did you learn from putting it together actually.

Ellen Bauer: So I was again, it’s a very new topic for me, so I was like, oh, what did I do to myself presenting that. But it was very exciting and there were a few AI talks that were really, really cool at the WordCamp. So it’s a good idea to check out the YouTube stream from the WordCamp other videos there. It was really cool to talk about a topic that I’m very excited about and just kind of getting into more and more with my work at Automatic as well. So I learned a lot. I looked at a lot of competitors and what they’re doing and obviously AI inside. It’s pretty wild what is happening and fast paced. So I think it was good to also bring the topic to a WordCamp and I had really, really positive feedback. Everyone was excited. The room was packed which I didn’t expect with an English speaking talk at a WordCamp. They had a live translation which worked really well and that was cool. A lot of questions in the end as well and a good conversation and yeah, just an exciting new opportunity for me. I see it as just AI is a possibility to help us fix or help us with the problems users have with site building because it’s not easy to do us to build your front end site for WordPress Store or any website. So if AI tools can help users, our WordPress users, us to do these things a little easier and faster and maybe more inspirational with real content, like more related content and images that relate to the site you actually want to build. I think that’s just very exciting. And yeah helps for me seeing users struggle with our themes as well and finding the right theme for what they wanted to build over the years. I think it’s just a great opportunity to make it easier for users and also kind of then yeah make WordPress attractive on another level to very beginner users and can just do so much. It’s an exciting time, honestly I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. Yeah, There is this. WordPress.com has started with the AI site builder and I find it really helps with the onboarding of users that just want to get a site built. You still have to make the decisions about what’s your content about and what are the images that you want to do but. But it kind of gets out of the way in putting those things in and you don’t have to search for things too much. I think that WordPress 6.9 also and we’re going to talk a little bit later about the whole release that’s coming up with a command palette. Yeah, you can really shortcut some of the things, but you still need to know what you want to do to put the command in to get to where you want. But it’s also, yeah, there’s a lot of help out there. And I’m really excited also for the AI site building that ends up with a block theme and with a really fast site. So it’s a really cool thing.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah. What I like about it too, that it’s on the blocks patterns. Block theme foundation. What you can test. I really like it for something that is difficult for nonvisual users is you can get color palettes, ideas, you get template ideas. Because one of the things I always hear also with patterns from users, it’s like how do I decide which. You maybe have a pattern library in a theme, but it’s like how do you decide to put a page together with these patterns? It’s very challenging. Users don’t really know should I have testimonials in the bottom or at the top or what is most important? So there’s template page templates, suggestions shown and you can just pick one. It makes it way easier and more appealing. Same with like fonts. How should I know if the font is a professional font or a classic or more modern? It’s very difficult to tell. That’s like very advanced decisions you need to make on the design side as well. So if we can give suggestions and help, I think that makes it just easier and also more fun to build sites. Yeah. Another thing I probably have mentioned on the podcast is the word telex and doing. And you can test about it. Probably. Yeah. Because that’s also another thing I was like, oh, that’s so exciting because you can build blocks with AI and it’s so difficult to build blocks, but now it’s easy to have an idea and build a block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There was this blocktober fund by Tammie Lister which is now came to end. But there are 31, I think blocks that she built and she had some great ideas. I will put a link to it in the show notes again, but because what you can learn from there is also how you prompt the telex to actually get something out of it. So it was a really cool thing. And other people did also some, some great thing with Telex, the experimental block builder. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: So that was also part of my talk prompting tips. And I think you could do a whole talk just about that and it will be way more important moving on how we. Yeah. How we talk to AI to actually make it efficient.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. 

Ellen Bauer: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I’m really looking forward to the next flagship WordCamp where that will probably be even more prominent because the next one is WordCamp Asia in Mumbai. And I submitted some Talks there, not AI talks, but I’m still in the you build it yourself kind of block theme. I will do a workshop on block themes and how the different workflows work together. And so the good news was that the WordCamp Asia speaker team extended the deadline for speaker submission to December 15, which is kind of another month out.

Ellen Bauer: So I thought it was November, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that was. They made a mistake on their Twitter account. I clarified that in the WC Asia channel on WordPress Slack so you can read up about it. But because there was a discrepancy between what the website said under speaker submission, what the tweet said. And it’s actually December 15th. Yeah, you don’t have to worry. Hurry next week.

Ellen Bauer: Oh, that is nice. The WordCamp Asia in Mumbai is. I just checked the date April 9 to 11 for everyone looking for travel dates and I submitted a talk as well. I will submit maybe a better version, improved version if I now have more time, which is great because it was a rushed application. But yeah, I’m really excited for that outcome and really, really hope I can make it there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s the week after Easter so if you want to go a little bit earlier, you have some Easter holidays to cover your vacation, not to have to take. Well, in Germany we have three days, no two days vacation or holidays that are around Easter. So it’s a Good Friday as well as the Easter Monday they are off in Germany. So we have another holiday weekend that we could go there. So we plan to be a little bit ahead of time in Mumbai in India. So yeah, it’s going to be interesting. They also have a schedule of when they release tickets so you can go on the website and see that at the WordCamp Asia website, I think November 11th and then they have two more dates where they release tickets because the first one actually sold out within an hour or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s going to be a huge bootcamp.

Ellen Bauer: I think I got my tickets already for us, so. Yeah, but that’s nice that they released the dates.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. The Guternberg Times, I also applied for media partners, so either speaker or media partner, maybe I will get my tickets that way. 

Announcements

So yeah, so we’re coming through the announcements. The first one that I wanted to talk about is that Anne McCarthy updated us in her post update on phase three collaboration efforts November 2025 on the state of the phase three, the progress made, what’s in the works for the Future and especially WordPress 7.0. Now we’re talking 7.0 on the eve of release candidate for 6.9; there is not a whole lot of more information out there and the post is talking about the real time collaboration with multiple authors. Edit the content simultaneously without conflict. Now this feature has been tested with a small group of clients from WordPress VIP, but they’re loving it it seems, and they are bringing things to Core WordPress 6.9 has the asynchronous notes of collaboration. That’s the commenting on blocks that comes to WordPress December, but it allows you to add comments directly on the content blocks and there will be refinements and additional features kind of coming in the future. And what’s also prepared for WordPress 10.0 is behind the scenes the contributors are rebuilding the admin screens with a new Data View and Data Forms tools. There’s a whole new Fields API that kind of runs the data form components and then you organize and display information on admin pages. Part of it is also Media Library revamp and the extensibility for plugin developers. So that’s pretty much kind of a short rundown of what’s in the post. It’s much more detailed information with links to GitHub issues and PRs and all that. Any comments?

Ellen Bauer: I’m actually really, really excited about that and the start of that. It’s cool to see that in 6.9 already. I think just collaboration in general within WordPress is one of the things missing to have this thing like in Google Docs we all kind of love it. It’s so easy and yeah, I’m just so, so excited to get that in because we have always run our Elmo Studio blog with two people and at some point like even we had guest authors. So yeah that just makes it so much easier to actually work together in WordPress.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah and well we use Google Docs for any of the articles be it on the developer blog or internally at Automattic or for the Gutenberg Times. And this would just eliminate one step because you still have that step left that you need to copy paste things over and put the images in. And if you can start drafting already in WordPress it eliminates so much time that you kind of win there. It’s really cool.

Ellen Bauer: I never, I can’t even write in Google Docs, and I’m actually I’m using Notion as a drafting tool because it just doesn’t look as nice so. And yeah just easier if you can just collaborate within your save so much time and effort and it just, it’s just Nice to see the people you’re working with in your post and kind of work together there, the comments and feedback and I think even also for design stuff like I love Figma comments as well. It’s just. Hello, it’s so good to give feedback. So even if we can have a block section or even on patterns, we can comment on design topics as well there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: So yeah, even for the visual part of feedback on pattern designs and stuff, it will be really exciting to use that too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Ellen Bauer: For writers and content creators.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what is probably coming to WordPress 7.0 is that you also can highlight text. Not right now, you only can comment in the notes, just on single blocks. Yeah. So if the block is a long paragraph, you cannot just highlight things and then comment on that. So it’s not like Google Docs yet. But I think that’s the aim that developers have to make that work as well. I’m really excited for what’s to come. We’ll see. But it’s a lot of work. But the last half a year there has been some great progress there. 

All right, so the next thing that I wanted to point out here is the new the plugin review team has this plugin check plugin that you can as a plugin developer kind of use and check your plugins before you submit it. So you don’t get a whole lot of back and forth with the review team until they approve your plugin. That plugin also has a new version and the review team announced it just last week that they now not only screen new plugins that come to the repository, but also will screen updated plugins or plugin updates for security, compatibility and compliance. Right now it’s in testing form so currently the team evaluates the information only internally and sends reports to authors if needed. And they want to kind of. It’s like the normal WordPress way, you kind of look what it does and then you iterate on it. Yeah, they want to observe the behavior during updates and put in some refinements. 

And after that initial testing phase, automated security reports will be emailed to authors right after the plugin updates. This is such a huge progress because plugins account for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024 in a report. And that increased scrutiny on the WordPress plugins repository is really a huge impact on the health of the whole WordPress ecosystem and it definitely will make the web a better place with 43% of all websites being WordPress having that additional layer There is really going to be huge.

Ellen Bauer: I love that too because yeah, it’s funny, I just remembered when you said that most of the. As a theme author, I can’t even count the number of times I get support requests for something is broken. And first thing I always said, oh yeah, I kind of sensed, oh, it’s, it’s a plugin. It’s most of the time the theme is not affected because there’s not much to a theme. You have to deactivate all your plugins and check the list when the error occurs. I think. I don’t know how much time I spend on plugin support actually as a theme author.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I mean security, if you put a point to it, is actually something the server or the hosting company should really implement as well as an agency. When we were dealing with other websites from other people that actually support their businesses. Yeah. We made sure that they are on a hosting company that actually has their own security screening and the automating, removing of malware if that occurs. The plan might be a little bit more expensive, but it’s kind of that peace of mind for all of us is really important. But yeah, even then things could get through.

Ellen Bauer: So yeah, yeah, this is like very important help.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

Ellen Bauer: I think that if the offerings also for Hostess got better over the years, I think and more awareness. But yeah, just funny. It’s like part of my WordPress history is fixing plugin update issues.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: Gosh.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But I, I, that was work that I really hated.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah. Although it’s money because I was like, I’m just. It’s a theme, but it’s not the theme.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no. It wasn’t something I thought or something like that. Or it was more like it’s not work that I would like to do. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: So it was also work that we weren’t paid for. It was a lot of support. We did.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But even if you get paid, it’s not work you want to do.

Ellen Bauer: That’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, some people do, but yeah.

Ellen Bauer: So yeah, I didn’t like it either, but I had kind of. It’s funny if you do it like for so many years, like 10 years or so, you get a sense of. Also if you see the plugin that you already kind of know, like it’s like a six, then do you get on where the problem is? It’s kind of weird.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think also the site health plugin that the WordPress contributors put together is really helpful in just kind of eliminating the plugins and that kind of. Yeah, that really helped with the research. But yeah, that can also happen. Not in a security context. It’s just kind of. Yeah, it broke my site. Yeah. So some update because it was a plugin conflict and the site health plugin is really helpful for that. 

Community Contributions

So there’s WordPress Studio. I think I’m not sure if we ever mentioned it here at the podcast. It’s an open source local development tool and it now can handle blueprints and those are Playground blueprints. So they’re lightweight and they’re fast to implement and it’s a topic close to my heart. This year I did many talks about Playground and the blueprints and you can watch three of them on WordPress TV and I will have the link in the show notes. They are now available also to be used in Studio because Studio is based on Playground so it makes spinning up new sites so much faster. You can select three pre-built blueprints. One is just a quickstart WordPress.com website or a site for building plugins or themes, or creating an online store with WooCommerce and companion plugins pre-installed. But you could also kind of build your own and have all the plugins that you ever want to need for any site and spin up a new site with the theme or with some standards that you in an agency or as a freelancer always use and then can work on it. And I love this local development tool and paired with Playground CLI. Yeah it made my testing and development so much easier. It’s really great.

Ellen Bauer: I use it every day as well. Yeah, I didn’t. I wasn’t aware that there’s a WooCommerce version of the blueprint as well. That is cool because you don’t need to go ahead and test. Sometimes you just need to test a store and you don’t want to install all the plugins yourself a little bit annoying. So that can be.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s absolutely handy.

Ellen Bauer: The next update I will cover that and it’s actually kind of an interesting thing and Matt blogged about it on his personal blog as well. So you can check out that link. It’s that a new plugin called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer. That’s a long name for plugin, but it helps to get an archived link to any kind of broken link that you have. Which for a lot of us who have older WordPress blogs or websites that is probably the case. And I actually I haven’t installed the plugin yet, but I will go to do that this weekend because yeah, that’s exciting. You can just get a link to any, any broken link to the Wayback Machine version, archived version of that website or blog post. And yeah, check out that post on Matt’s blog where he talks about it quickly and introduces it and yeah, I think that’s a really cool additional plugin that we have available to help with broken links. Really exciting. I love that. I will, I will test it and then maybe I blog about it too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. So go ahead. The plugin is free, but you need a free account on the Internet Archive site to obtain an API key because you tap in right into this and to connect your site to the interactor Archive. And then step two and three, you just have to make some additional decisions. But they’re very well explained about if you want automatically your site kind of put into the Wayback Machine and all that. 

Just for people who don’t know, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit library of millions of free text, movies, software, music, websites and more. And they run the Wayback Machine which pretty much surfaces previous versions of websites. So if you are new to a company and you want to do a redesign of the website, you probably want to go back and see what have they done in previous redesigns to kind of go back to see what’s important to them. And it’s probably a better way than to ask 15,000 questions.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, that’s a nice idea. I haven’t thought about that. I actually love to go sometimes on the Wayback Machine with Manu. Just kind of looking at the old designs we had for our own website. It’s so fun to do that. Old designs of other sites that you loved and really, really fun. You can check out the old WordPress. Org versions or even like the Google Google site. It’s just fun to do that. And you kind of get a little bit of a nostalgic feeling. Oh yes, I remember that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So when I started Gutenberg Times I had the 2019 default theme on it. And then somewhere in 2020 I think I switched to the Excel theme by Anders Noren and there were a few things that didn’t work that way in the other themes. So I just kind of adopted. And then now I come back and kind of compare what was the old one and what was the new one. It was, it was really interesting because I’m now building the third theme for, for the site and I want to do it myself and now I can do whatever I want with it without having to follow a theme, but I still wanted to make sure that I have all the things that I thought were important also in the new theme. So we’ll see. I’m definitely going to share my journey.

Ellen Bauer: You plan to update that soon?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Soon as a relative term.

Ellen Bauer: When do you do it?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’d like to have it by the end of the year, but we’ll see how that comes out. Yeah. I built it already. I needed an additional plugin for my podcast because I wanted to have the social icons from the podcast directories where our podcast is in. And only the 6.9 now has the possibilities that you can do custom social icons. So I tested that and it works. But I need to wait till it’s out too. So the plugin is available but it’s in the plugin repository. But I have one fix that I need to do. But also I wanted to have a better template for the podcast and the plugin API to register templates. That was in 6.8, but I needed to figure out how that works as well. Not all the things that I talk about. I know how to do it when I want to do it. It’s kind of really interesting.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah. And it’s always just finding the time for these on the side things.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.9 Beta 4

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So now we’re coming to the what’s released section of our podcast and the first one is today, Friday, November 7, WordPress 6.9 beta 4 was released. It’s a quiet beta. It has a release post, but that’s on the make blog. Just because there was one thing that they needed to reverse and so they wanted before the release candidate on Tuesday, November 11, they wanted to have another beta to make sure everything works all right or the thing that they changed works all right. Let me put it this way. Yeah. So this is also a good place to talk about last minute WordPress 6.9 feature decisions. Contributors have decided to not move ahead with the enhanced template management feature for this version. The content only editing was also punted to 7.0 as well as the updated block binding UI for external sources, there were a few issues with all three of them during testing sessions and that can’t be While the content only editing was earlier decided that it’s not going to come to 6.9, but the other two, there were issues that couldn’t be resolved in the remaining time before the strength freeze in release candidate one, which is Tuesday. So yeah. Ellen, what are your favorite features for 6.9? Anything standing out for you?

Ellen Bauer: Yes, I was looking forward to the template management feature of course we have to wait. We have to wait for that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s still in Gutenberg. Yeah, it’s still in the plugin. It’s just not.

Ellen Bauer: Then second pick. I still am super excited that at least we start with the commenting option on post. Like on blocks and posts. I’m excited to just have this in there. Like that’s something we haven’t had in WordPress. So yeah, that’s. I think I would pick that as my favorite. And then instead.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Are you getting excited about the new blocks?

Ellen Bauer: Oh, yes, new blocks as well. So the accordion, it’s actually nice to see that come in because we have started using that in WooCommerce for an update on the. Having the tabs for a description, like a product description, additional information and comments in there. So I think I’m a little bit semi proud. Maybe that pushed it, the accordion block into more attention, into Core and then the. I’m not sure if I have the name right. Is it called Sticky? Sticky Sketchy text? Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, Stretchy. Stretchy.

Ellen Bauer: Stretchy. Stretchy. That makes more sense. Yeah, just that’s from a designer perspective. It’s interesting actually to see that in Core because that’s like just a design tool and a fun kind of block. I love seeing that in Core. Yeah. Just nice to see this kind of more fun not experimental, but like just design tool core blocks coming in and then icons block. Really, really nice to have that. But that’s not like needed, wanted. Oh, no, that’s seven.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the icons block didn’t make it.

Ellen Bauer: Oh, no. Oh, sorry.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Ellen Bauer: We have to wait. Well, next year then we will get more excited. Yeah, I want that so badly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the icons block as well as the. The block visibility is there as well, but it’s more like the basic kind of feature, the foundation for what’s to come in 7.0. But it’s good to have it in talking about the accordions if you want to kind of get a little bit of a head start on styling accordions. Justin Tadlock just published last week a tutorial on how to style accordions with WordPress 6.9. And he walks you through how to do it in theme JSON and how to do a style variation as well as how to do the pattern for an accordion pattern. So that gives you a head start on updating your theme or your own site with it. 

What’s coming to the developer blog? We have just the editorial meeting yesterday. We just approved a snippet how you can also add structured data to your FAQ accordion. So it gets right into the SEO kind of thing because Google treats the FAQs differently. It kind of does answer question answers quite nicely. So you can make that also with the accordion. And he will publish that probably in about two weeks or three. We’ll see how that comes. Yeah. There’s also on the developer blog where additional theme related things like the border radius, size presets that come into WordPress 6.9 and also I mentioned it, the social icons, custom icons that you want if you want them. Also a tutorial on the developer blog register custom social icons and we have one more that is the how to style forms with theme JSON that comes also with six point nine.

Ellen Bauer: That’s a big one. Oh, that’s cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

Ellen Bauer: Very exciting because that’s one of the things you miss that was missing always for themes and our custom icons. Actually I think it’s a bigger feature than you think because that was always for years one of the requests like how do I get my own icon in there? Like, oh, it’s missing. Like maybe certain countries have their big individual icons that were not what kind of icons icons, but tools, social.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can. Websites. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ellen Bauer: I remember there was a German one we were always asked for. I don’t remember what it was, but from different communities you get different requests.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. In Germany there was this ext or next or something like that was a social one. Right. But that kind of folded into LinkedIn now. So. All right, I’ll put the links to the developer blog posts into the show notes and so you can all follow along on that. 

Gutenberg 22.0

And that brings US to Gutenberg 22.0, and Carlos Bravo was the release lead on that and he kind of said that it was a relatively quiet Gutenberg release because it followed the WordPress point release and it normally prioritizes core quality and bug fixes over new enhancements. So we probably get here pretty quickly go through that. 

Enhancements

Well, I’ll start with the block library changes in the navigation block. You can have a button create a new page, but you create it and then what happened. Now you have a notice that there was a page created and how to find it. So that’s really cool. It’s a quality of life improvement that. Yeah, you only notice that it’s there or that it’s not there, but it’s missing all the time.

Ellen Bauer: And the second one was that breadcrumbs now get support for archives. That was missing, just missing before, Birgit.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so breadcrumbs came in actually with this Release out of experimentation, but it will not make it to 6.9. But the breadcrumbs block is a new block and the archive support was. There were kinds of discussions about how deep does the first version has to go. And now that it’s not getting into 6.9, it just gets. Just ongoing improvements. So it gets into WordPress 7.0.

Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I love that. For blogs, that makes a huge difference.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. That’s one thing. Also, when you have a huge site and you have 50 pages or something like that, your visitors most very often get lost. Unless you have additional navigation in there, and breadcrumbs help you so you don’t have to do this all manually and kind of think about how to get back to other places. I really love that. That and that the team actually takes time to get to work on this a little longer. And so the version is actually delightful and not just like an MVP or something like that. Yeah. The next one is that the categories block has a taxonomy CSS class now. So that’s probably only interesting for people that were looking for that and had to do custom CSS to kind of figure that out. But that’s definitely now in Gutenberg 22.0.

Ellen Bauer: I think having CSS classes for pretty specific things from theme author perspective, just helpful. A lot of time to just have that in there. So I like that. The next one was that I think that’s just added an explanation to the fit text feature that it gets just a description is added, that it overrides the default font settings.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: So that’s what I wasn’t visible just for users being aware of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think so. Yeah. That’s just a mix. Users are aware that sometimes you don’t get the connection, that if you have one option, the other option goes away. Yeah. So.

Ellen Bauer: And I think that helps. So I think yeah, they just added it fit into the container and then overrides your font’s default font setting. That helps to just explain it better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And just now that we’re talking about it, the stretchy text, they are still not sure if the font size or the font option or separate blocks. So they’re now getting into a variation for 6.9. I have not seen that issue or the pull request actually be merged, but we’ll see if it’s going to be in Release candidate one or it still stays as it is and comes in 5.7, 7.0. Why 5.7? That’s wrong. Yeah. The latest comments block now has an option to display full comments so there were only two versions. One was just the title and then an excerpt. And then now you can have all the full comments displayed in your post template or page template. So that’s also pretty cool.

Ellen Bauer: One additional new update is also in the global styles and actually Birgit had to help me figure that out. Global styles are now, can now be accessed in the post editor. But you need to have. What is it? You need to have Active show template template. Yeah, show template. And it’s like, okay, where is show template Burgundy? Had to help me out with that one. It was under preview.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was the preview of the test.

Ellen Bauer: So where you, where you look for the tablet and the mobile version of the preview, you also have the show template and I couldn’t find it. And then you get the little icon for global styles.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And then you can make changes. Yeah, you can make changes to, to your template on the global level, which really helps with. You don’t have to go back and go through the templates and all that. So it’s really interesting. I haven’t really worked with that yet because I didn’t find a need for that. But I, I can see that then all of a sudden post in the template when it says, oh, this is wrong, you just want to go in and make a small change of things. So this is helpful to not have to get out of your post and then have to go into the site editor and the template. And yeah, it’s kind of just a shortcut for.

Ellen Bauer: I think it also builds like having that connection also builds a little bit more awareness for users of the connection between where what a template actually is and that you can. What global styles are that you have that connection of. Oh, the global styles are connected to the template of this post and if I change something there, it’s changed in the post. I think there’s still difficulty for users to understand that connection if the templates are hidden and the global styles are hidden in just the site editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that’s a good point.

Ellen Bauer: It just builds that connection.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a good point. Yeah. Thank you. I haven’t even thought about it, but that helps people figure out because the template, new WordPress users might not have that problem, but long time WordPress users, they never had to deal with templates because it was all, it was all something that the theme developer would do for them and they were just using it. But now that they have control over it, they also kind of need to be aware what they’re doing with it. And the enhanced template management is Also part of it, that it needs to be a little bit less confusing. And also follow some. Some things that they say if I change something on a template, I don’t want it to go public without me knowing. So I want a draft section there and keep the other template going until the other one, the new one is finished. So that is something that comes with enhanced template management and I’m really looking forward to that.

Ellen Bauer: That will be exciting also to make templates more exciting to play with because. Yeah, I think there’s still an amazing amount of confusion of what a template versus a page actually is. So just if users play more with custom templates and build their own, I think that builds more awareness of that. The difference between these two.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I think one of the last things that we want to talk about here is the. That the math block, which is a new block coming to 6.9. Yeah. Yeah. I’m love it. I actually was in school, I had all these big formulas to talk about. To write and. Yeah. And I was never kind of thinking, oh, I could do a blog post about things that. Because I had no way of knowing how to do the formulas. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: And you can’t really output them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And they follow the mathwork, follows latex formatting, which is the math kind of language, and then puts it into your site. And now it also. It’s now enabled. Horizontal scrolling is now enabled because those formulas can be really, really long. And so you can kind of have a horizontal scrolling on your formula so you don’t have to kind of put line breaks in there where no line breaks. I want that.

Ellen Bauer: I want to start a blog to blog about math. I was never good at math, but I always. It’s admiring too. I love it. So maybe we should all start blogging about math now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Bauer: Problems.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Math problems. Yeah. Especially fractions and all that kind of. What was it? Five. You’re very long.

Ellen Bauer: So we need the scrolling.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we can do the scrolling. Yeah.

Experiments

And I’m gonna scroll further through the changelog and I’m stopping at the experiments because the real time collaboration experiment is still on in Gutenberg and we talked about it, but there have also been some changes now. And one is that it’s supporting synced post data and it also the YJS import is actually behind the experimental flag, which is actually a code quality thing. And they implemented CRDT persistence for collaborative editing. And that just means that’s the. The saving of your immediate changes and then the sync part that works persistently on your collaborative editing plane. It’s a really complicated thing to do. But they seem to have figured it out with that library, the YJS and Kevin, who is the maintainer of that, was part of the initial MVP of the collaborative editing and now. Yeah, so it’s really cool. 

And you need to go install 2020.0 Gutenberg plugin and then go to the Gutenberg menu item and enable the look at the experiments page and enable real time collaboration. So there are a few steps there to get to that, but that’s good. So it all stays behind the experimental flag as long as it’s in development. Good. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

So for the developers amongst you listener, there is. I’m sharing an issue about the version 2 of the build WordPress scripts where Riad Benguella, one of the lead architects of Gutenberg has opened this issue about kind of making scripts a little bit more flexible and also have the point that it comes easier and feels a little bit more simple. But that’s all is good. Good goals I would say but I think the technology is a little bit more complicated. But I will share that for all the developers on the show or who listen here to check out because Riad needs people who build plugins and have a build process and use the WordPress scripts to actually test the version 2 so they can catch all the edge cases and all the use cases before they actually migrate that all over. So that’s my thing. Alan, is there something that you want to remind people about upcoming events or releases.

Ellen Bauer: Actually I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if people want to connect with you, where would they find you on the.

Ellen Bauer: I’m definitely on the Slack WordPress Developer Slack or on social. I think I’m moving more and more to Blue Sky.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Ellen Bauer: And yeah also on X and there and YouTube is like a thing I want to be more present and add more content to. So yeah, I have a YouTube channel. I think you can find me just under my name on all of these or maybe Elmer studio on the YouTube. I’m not sure. I think both is possible.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah I will share share this all in the show notes and as always. Oh I wanted to announce something. Sorry on November 13th. That’s next week. If you listen to this over the weekend you get the chance to see the developer hours come back to the online workshops on Learn on Meetup and JuanMa and Jonathan Bosinger are going over the developer parts of WordPress 6.9 one is the Data Views and Data Forms and Fields API. The other one is the Abilities API and they might even be covering Interactivity API, seeing what kind of time they have. But that’s on meetup on November 13, just to let you know.

Ellen Bauer: Exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. As always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 124. 124. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenbergtimes.com and if you want to leave a review on Apple or podcast or Pocketcast or any other of your favorite podcast, only.

Ellen Bauer: Five star, of course.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I, I take anyone. Yeah, that, that’s kind of how I connect with the listeners and if you can improve.

Ellen Bauer: But you deserve the best.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you. Thank you. I think so. But yeah, maybe other people have a different opinion and my, my opinion only counts when I’m home alone. So. Yeah. So thanks everyone. And until the next time, be well. And we see we hear each other just before Thanksgiving. And thanks to Ellen Bauer for coming to us.

Ellen Bauer: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Take care.

Ellen Bauer: Bye. Bye.

Next week is Release Candidate 1 week! Subscribe to the Make Core Blog, if you haven’t yet, to get all the Dev Notes and the Fieldguide notifications. “String freeze” is this state of the release called until the final release on December 2, 2025. It’s also the start of the last four weeks when the wonderful translators of the Polyglots team work to bring the new version to many dozens of languages.

This week was busy, too, though. I hope you enjoy all the good things below.

Yours,
Birgit

WordPress 6.9 is not the only major WordPress event on December 2, 2025. On this day, Matt Mullenweg‘s annual keynote, State of the Word, will be livestreamed from San Francisco, CA. It will take place around noon Pacific Time and will be recorded so the other half of the World can watch it on the rerun, so to speak. Being there in person is also possible with limited seating. You can request a ticket on the landing page. You might find a watch party near you or you can register your own party.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Carlos Bravo released Gutenberg 22.0, and in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 22.0? (5 November), he noted “Typically, the Gutenberg release following a WordPress point release focuses on core quality and bug fixes over new enhancements. As such, this will be a relatively quiet release.” He highlighted two things, both already slated for WordPress 7.0 and later.

1. Real-time Collaboration: Post Meta Synchronization
2. A new theme package

Anne McCarthy published an Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025) and noted that WordPress Phase 3 focuses on making teamwork easier.

• Real-time collaboration lets multiple authors edit content simultaneously without conflicts.
• Block Notes, arriving in WordPress 6.9, allows users to add comments directly on content blocks.
• Behind the scenes, WordPress is rebuilding admin screens with new DataView and DataForm tools, which organize and display information better while letting developers customize them easily across different admin pages.

Rae Morey expands on this update in her article, Real-Time Collaboration Flagged for WordPress 7.0 Amid Ongoing Technical Challenges and includes additional information about the VIP plugin as well as this year’s progress.

Ellen Bauer joined me from New Zealand to record the next podcast episode with me Gutenberg Changelog #124. We talked a lot about WordPress 6.9, WordCamps, Block Themes and more. It’ll arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

WordPress 6.9

WordPress 6.9 Beta 4 is now available for testing. As always, the post shows you four different ways how you can start with your testing sessions.

Contributors decided on punting the enhanced template management features to WordPress 7.0. A few issues surfaced during testing sessions that can’t be resolved in the remaining time before string freeze with Release Candidate 1.  

WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 1 is scheduled for November 11, 2025, and so are the Dev Notes, updates for developers about the relevant changes:

• Interactivity API
• Abilities API
• Block Bindings API
• Streaming Block Parser
• Modernizing UTF-8 support
• Updates to the HTML API

JuanMa Garrido and Jonathan Bossenger, developer advocates at Automattic, invite you to join them for a Developer Hour: WordPress 6.9: developer updates on November 13, 2025, at 10 am UTC – It’s a bit early for US timezone’s though. The session will be recorded and appear shortly after on WordPressTV.

Styling form elements with the Block editor becomes much easier. Justin Tadlock posted a tutorial on the WordPress Developer Blog on How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover. WordPress 6.9 introduces theme.json support for form styling on text inputs and select dropdowns, enabling designers to apply border, color, shadow, and spacing properties globally. However, focus states, labels, checkboxes, and other form elements still require custom CSS. This is just the beginning. Contributors are working on releasing more form styling options in the future.

Other articles on WordPress 6.9 features to come:

• Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9
• Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
• Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9

Dave Smith, core contributor on Gutenberg, explains in his video WordPress 6.9 FIXES Navigation Links the main change to the Navigation block in WordPress 6.9. Now the navigation links are dynamic and adopt automatically when you change a slug.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Steve Burge, Publish Press, announced the new version of Gutenberg Blocks (v 3.5.2). It brings a new feature to the block editor. “You can just create your own styles for any block.” A socalled Style builder is now available to create these style all no-code.

Velda Christiansen, member of the training team and support engineer at Automattic, held another workshop to teach WordPress users about Landing Pages, Posts & More: Strategies for a Stronger Site. It was a workshop on WordPress content strategies, demonstrating how to create effective landing pages through template customization. Christiansen addressed attendees’ technical questions and concluded by discussing hosting, email strategies, monetization options, and resources for further learning.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Iliana Mustafa, Digital Marketing Manager at HumanMade, shared by Why we embraced FSE for our own website redesign. “One of the biggest wins of the redesign has been how much ownership our marketing and content team now has over the site.” She wrote.

Johanne Courtright addressed a challenge with forms: providing styling controls for Gravity Forms in the block editor. In her blog post Making Gravity Forms Inputs Play Nice with Block Themes, she outlines her method, which includes converting Gravity Forms buttons to standard WordPress block buttons using PHP, applying scalable input styling with CSS custom properties, and offering nine color customization options in Gutenberg. This system keeps form input elements intact while enhancing Gravity Forms’ structure, allowing for proportional scaling through font-size changes and easy use as standalone styles or complete plugin integration.

On the WPTavern Jukebox, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Joshua Bryant on How Dow Jones Is Supercharging WordPress Editorial Workflows. They discussed how Dow Jones decoupled Gutenberg from WordPress Admin, embedding it into a standalone React application to accelerate breaking news publication. Bryant explained that Dow Jones operates Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch on WordPress Multisite but needed faster editorial workflows for time-sensitive content. He emphasized that discovering WordPress’s global WP object handling was challenging but revealed how well-engineered WordPress truly is.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Carlo Daniele, Kinsta, helps you unlock new possibilities with the WordPress Interactivity API. “This API enables you to create blocks that react in real time to user interactions, allowing you to create rich user experiences and make your sites attractive, dynamic, and engaging.”, he wrote Daniele guides readers through the WordPress Interactivity API by explaining its core concepts, breaking down technical file structures, and then demonstrating practical application by building an interactive shopping cart block from scratch. He moves from theory to hands-on implementation with code examples and visual aids.

JuanMa Garrido introduced A DataViews-powered explorer for the Abilities API on his personal blog. He created an Abilities Dashboard prototype that combines WordPress’s Abilities API with DataViews, a React component system.

The Abilities API allows plugins to describe their capabilities in a machine-readable format for AI tools and automation. Building on Tammie Lister’s Abilities Explorer plugin, Garrido developed a client-side dashboard using DataViews, aligning with modern WordPress admin interfaces. His project demonstrates how DataViews can effectively display and interact with Abilities data, serving as a reference for this emerging intersection of AI and data management in WordPress.

Troy Chaplin, web developer from Ottawa, shared the Snippet: Limiting allowed blocks without breaking the Site Editor on the WordPress Developer Blog. “By scoping the allowed_block_types_all filter to post types and editor context, you keep the best of both worlds: editorial consistency for authors and full creative control for designers. A small change, but one that can save hours of confusion down the road.” he wrote in his conclusion.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

On All Saints Day, November 1st, we honor dear people who passed. I wanted to take the occasion and point you to the WordPress Remembers page where accomplished contributors who passed have a permanent home. Their work lives on in every new story, every new website, and every new idea made possible by WordPress.

And it’s a long newsletter today with lots of great blog posts, videos and tutorials. I also included two ecosystem-related developments that would be normally out of scope for this niche newsletter. They have huge implications for the security and longevity of WordPress, and I definitely thought you shouldn’t miss.

Have a lovely weekend,

Yours,
Birgit

PS: Voting for the WPAwards already started. Vote for your WordPress favorites, hopefully among them the blog Gutenberg Times and the podcast Gutenberg Changelog. Hat Tip to Davinder Singh Kainth for putting the WPAwards together every year.

WordPress Ecosystem updates

David Perez, a Hostinger sponsored contributor, posted a new milestone from the Plugins Review team that will have broader impact throughout the WordPress ecosystem: The Plugin Check Plugin now creates automatic security reports after each plugin update. It reports on the update of the Plugin Check plugin that not only screens new plugin submissions but also expands the screening to subsequent versions of plugins for security, compatibility, and compliance.

Currently, the team evaluates internal information and sends reports to authors as needed. They observe PCP behavior during updates for refinement. After this phase, automated security reports will be emailed to authors right after plugin updates.

With Plugins accounting for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, this increased scrutiny on the WordPress plugins repository submissions will have a huge impact on the health of the whole WordPress ecosystem. And it will make the web a better place.

Rae Morey, The Repository, has the details in her report: WordPress Plugins Team Rolls Out Automatic Security Scans for All Plugin Updates

The second development is a plugin to eliminate link rot on the internet and was brought to you by the Internet Archive– “a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” It also runs the Wayback-Machine, surfacing previous version of websites. The plugin Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer made its debut in the WordPress repository. It’s came to pass in a collaboration between the Internet Archive and Automattic’s Special Projects team.

Matt Mullenweg wrote on his blog, “When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version. It also works proactively by archiving your own posts every time they’re updated, creating a consistent backup of your content’s history.”

The plugin is free, you do need a free account on the Internet Archive and obtain API keys to connect your site to the Internet Archive, on step 2 and 3 you’ll have to make some addtional decision.

As a side note, scrolling through Gutenberg Times history on the Wayback machine is fascinating. I am person you lives solidly in the moment and often forgets what happened in the past. (or it’s just old age, don’t say it). I am working on a block theme for the site, and going back to previous versions of the site helps to educate the future. Anyway, back to block editor stuff and more.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 6.9 Beta 2 was released this week. Release coordinator Akshaya Rane has the details in the WordPress news post. A description of what this next version will bring is available in the announcement of the Beta 1 release.

Release Test co-lead, Krupa Nanda posted great instructions on how you can Help test the Beta 1 release of WordPress 6.9 . It’s the best way to learn how to use the new features and report quirks and bugs back to the contributors, so they can be fixed before Release Candidate 1 which is scheduled for November 11.

The Gutenberg 22.0 RC 1 is now available for testing. It contains 53 Bug fix PRs that are backported to WordPress Core and will make it into WordPress 6.9, too.

Hector Prieto published the release post for Gutenberg 21.9 version. He highlighted:

• All the blocks!
• Direct drag and drop
• DataViews customization persistence

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

The Editorial Staff at WPBeginner already let you know What’s Coming in WordPress 6.9? (Features and Screenshots). They highlight block-level Notes for collaborative feedback, block visibility controls to hide content from front-end visitors, and improved template management across theme switches. New blocks include Accordion, Terms Query, Math, and Time to Read, alongside enhancements like text-fitting typography and a dashboard-wide Command Palette. Performance gains include on-demand block-style loading, faster emoji detection, and optimized cron execution. The foundation for AI workflows arrives through the Abilities API, enabling machine-readable WordPress capabilities for secure automation.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Amadeu Arderiu, co-founder of Ploogins and explorer of all things AI and WordPress, was interviewed by Nathan Wrigley on the WPBuilds podcast episode 443. They discussed AI-powered WordPress projects: a smart plugin search, an AI website chatbot, and AI-driven block editor tools. In the chat they touched on three tools:

• Ploogins – a natural language search engine for WordPress plugins. Just tell it the functionality you need and it gives a list of free and premium plugins.
• Joinchat, a plugin known for its iconic floating WhatsApp button on countless WordPress sites. This chatbot answers user questions using only the content from your site, some setting to fine-tune the scope.
• Suggerence, an experiment that places conversational AI directly into the Gutenberg block editor. A site owner can simply describe a task and the robot executes. Example: “Create a hero section with a button”.

I am going to miss the steady creation of fun blocks via Automattic’s Telex. This week’s Blocktober.fun creations are also the last ones on the site.

• Trick or treat
• Filter Table
• Bar chart
• Checklist
• Blogroll

Rae Morey, The Repository, reported Blocktober Wraps Up as Telex Inspires a Wave of WordPress Experimentation. Tammie Lister’s daily block-a-day challenge has become part of a growing wave of Telex-powered creativity, showing how AI can make building in WordPress feel playful again.

Telex, Automattic’s experimental AI tool, enables anyone to build custom Gutenberg blocks using natural language prompts, generating downloadable plugins through a chat-style interface. The tool sparked developer enthusiasm with shared creations ranging from summary generators to specialized calculators.

Divi by Elegant Themes has been around for ages with roughly a million users. This month I came across two blog posts from agencies about moving from Divi to Gutenberg and the block editor. Two approaches with the same outcome.

Johanne Courtright shared her team’s approach in Why I Don’t Migrate Divi Sites (I Rebuild Them), arguing that rebuilding Divi sites with Gutenberg is faster and cheaper than migration. Divi’s proprietary format traps users in technical debt and poor performance. Migration plugins, while available, result in messy conversions that still require manual layout rebuilding. Clean rebuilds uphold content integrity and design patterns, enabling faster site delivery within 3-4 weeks versus 6-8 weeks of migration difficulties.

In his post Divi to Gutenberg Migration 2025 – Step by Step Guide, Piotr Kochanowski at DevelopPress outlines a migration strategy using Divi 5’s block-like format and WordPress 6.8+’s features. The guide highlights pre-migration audits, staging environments, and page-by-page transitions through the Divi Layout Block. Key steps include design-system extraction, template rebuilding, and SEO parity verification. Migrations for standard 20–40 page sites typically take 1–3 weeks, while complex projects may require 4–8 weeks.

Cheyne Klein, Happiness Engineer at Automattic, held an online workshop on Learn WordPress on Building top-level menus & sub-menus. You’ll learn the two main ways to create them in WordPress — the Navigation block and the Classic Menu Editor.

Benjamin Intal, Stackable, announced the new version (1.3.0) of the Interactions plugin which gives you controls to add animations and interactions to your site. He lists

• 54 Pre-made Interactions
• DIY Interaction Builder
• GSAP-level performance
• Hero reveals, parallax images, scroll animations & more

GSAP-level performance” refers to the high-speed, smooth, and efficient animations of GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP).

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Justin Tadlock dives into Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9 with you! This guide is here to help you adapt the design to your or your clients needs. You’ll learn how to apply styling via theme.json, style variations and patterns.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

On his personal blog, Riad Benguella, lead developer on the Gutenberg project, wrote about Debugging WordPress Scripts and Styles. He introduced a vibe-coded tool addressing increased JavaScript and CSS complexity in WordPress admin interfaces and editors. The tool reveals uncompressed file sizes, explicit enqueueing status, ancestor dependencies, and direct parent scripts. Users access it by placing the file in plugins and appending ?debug_script=true to page URLs. Benguella recommends Query Monitor by John Blackbourn for comprehensive debugging solutions.

Shani Bannerjee takes you on the journey to Understand the Interactivity API-driven future for WooCommerce Blocks, explaining how this hybrid approach merges server-side PHP robustness with client-side JavaScript responsiveness. The API enables seamless interactions—cart updates, real-time filtering, interactive galleries—while maintaining block editor integrity. Product Collection, Product Filters, Product Gallery, Add to Cart Options, and MiniCart already implement it. Future WooCommerce blocks adopt Interactivity API from inception. Development shifts toward store-based state management and community-driven extensibility patterns.

Earlier this month, JuanMa Garrido published the monthly roundup post What’s new for developers? (October 2025) on the WordPress Developer Blog. If you missed it or you’d rather watch a video, Ryan Welcher goes over the post in this latest video What’s New for WordPress Developers – October 2025 on YouTube. In either format it’s not a post to miss.

Tammie Lister shared in her blog post Abilities Explorer “The Abilities API is coming to WordPress 6.9 and I have brewed up a little tool to show what abilities you have on your site loaded in core, themes or plugins. It’s very freshly brewed so sip cautiously” she wrote. The experimental plugin visualizes available abilities by origin, enabling testing and detailed inspection. Built rapidly with Claude and Cursor as a learning exercise, it aims to help developers discover and understand WordPress’s emerging Abilities API registry while surfacing potential gaps in site functionality. The Abilities Explorer lives just on GitHub. Check it out.

In this week’s stream Multitasking with GitHub Copilot, Jonathan Bossenger attempts to update two repositories simultaneously. He uses the GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to implement the latest Abilities API and MCP adapter versions. He walks through debugging issues with GitHub Copilot. He covers setting up categories for abilities and testing local environments and tackles real-time coding problems. He leverages AI for documentation and updates. Bossenger also made his WordPress Plugin GitHub Copilot Instructions publicly available on GitHub to give you a head start.

In his livestream, Ryan Welcher was Using every Interactivity API feature in one site. He took a deep dive into the Interactivity API as he wanted to get back up to speed and build something that uses every directive and feature it offers.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special guest: Isabel Brison

• GitHub @tellthemachines
• WordPress @isabel_brison
• X (former Twitter) @ijayessbe

Previous episodes:

• Episode #93
• Episode #84

WordPress 6.9

• WordPress 6.9 Beta 1 
• Help Test WordPress 6.9
• Developer Blog articles
  • Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9
  • Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
  • Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9

Gutenberg

• Gutenberg 21.9
• Gutenberg 21.9 (October 22)
• Styles: Move global styles data logic to a dedicated package #72464

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So welcome to our 123rd episode to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.9 and Gutenberg 21.9, unless you cover it already in the release discussion. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. After a long break, Isabel Bryson, JavaScript developed by Automattic and core contributor friend and WordCamp buddy is on the show again. I’m delighted to have you. Thank you for joining us today. Isabel, how are you?

Isabel Brison: I’m great, thanks. And thanks for inviting me, Birgit. I always love being here. Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re always such a delight and you have so much knowledge about the Gutenberg Project. Yeah, it’s just amazing. So we are jumping right in. Right. What have you been working on for the last period of time?

Isabel Brison: I’ve been working on bits and bobs, this and that. I did a fair bit of work on the content only feature formerly titled Write Mode, but unfortunately that didn’t make it into 6.9. It’s still. It’s getting there. I am optimistic that we will have it built shortly, but it just wasn’t stable enough. There were decisions to be made. There was. UX wasn’t really perfect so we thought we’d hold back from adding it to this release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think it was a good decision. But I also love the feature. Yeah. That it kind of. You kind of get your head out of the design stuff and you’re not distracted by the design stuff and you just can create content once a theme is stable or once a site is stable, you don’t have to make all those things decisions. Yeah. So I’m really good, really great that that’s in the works. But yeah, I understand that it is punted, as we say, to WordPress 7.0. Wow. That’s a big number too. That’s next year.

Isabel Brison: All right. That’ll be exciting.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.9 Beta 1

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So last episode we were actually talking with Beth Soderberg and we also kind of talked a little bit. What probably didn’t make it. And now that we have WordPress 6.9 beta 1 out, we know that especially two blocks that I really was looking forward didn’t make it into the release. They are also punted to 7.0. That is the breadcrumbs block and it’s the icon block and maybe no, another one. There were some ambitious new blocks in the works. And they will all come, but not for this release. So what are the main features for 6.9, do you think?

Isabel Brison: There’s a lot. I don’t see it as a sort of one of those releases where you have one or two massive features that are just absorbing all the attention, it seems like, I don’t know, I mean, usually by the time we get to the stable release and folks are preparing the release post and the demos and all that, they’ll, you know, we do a bit of sort of, I want to say marketing spin, but it kind of is around the features and something will have to emerge in first place. But for me it’s looking, looking at the list, it’s looking very balanced. There are very sort of no massive feature, but a lot of small to medium great improvements, quality of life stuff. Things that are going to be incredibly useful, like really practical. So I’m liking that a lot in this feature list for the release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I agree with you. However, I think that the notes feature was previously called the block level comments is actually pretty big for editorial teams. Well, for a blogger like me, I’m the only one on the site, or maybe two or three others, it has no ramification because I can comment myself just a little bit somewhere else. But if you want to kind of keep a step out of the editorial process like Google Docs, where people asynchronously comment on things, that is definitely a feature that a few people really would like to have on their team. So I’m liking that very much.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, yeah, that is, it’s. It’s a very new one. It’s not a sort of enhancement to any existing thing. It’s like, oh, suddenly you can comment on posts and that’s good. It’s also exciting because it’s sort a review of things to come in terms of the collaborative editing phase three, you know, the big. I guess what, what would be the big piece of phase three. So yeah, it is in that sense it’s. It’s a cool feature. Definitely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the other part is the. I like, but I’m not quite sure how the switch will happen. The expanded template management. There have been quite some tests in there. So that’s a feature where you have now two more items in the menu. One is the customized templates and one is the active templates and then the theme templates. Yeah.

Isabel Brison: So there’s a few interesting sort of workflow changes around that. One of them is that whereas previously you’d go into your template section in the site editor and you just click into a template, into one of the theme templates and you just go edit it and whatnot. And then you could revert it if you wanted to. But now if you go into the template editor and you click a theme template, it goes, do you want to duplicate this template? Because this is the theme template and you can make a copy if you want, but you’re not going to touch the original one. So that’s a bit of a difference. 

And also in the split between, you know, what are the templates that’s already there in the theme and templates that you might create yourself and your creator templates appearing in the different list and what is probably the most, I guess, I don’t know, I find it really hard to judge what might be more because different people, different workflows will find things more useful than others. But the active templates one is also super interesting because it means that you can essentially have multiple of each. Say you could have multiple home templates and you can switch between them because only one of them is active. So you say you have three different home templates and the active one is the one that’s showing on your website’s homepage. And then you can just go into the admin and switch the active template if you want to just change your homepage to a different template. So that is super cool. If you’re doing things like, you know, the landing pages and stuff like that, you know, seasonal things. This is my Halloween homepage sort of thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Timely example. Wonderful.

Isabel Brison: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it comes with a few hiccups because that one is if you are accustomed to change your template right there from the theme, getting a notification that it’s now a duplicate there. And normally duplicates we don’t like. Yeah. So but it also, the advantage is that you can make your edits without interrupting your front page and then can activate the edited one and leave the theme template as it is. And you can always switch back in, activating and deactivating it. But I think that one step is oh, do you want to duplicate? Yeah, it’s kind of another decision for the user. But I think it’s a valuable one to point out that, yeah, you can edit this without interrupting your front page and then. And you can build more than one. 

It’s also good for plugin developers who want to add or help with templating specific features, then they can actually also provide multiple templates for the feature. If it’s woocommerce yeah, big, big plugin that has a lot of additional features. Yeah, they can provide multiple templates for the product page or for the archive page for products, and then give the user some choices which one they would like more and add in additional features. So I think that’s also still an underrated feature coming to WordPress, but it makes the handling of the template so much easier or consistent. I would say there’s no surprises anymore, so. Oh, I didn’t know I wanted to do that kind of thing. 

The next one on the list is the ability to hide the blocks. I think we talked about it also with Beth Soderberg and with others because that kind of was in some of the Gutenberg releases before. It’s more a foundational feature right now it can only do hide or show, but there’s no condition around it. I think the developers really want to make sure that the foundation of adding, showing and hiding is consistent throughout the interface and the front end and all the different pieces like blocks, like patterns, like sync patterns. You could hide a block within the sync pattern or even templates or template parts before they add conditions to it. And also with the conditions will come the thinking about how can other people, third-party extenders, that’s plugin developers also add additional conditions to it in the realm of the WordPress ecosystem. So I think the treading lightly on that feature is a good first iteration there.

Isabel Brison: Yeah. And it can be super useful as sort of a complement actually to the active templates idea is that you could potentially have a pattern or a block or something you have a sale on. And so you put the sale block up on your website and then you take it down and it’s still there. You could just switch it on and off whenever you like. So it’s going to be pretty useful for that sort of workflow, I reckon.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely.

Isabel Brison: I see with the conditional hiding, there’s one very obvious thing. This I think has sort of been a feature request that’s been going around for ages, which is being able to conditionally hide blocks depending on the breakpoint. So in order to have different layouts or different, you know, different content for desktop and mobile, for instance. And so that’s something. But that’s everything that involves responsive behaviors is so complicated because once you start thinking about how, how do you define this then what is mobile? You know, what are you going to give people fixed breakpoints? Are you going to give them the ability to define their own breakpoints? What’s this API going to look like? There’s a lot of questions there that haven’t been answered.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, indeed. And. And I think I’m coming from expectations that I have been using Nick Diego’s Block Visibility plugin that he started, I don’t know, three or four years ago and he kind of provided new features every time when he’s. He released a new plugin. And you can do the time condition, you can do the coming from Twitter or coming from. So there are a lot of expectations there that have been a little bit damped through this first feature in Core, but I think it’s a good move to do that in the smallest increments possible to not interrupt things too much. So how do you feel about the command palette? Command palette everywhere?

Isabel Brison: It’s cool. I mean, it’s actually pretty nice to be on whatever screen call it up, just start typing name of new screen I want to go to and be able to go. Because it. I think it really saves a lot of clicking around in the admin, a lot of, you know, going click, click link to place. Whereas now it’s just a keyboard shortcut, type enter. Your hand never needs to leave the keyboard. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s pretty good. Yeah. I like it very much and I haven’t used it that much as I wanted to, but I also haven’t had the WordPress 6.9 installed on many of the test sites. But yeah, I like that. Now the pressure is off to surface all the menu items to the top so it’s easily accessible. That’s kind of for. For a lot of people, kind of the. The problem with the WP admin with those two to three levels deep and this can really. Yeah, shortcut that, as you said, to the next screen to a different. Add a post. You don’t have to click through all that. You don’t have to for changing settings. You don’t have to find which settings do I want. Yeah, and all that. It’s really cool and I’m glad that it’s now available to the full WP admin. That’s where it’s really shining now.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s it. That’s the thing. It’s go from anywhere to anywhere, whatever screen you’re on. That’s really cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And plugins can register commands for their own tools. So there’s that API was in 6.8 already, or even 6.7, I don’t remember, but it was already in WordPress available for plugins to add comments, but if they are out, if most plugins are outside of the site, Editor. So it didn’t really register to anybody or wasn’t particularly useful. So yeah, the next thing is, I’m not quite sure what to make of that. That’s the allowed block support I get and the UI for it I don’t get. So a loud block is. Well, why don’t you explain it?

Isabel Brison: Yeah, that was actually one of the pieces I reviewed, so I tested it a fair bit. And allowed blocks is something that. So the functionality itself has existed for a while, but in order. So what it does is for some containers that support it, you can define which blocks are allowed inside that container. So it could you say by containers I mean blocks that can contain inner blocks, such as a group or a cover or, you know, the usual suspects columns, stuff like that. And in those blocks you can define which blocks are allowed as children of them. So you could say if you have a columns block, these columns will only have headings and paragraphs and I don’t want any images, I don’t want any widgets or any other stuff. It’s only going to have those two types of blocks. Or conversely, you could say that there is a specific type of block that is not allowed. But I think the more frequent sort of use case would probably be to define like a strictly limited amount of blocks that you could use. And this could be useful if you’re creating patterns and templates that you want to be used in a certain way to make things easier to just define which blocks are going to be allowed in that container. This was already possible to do, but in order to do it you had to edit the block markup. So you had to go into the, you know, the editor code view and you had to write in the block, you had to like identify the block, which is, it’s not very user friendly. It’s mostly, you know, it is something that can be done through the UI. You don’t need a code editor to do it because you have that handy code view in the editor. So you can edit the code, you can add that metadata in there, but it’s not nice. And having that as a UI option, it’s well enough hidden away that it’s not sort of going to interfere with normal workflows. It’s not in your face. Right. It’s just out there in the advanced, if you really want to use it, you know, it’s there just makes things that little bit easier for. I’d say this is probably mostly a feature for, you know, website admins, theme pattern builders, that sort of scenario agencies probably find it useful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think agencies find it useful, but they’re already doing that with code. Yeah. So their patterns already have the block markup in it.

Isabel Brison: Yeah. This just makes it a nicer interaction model because, I mean, if we’re offering essentially what WordPress has been doing for these, you know, for these past I don’t know how many years since the block editor came out. Really, you know, eight years. That. Wow, that’s been a while. But we’ve been building this system that allows you to do as much as you can, that allows you to build whole websites without ever having to touch the code. And this is just, you know, one more piece of that. It’s like. No, there’s a UI for that. You can actually. You don’t actually have to get your hands dirty.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I can. I can see how that works for patterns because it’s kind of one container that is used over and over, but to set it up, you need to be in the editor. So it’s normally not used for someone who creates posts and pages and has to do the setting for every container that’s on the canvas to do that. So it’s probably not that use case that I was. Because it only makes sense for me to get into template parts or get into the containers in the. In the patterns or in templates. Yeah.

Isabel Brison: So, yeah, I’d say so, yes. This would be mostly a feature for templates and patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Isabel Brison: Like you wouldn’t be writing a post and go, oh, I’m going to put a group block in here that only allows paragraphs like what? You don’t need to do that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you can do it right away. Yeah, so, yeah, I think that was what tripped me up. So why is in the post and page editor, but that’s the same editor. So it’s more function for blocks of blocks everywhere.

Isabel Brison: I mean, you can add patterns to posts and you can add navigation blocks to posts. This will just give you your whole website navigation right there in the post. It’s like you can do anything with blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can definitely do that. Yeah, absolutely. So I get. Yeah. 

So the same is also happening with block bindings where it had been already in WordPress and being used, but it was not particularly expansive. So now block bindings is kind of going out to all blocks and also have UI where you can see what are the bindings in there. And plugins. Plugins will have not in this release, but in 7.0. I think the possibilities to define their own UI for the block binding so I think that’s going to be a real winner also for plugins to not have to create custom blocks but just do a block bindings to some data. So now we come to the great part and that’s the new blocks that are in beta 1 now. We are all pretty excited I think about the accordion block. Finally made it.

Isabel Brison: How good is the accordion block?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it’s pretty feature rich. And I know that Justin Tadlock is working on a style variation tutorial for it. So you as a theme developer or site builder can learn more how you can then style it and what to look for. And he also is testing it so whatever tutorial comes out it. I’m sure he has one or two, three bug reports that he said, well that could be better. But that’s kind of the. It’s the first version so that’s expected and wanted.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, totally. Lots of testing will have to be done on all these things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Isabel Brison: So that it’s all stable in time for the stable release. There’s a math block now that is super fancy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Isabel Brison: Like you can do math stuff in your posts.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s one math professor I think from Stanford who has a blog for many, many years and he always kind of said is that possible to do latex and ML markup language and all that? So yeah, he, he might be delighted about that. And for all the teachers that are out there that are in, in STEM fields, that’s. What is that? Science, technology, Math and science.

Isabel Brison: Technology, Engineering. Engineering and math. Is it math?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Isabel Brison: Interesting. I always thought of maths as part of science, but.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, math is used in all kinds of different science.

Isabel Brison: 

Yeah, it’s sort of philosophy adjacent too. It’s a bit, bit of a weird one. It’s a weird discipline actually.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Engineering needs math too.

Isabel Brison: Well, engineering things. Engineering is a very practical discipline that uses abstract concepts from other disciplines like maths.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah. So that’s them. In the US there are some instructors who actually call it Steam and the A that comes in Steam is for art because you also need designers to be kind of really good in building a world. But we are digressing.

Isabel Brison: I like STEAM actually. I think because things are a lot more interconnected because you do have that sort of philosophy poking in and you have ethics and you have history and you have a lot of things. Yeah. A lot of arts related disciplines.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I totally agree with you. Because you also need to have a creative mind and that is actually most of the time only really taught in art settings to kind of be exploratory and to kind of see where the art. Well, your creativity gets you. And yeah, design is applied art. Yeah. In that matter. So, yeah, it’s kind of. Yeah.

Isabel Brison: Problem solving when you have lots of constraints, lateral thinking, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so the terms query block is a very special block that helps you create like the post query loop, a loop of terms that are on your site and then you can display either with counter or without the counter, with links to the archive pages in one swoop. And it also has some adjacent new blocks. That’s the term name and the term. No term description was already in. In the editor, so that’s kind of nice for the creative designers. The paragraph and heading blocks now have a fit text.

Isabel Brison: Oh, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Typography setting. It came out of the idea that there needs to be a stretchy text block and then by exploring how to figure out how that works, the developers came up with, oh, that might just be a setting for the typography and we don’t need to create a new block. So I think it’s a really cool, cool PR to read through to kind of see how that all kind of developed in terms of we have an idea in our head and then we need to figure out how to implement it.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, for sure. I think it makes total sense to have that be a setting or sort of like, I guess it should be under typography. I think it is typography. Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s enough.

Isabel Brison: To be sort of a block support because then that means that you could potentially, you can add it to headings, you can add to paragraphs. I mean, you could add it to other blocks potentially, but I think those are probably the major two that you’d want this on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what it does is actually you. You start typing, give it a. Your heading, and then when you switch it, it kind of fills the whole space of it and not just the space that the normal letters would take. Yeah, when you write it out, it kind of increases it and then. Or makes it smaller depending on how long it is. But it definitely has a higher attention rate on your website and it fills the whole thing, whatever container it is in.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s pretty cool to play with. It’s a bit weird because there’s a bit of a delay in the resizing. So if you’re editing something in the editor, it resizes just a bit later, which I guess probably you also don’t want it to resize as you type. I don’t know. It’s like great. I think that in that sort of finer detail of getting the experience exactly right. And if I think that there was a bit of back and forth on that on the PR too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was.

Isabel Brison: So it’s going to be interesting to see where we land with this one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And I. I think it’s a bit weird to see the letters go big and small while typing because it kind of gets you a little bit in a motion sickness kind of way. But it’s also something like the drop gap in the paragraph. Yeah. You don’t see it in while you’re typing the paragraph, but once you get out of the block, it formats it, the first letter to be a larger size. So it’s probably a similar thing that you can only diminish this.

Isabel Brison: Yeah. No, the drop cap actually disappears if you select the paragraph that has a drop cap. Whereas the fit text. The text stays big. It’s sort of. It slightly changes size. So you have a paragraph with fit text and if you click into it to type in. Because. I’m not sure if this is because of the cursor, but for some reason it just sort of shrinks slightly. This might be a bug. I’m not sure we’ll figure out test a bit further.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m sure developers will figure it out or designers to kind of make that a little bit more smoother. Yeah. 

And the last block galaxy that comes in is the time to read block. It has been in Gutenberg for quite a while, but it took some major effort to get it past the accessibility problems that it had. And now it’s actually because of. We talked on a previous episode about that as well, that the time to read, if it’s a static number, it kind of is hit and miss for the readers who take longer or take shorter, it’s kind of not really helpful. But now it displays a time range, so from 15 to 18 minutes or 12 to 18 minutes or something like that. If you want that there’s a choice for the user and then the time to read. Blog actually also has a word count setting, so it can be used as two blocks. One displays the time to read in your. In your loop or on your single post template. And the other one shows the word count. So it kind of gives two pieces of information about two data sets for the reader to figure out do I want to read it now or later? And then later never happens. But that’s a different story behavior.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, word count is. I find word count a pretty cool block. But do we. Is this something we ever want our readers to know how many words a post has. Is there anyone. I guess my question is, is there anyone out there who chooses what to read based on how many words it has? If you’re going to, you know, I, you know, I need, I need a five minute read. Are you going to go like, no, I actually need a thousand-word read. Is that a thing?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Does anyone. Yeah, well, it depends. Writers know how much, how long it takes to read 3,000 words and can say, okay, I read half of it and not the rest of it or something like that. If it’s good structure, it has the most important part in the first half and not in the second half. But yeah, I don’t know. People are so different from me. Yeah. That I really don’t have a good handle of what’s good. So I wouldn’t be a good product manager because I said, okay, well everything in there give options here. But that’s not the philosophy of WordPress. It’s kind of decisions and other options and I’m having a hard time thinking about decisions for millions and millions of people that are only millions and millions of people in other cultures. So I really admire all the people who can make those decisions here. I’m digressing again. Sorry.

Isabel Brison: That happens. But yeah, I agree.

I’d much rather be an engineer than the product manager because those folks have to deal with really tough decisions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next thing is something for theme developers. Pretty much it’s the border radius presets for the theme JSON file, which is pretty good. So you don’t have users that have all kinds of ideas how big the border radius has to be. And there’s a consistent either small or middle or large kind of border radius that you can give options to your users. Justin Tadlock actually wrote a piece already on the developer blog about that. So go and look for it. And of course I also put it in the show notes.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s linked to from the test blog.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That too. Yeah.

Isabel Brison: That’s good. Justin’s always on top of everything.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Well, as long as theme. As long as it’s a theme-related gene station-related design related stuff.

Isabel Brison: But this is. It makes perfect sense because you have font size presets, you, you have standard sizes, you have spacing presets, you have all, all sorts of things. So border ages is just one more of those.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You could even have shadow presets. Yeah. For your, for the shadow setting. Drop shadow setting. Yeah. 

And the next one is that Social links can now have custom icon not only the icon extensibility, but the whole custom variation extensibility where you can create your own social icons with a plugin and have that display on your website. It’s fairly easy once you get to get through the documentation, all that to actually create. So I needed it for my theme that I do for the Gutenberg Times. It’s still in the works, but I talked about it earlier. I needed social icons for the various podcast directories where Gutenberg Changelog is actually listed and I only found two of them in the with Core. One was the Spotify and the other one was the RSS Feedback. Yeah. But there’s also Pocket Cast and there is. The Pocket Cast embed is in there and maybe there’s even. Yeah, so there’s also a pod bean and these kinds of things. So I. I had to create a plugin and just add them to it so I can put them in my template. So it’s a fairly. If I can do it, everybody can do it. Yeah. Kind of thing.

Isabel Brison: Cool. Do you reckon we’re going to start seeing plugins like for sort of really, really niche sort of, you know, like social media platforms? I can extension pack or podcast platforms. I can plug in like for like specific things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can see that too. Yeah. And. Or payment. Yeah. Kind of for all the content creators. Yeah. You can. You can see a link to Ko Fi and to buy me a coffee or all this. Or Patreon or PayPal. Yeah. For those. Click here and donate something. Yeah, I can see that. And I don’t think that. Yeah. As contributors we don’t have the bandwidth to kind of decide. Same thing. Yeah. Decide what’s now should be in Core and be maintained or not. Yeah. So have the extensibility in there is a really plus for the ecosystem. Yeah. 

And that’s kind of some of the features that I’m kind of thinking of right now. I’m still working on the Source of Truth with all the. What I haven’t seen, neither in the release post nor in the call for testing, is the. The list of all the improvements for the other blocks. For the old blocks only. Yeah, Kind of. What happened with the cover block and what happened with some of the comment blocks. There are some additional features in there. We kind of wanted to remind everybody that there are 15 Gutenberg plugin releases in this next version. 

Isabel Brison: Yeah. And I mean, there’d be a huge amount of bug fixes, but unless there were a really scandalous bug that everyone was upset about, you wouldn’t really announce it in your beta 1 release posts, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, of course releases are for features. Yeah, right, yeah. But there are updates also for developers. I think almost every API got some love in this release. So there is the Data Views and Data Forms. The team has been working on almost all the 15 Gutenberg releases. There was something in there for the Data Views and Data Forms. Then the Abilities API made it just half an hour before the release into the beta.

Isabel Brison: So we will see that one’s also. It’s sort of a cool preview or pointer to what the future may hold in terms of AI integrations for WordPress. So it’s a good one.  I think it’s good to have it out there, I guess so that plugins can start because the idea is that plugins can register their abilities, the things that they can do, so an AI agent can go and pick up on those things and do tasks for, for the website owner. But of course it’s one of those things that it has to. It’ll only work if, if there’s adoption. So I guess it’s good to get it out there early. So maybe plugins will start experimenting with that and then once all the other parts because then you know, there’s a whole workaround building MCP adapter so that those abilities can be channeled through to AIs. So that’s, you know, it’s all a big working process. Pretty exciting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel that too. Yeah. But I, I think the, the MCP, it’s not yet ready yet. I think. Yeah, people have worked on it, but it wasn’t near ready to be in Core and be maintained for the future because it’s the backwards compatibility promise that WordPress has. Might delay a few things to make sure that people are really sure that needs to be in Core or that it doesn’t change too much in the future. And with all the AI stuff, it’s probably hard to predict how far, how long it needs to wait or how this all comes together.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s interesting because the whole of sort of AI-related development is going in this whole like move fast and break Things mode, whereas WordPress is not about moving fast and breaking things. So yeah, no, the MCP I mentioned it because this is something that will, the Abilities API will later be integrated with if all goes well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s a plugin out there. So the AI team, Core AI team has four building blocks. One is the Abilities API, the other one is the MCP adapter and then there is a PHP SDK software development kit. Basically the fourth one is the plugin that kind of pulls it all together and kind of shows what actually could be possible. So people who kind of. Or developers who kind of want to get into that field can gradually skill up on the AI stuff. And I think it’s really cool. And I know that Jonathan Bosinger, he has done a lot of live streams on all the AI features and has worked with the Abilities API and he’s preparing also for the developer blog an article to kind of do the introduction there and figure out a use case or a little small plugin that kind of uses it. So, yeah, pretty cool. Cool things to come. Yeah, the interactivity API improvements are more about the router of that.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, I have to say I didn’t really follow these very closely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me neither. It was always so it sounded all like bug fixes, but I know there’s something in there that people would like to use. I need to get smarter about that, but I haven’t yet. And then the updates to the block bindings, where block bindings coming to other blocks or to custom blocks in one way or other, and then the updates on the HTML API, those are totally beyond me.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, those are more internal things that you wouldn’t see any user facing changes with HTML API updates. You might, I mean, potentially in some places it might make the code a bit more performant, it might make the code a bit more stable. It’s generally, it’s. They’re good code quality improvements, but it’s not something that you can actually point at on the front end of the website and go, hey, this is the.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thing, the HTML API. Yeah, celebrated.

Isabel Brison: And you don’t see it in action.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Like visually put fireworks on it. Yeah, I said, why? Yeah, that’s kind of funny. Yeah. But what I learned is one of the good things about the HTML API is that you could actually parse HTML without using regex and get a better, say, a more consistent outcome on things. If you want to add an attribute or class or something, something like that to certain things, that’s a good use case for HTML API. But it’s also. Get a URL link content. Yeah, there are these new functions that, if you had to write them yourself, kind of really complicated. But there’s an underlying support layer with the HTML API that kind of saves you a lot of work on that.

Isabel Brison: Oh yeah. And things we do a lot, very frequently throughout the code. And yeah, as you say, we were using regexes for things and like had custom solutions here and there to like add a class, remove a class, edit a class, do weird things with bits of markup. And the TAG processor has made a lot of code a lot more readable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I think that’s for now. The WordPress 6.9 part of our changelog today. We need to get going here. 

Gutenberg 21.9

So what’s in 21.9 specifically? 

Enhancements

We talked about the allow blocks UI and support for more blocks. 

What I like is actually the aspect ratio control for gallery blocks.

Isabel Brison: I was going to mention that. I was just looking at it going, oh, that’s a cool feature. Yeah, it is, absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But all of a sudden you have the pictures that are in your gallery along the same size and all the like. Yeah, it can look really cool. And then in 21.9 there are also features in there that didn’t make it in 629 like the breadcrumbs block for testing. It’s all. It’s still behind the experiments flag but it. It will support the post with terms has some other. It’s actually added in 21.9 to the Gutenberg plugin.

Isabel Brison: There’s a cool one here that I wanted to point out in relation to the Data Views package that is actually pretty visible in the front end. So it’s shipping in 6.9, which is the persistence for your page settings. So when you’re in the site editor, say you go into the pages view and the default of that view is a list and the site preview and you can change that. Say you can change it to display as a grid or a table and previously you change that and then you’d navigate to another place and then you’d get back and it would be reset to the default view. Whereas now it will save your settings, your view settings. When you navigate away and you navigate back, if you’ve reset the view, you still have the same view that you configured. So I think that’s just. It’s just one of those little but really cool quality of life improvements that was chipping in 6.9.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s kind of upsetting when, when, when it doesn’t remember. Yeah, because it’s a bloody computer. It should remember.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, no, I need this view because I really need to look at the featured images or whatever and I need to see them in this size. And then you navigate it and go, no, it’s all gone back again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is this stored in the user preferences or is it more in the browser or.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, so technically I think a new package has been created to store these. There’s like a new Views package which is being used to store data. Views preferences. It is. I would say it’s likely to be. It’s likely to use emitter stored in your browser settings like, you know, local storage.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Isabel Brison: But I haven’t actually dived yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s just a detail that I was kind of. Yeah. If I move away from my computer and go to a different computer if it’s stored in the browser. I don’t have that feature persistent here. But anyway, so yeah, we talk pretty much through things because the 21.9 is the last Gutenberg plugin release that has features for WordPress 6.9. After that, only bug fixes and quirkiness removal will make it into the release. So a lot of the things that we talked about actually came in just ahead of the 21.9 release candidate. So the notes are graduated from the experiments here so they can get into the release. 

The switch from block comments to notes in the term of description and how we talk about it to offset the confusion with the other comments that we have on WordPress. Yeah. Which is the user comments, the visitor comments. So that’s also in this release. We talked about the coordinate block. We talked about block visibility. There’s a keyboard shortcut actually for the block visibility. So you can. You can highlight a click on a. On a block and then do control or command shift H and then you hide it or H back again. It shows a toggle switch toggle keyboard. So that’s pretty cool. And there’s some drag and drop by move quality of life enhancements. When you move the block, it actually moves the block animation. So you kind of know, okay, I’m still moving this block, I’m not moving something else.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, the drag and drop. Being able to drag and drop actual blocks is also a really great improvement. Like to actually grab the blocks and drag them somewhere else and see it being dragged.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Isabel Brison: And yeah, yeah, yeah.

Experiments

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there is what is in 6.21.9 are actually experiments that I wanted to point out. I talked with Beth Soderberg about that because in the 20.8 there was a new block API for PHP only blocks. And it’s definitely not a fully featured thing yet. But it now has auto register the block with the block API version 3, which is important for the Iframe editor. And the other one is to make sure that the editor interactions and block supports are also working correctly with the PHP only blocks. What was In Block Editor, kind of dividing from the get go is that people, some PHP developers, hate JavaScript with a vengeance. They can.

Isabel Brison: I’m sorry to hear it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I know.

Isabel Brison: I kind of understand.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. JavaScript, the good parts, is a very small book. So there is the expectations that not all good things from the JavaScript block handling comes into PHP, but now it’s much easier to create blocks with just PHP. But it’s experimental. It is not yet in WordPress 6.9 and I don’t know the timeline from that, but it’s just. I just want to point it out that some people can start testing things with the Gutenberg release 21.9.

Isabel Brison: Yeah, yeah, that would be great. That’s a great thing for extenders to test and give feedback on, I think. Especially while it’s still experimental, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Especially agency developers and plugin developers who haven’t made the switch to block things yet. And then. Yeah, go ahead.

Isabel Brison: I was just going to say I was doing a bit of experimenting here just to loop back on the data views preference persistence thing. It appears to be using preferences because it does maintain your preference across browsers.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, cool. Thank you for filling that gap. Knowledge gap. There’s also an experiment that the navigation block toolbar gets an add navigation or edit navigation in the template part editor, which is definitely helpful because clicking on things, it’s sometimes hit or miss, but I think it’s an experiment. I didn’t see that that made it into 6.9 because that came very late into 21.9.

Isabel Brison: There’s been a lot. There’s been a lot of sort of ongoing work on the navigation block. There are no huge pieces. Each one likes just sort of small bits and pieces. There’s a general improvement to how it works. Which, which one in particular are we looking at?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: When you go in the rundown further down to the experiments, there’s one for the block API and then for the block library, it has a navigation block toolbar. And when you click through the PR that at 72008 you see it still has the experimental label there and there’s also no backport to 6.8. 6.9.

Isabel Brison: Oh, okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you’d like that because you like having text in your toolbar, right?

Isabel Brison: Oh, yeah. No, I’m finding it very interesting that some of these new buttons for new functionality that pops up are actually text buttons. It’s like, oh, we’re giving up on icons. Express things with icons as fully as you can with text. Like I’ve Look, I’ve always struggled with icons. To be perfectly honest. One of the reasons I worked on. On the text labels setting was because I could not tell the icons apart from each other. If I’m going to be working on this UI, there has to be a way of switching this off.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And a lot of people actually are grateful for that as well. With the same reason. Yeah. That I can’t. Don’t do it for me. To be sure that I click when I click on it. That I don’t offset a nuclear bomb or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

Isabel Brison: Was that the one I wanted to click? No, it’s the other one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And what was it again? That I really. Yeah. To kind of remember those icons as well. Well, and then for the block bindings, there is an experiment in 21.9 that extends the UI to the external sources. That’s something that I mentioned before that it won’t make by the block bindings. It won’t make into 6.9, but it is kind of in the works for 7.0 and to extend the UI for the block bindings so plugins and other extenders can work with that and have their custom blocks and all that. And if you’re interested in a PHP only blocks, there is actually an added. There is some documentation in there now in the block editor. Even if it is now still an experiment. There is already some documentation under the getting started fundamentals registration of block. There is a PHP only block in autoregistration chapter now. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

I think there was all I wanted to point out from the 21.9 release. That is beyond 6.9 features and all that we have also one thing that might be interesting for the theme developers and also for plugin developers who want to tap into global styles. The global styles have been. The data logic has been moved into a dedicated package. So you don’t have to have three or four packages to kind of deal with your global styles. It’s just one that you have to include in your plugin. So I think that’s very good development there.

Isabel Brison: This is still sort of far from its definitive shape yet there was actually that even today there’s sort of discussion on that PR as like, should it be this package? Should we. I was. I was arguing for some of these things to be in the style engine package. And Riyadh’s sort of holding back going, no, it might be too early. Let’s try and figure out the APIs first. One, a very practical reason for this to appear is because there are a bunch of global styles logic that lives in edit site and if we want to use it in the post editor, it’s not really available. And so global styles should, you know, global styles should be in a place where it’s not bound to a specific editor and it can be used across the board. So this is sort of it’s work that’s going to be helpful for lots of internal purposes too. I think we’re still not quite close to getting to the point where we start thinking about how useful this is going to be for extenders. However, I have to say if extenders are listening that may be interested in using any of these APIs. Feedback is always very welcome. I mean we can only know what needs to be public and what tools we should offer when people tell us. I need that, you know, this is a thing that would actually be very useful so that any feedback on that count I think would be really good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there’s still a few things that are still in private APIs but I think that’s the step to kind of move it into a public API as well. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, thanks for diving in there. Yeah, it’s a lot of commentary there and also with further PRs to fix some of that, but it is merged. It’s alerting. It’s however in the milestone for 22.0 and we’ll see how far that goes when we talk about that in the plugin release of Gutenberg 20.0 which is actually the next one in two weeks so. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah but I think there’s a lot of activity going to be around 6.9 buck fixes and all that as well. 

So if people want to connect with you, where would they find you? Isabelle, what is the best way to connect with you?

Isabel Brison: I think I’m. I’m sort of not really on social media these days, so GitHub I am tell the machines on GitHub you can always come and you know, leave comments on my pull requests and the work that I’m doing. If it’s anything you’re interested in. I am also in the core WordPress slack. I think I’m also. Yeah, I’m also told the machines. So that’s. Yeah, that’s me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a great handle coming out of the 90s.

Isabel Brison: Yeah I was like ah, talk to computer thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right, right. Yeah. Well it’s such a pleasure to talk with you through All Geek out over the Gutenberg Project and releases. Thank you so much for being here. Dear listeners. Go and test help test WordPress 6.9. The instructions are incredibly detailed and Krupa Nanda and Jonathan Bossingers, who are the test release leads, co-leads, have done a fantastic job to kind of put it all together. Of course, the links will be in the show notes. I will also link the PR we talked about the global styles going into a dedicated package. I will link that as well in the show notes. And as always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is episode one, two three and like it is my password one two three.

Isabel Brison: I love it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if you have questions or suggestions and news you want us to include, to send them to changelog@gudenburgtimes.com that’s an email address and changelog@gutenbergtimes.com so thank you all for listening and thank you again, Isabel, for joining us. Bye Bye.

Isabel Brison: Thank you. Bye.

I am genuinely giddy about WordPress 6.9 and its delightful updates. Major kudos to all contributors, who push it over the first hurdle of this release cycle. The Beta 1 release happened earlier this week. The final release is scheduled for December 2nd, 2025.

There are lots of different updates for the full range of WordPress users.

• Content creators get a number of new and waited-for Blocks, with Accordion, Time to Read, Term Query and MathML Block, and further refinements to block handling and existing blocks.
• Theme and site builders get additional tools to style a site via theme.json and majorly improved template management right in the site editor, and
• Developers can build faster with an enhanced Block Bindings API and Interactivity API, and for the admin side of plugins the component library of DataViews and DataForms has some great updates as well.

Release Test co-lead, Krupa Nanda posted great instructions on how you can Help test the Beta 1 release of WordPress 6.9 . It’s the best way to learn how to use the new features and report quirks and bugs back to the contributors, so they can be fixed before Release Candidate 1 which is scheduled for November 11.

In Europe we will turn back our clocks one hour on Sunday (Oct 26). The US will follow suit next week (Nov 2). This will be the week of “pick-up meetings” for me. It’s what I call the phase where I miss a meeting and instead turn up at someone else’s meeting and meet new people. Win-win. But seriously, if you scheduled a meeting with me next week, you can’t send too many reminders if you want me to turn up in time.

Have a splendid weekend ahead,

Yours,
Birgit

This week in WordPress is a great long-running show by WPbuilds and host Nathan Wrigley. A panel of three people chats about last week’s WordPress news. They comment, explain and present addtional view points. It’s loosely inspired by “This week in Google” an even longer-running show of the This week in Tech (TWiT) network that was renamed at the beginning of this year to Intelligent Machines. With Jeff Jarvis, Leo LaPorte and others. It’s my favorite podcast. But I digress.

In the latest episode, This week in WordPress 353, Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash, Nathan Wrigley and yours truly discussed the great Internet outage of 2025 aka AWS outage, the WordFence Security Report, WordPress 6.9 upcoming features, Gutenberg updates, and Tammie Lister’s fun blocks and so much more. Listen in on YouTube or your favorite Podcast app.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Rae Morey, The Repository, reported that WordPress 6.9 Beta 1 Now Available and Ready for Testing and gives and overview of the features and also what’s didn’t make it into the release, a nice recap on the progress of the Admin Redesign.

Besides WordPress 6.9 Beta, the fabulous crew of contributors also released Gutenberg 21.9. It brings three new blocks: MathML, Term name and Term Count blocks, the latter two used in the context of the new Term Query block. The allowedBlocks feature has been expanded to all blocks and users can also use the new UI tools to controls allowed blocks for templates and patterns, without writing code or editing raw block markup. Hide/show block features was added also to synced patterns and template parts. It can also be called upon via Command Palette and keyboard shortcut cmd/ctrl+shift+H.

Isabel Brison, JavaScript developer at Automattic and core contributor, joined me on the podcast and filled various knowledge gaps about the updates in this release. We also had great fun discussing WordPress 6.9 features, soon coming to your a WordPress instance near you.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Upcoming Learn WordPress online workshops

On Thursday, Oct 30, 10:00 UTC, Maruti Mohanty will hold a workshop and show off WordPress 6.8 Features in Action + 6.9 Sneak Peek: A Hands-On Workshop.

On Thursday, Oct 30, at 20:00 UTC, Velda Christensen‘s workshop will be about Landing Pages, Posts, & More: Strategies for a Stronger Site -In this beginner-friendly workshop, we’ll explore simple ways to organize your WordPress content so visitors can easily find what they need and take the next step.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Brian Coords has the details on the latest release of WooCommerce 10.3. in his release post. WooCommerce 10.3: COGS comes to core and MCP beta he highlights:

• Address autocomplete for Checkout blocks and shortcode
• Product Collection Editor improvements
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is here
• WooCommerce MCP is available for testing in beta.
• More new features and updates
• API Updates

Blocktober Fun, the October challenge to build a block a day with Automattic’s Telex, is almost over. This week, Tammie Lister prompted the Block building AI tool for another set of fun blocks:

• Sketch Image
• Ripple Text
• VHS glitch
• Flip Card
• Emoji voting

A new fun plugin arrived at the WordPress plugin repository: It’s called Throwable by Qara Yahya, founder of BlockLayouts. Using it you can place buttons, paragraphs or image into the Throwable block. The adjust Gravity aka speed items fall and Bounce setting, and have some nice animation on your site.

Justin Tadlock released Breadcrumbs Block v. 3.0. The update includes support for the built-in Layout and Block Gap (Spacing) features in WordPress. “There are quite a few other changes and some notable bug fixes, particularly if you extend the block with custom code. Be sure to check out the changelog” he wrote on X.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Sid Sharma, content creator from Nepal, demonstrates how to create a transparently floating sticky header in WordPress, all in the Site Editor for Block Themes.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Seth Rubenstein, lead developer at the Pew Research Center and speaker at WordCamp US, chatted with Nathan Wrigley on the Jukebox podcast about Block Composability in WordPress’ Future. Rubinstein “shares fascinating stories from the work h e’s recently been doing. He breaks down what block composability really means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.” wrote Wrigley in his podcast show notes.

Fellyph Cintra, developer advocate working for Automattic, published Things you might have missed about the Playground project over the past few months. It’s a great roundup post about the amazing work of the team. He mentions the PHP-Wasm changes, updates to the Playground CLI, the JavaScript API, how to use Playground with Playwright and the performance improvements with OPCache enabled by default. He also addresses rumors about missing features compared to traditional WordPress installs, noting that this gap is becoming less significant.

In preparation for the WordPress 6.9 Field Guide, André Maneiro just posted an update about the Fields API, that has been worked on for many Gutenberg releases. It lists functions and options with code examples. Updates on DataViews and DataForm are still to come.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

A release party is coming up on Tuesday, October 21, at 15:00 UTC for WordPress 6.9 Beta 1. It’s the first time for this release squad. Good luck!

Will you start testing WordPress 6.9 next week? You can use the Beta Tester plugin by Andy Fragen and install it on your test site. I am using WordPress Studio on my computer for systematic testing and prep work for the Source of Truth post to come out in a few weeks.

The WordPress Test team already published a few pre-beta calls for testing, you can work through, and they are preparing a comprehensive post for all of WordPress 6.9 testing for next week.

• Help test changes to template management 
• Call for Testing: Ability to Hide Blocks 
• Call for Testing: Accordion Block 

WordPress 6.9 is a big focus of my work now. As always, I’ll keep you updated.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

PS: On Monday, October 20th, I will be on the 353rd episode of This week in WordPress show together with Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash, and the brilliant host Nathan Wrigley. You can join us live!

PPS: This week, I celebrated the five-year anniversary of Gutenberg Nightly.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg talked briefly at WordCamp Canada, gave a demo, and then answered questions from the the audience. The wizards behind the scenes already posted the recording of the session to YouTube. WordCamp Canada 2025—Ma.tt Mullenweg “Town Hall/AMA”. If you rather read about the talk on Mullenweg’s blog, WordCamp Canada Talk. He also added the Q & A transcript as well.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owner

In his video AI Builds WordPress Blocks , Jamie Marsland introduced Automattic Telex and showed off about ten blocks he and other people built with it, like animated text, a countdown counter, and mermaid diagram and more. Check it out; it’s not only amazing, it borders on voodoo or magic.

Tammie Lister continues her October Challenge on the Blocktober.fun site. The latest blocks are Flip Card, Emoji Voting, Highlighter, Story Generator, Watermark and Make the logo bigger. You not only can try them all out on Telex and remix them with your own ideas. Lister also shares here elaborate prompts you can study and learn how to skill up your AI work.

Troy Chaplin released Block Accessibility Check v2.2! It introduces Heading structure validation,  alt-text pattern detection and provides an upgraded URL checks with real TLD validation + dev environment support”Along with the new release comes a new dedicated website featuring improved docs, feature overviews, and developer API guide”. Chaplin wrote. The site is focused to assist content creators and developers alike.

Anne Katzeff shared how she created overlapping Columns with the Media & Text Block and little Additional CSS. The step-by-step instructions show you how you can build some dynamic layouts with the core block features.

Katzeff also posted a video of her process on YouTube. Overlapping Columns With the Media & Text Block.

Michael Manuel, WordPress VIP, posted a four-part series of short video: Behind the Build: How Christianity Today Modernized its Publishing Experience and how the team of WebDevStudios helped transform editorial workflows, infrastructure, and content operations for one of America’s most trusted media brands.

• Part 1: Editorial empowerment & workflow efficiency
• Part 2: Performance & platform modernization
• Part 3: Homepage & design system overhaul
• Part 4: Content migration & CMS modernization

Brad Salomons, 8r4d Consulting, Ltd, created the Panoramic Slider Block to scratch an itch. With this block you can post your Pano photos from your phone camera as it provides horizontal sliding controls.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

On the WordPress Developer Blog, Nick Diego published a Snippet on How to add custom blocks to navigation menus. It shows how to use the blocks.registerBlockType filter to extend the navigation block’s allowedBlocks array.

Elliott Richmond demonstrated how to create a block theme using Claude Code on YouTube. He built a theme from scratch with Claude Code, providing clear structure and Markdown tips for the AI tool. You’ll discover how to set up a CLAUDE.md file for AI-assisted theme development and how Claude works with the WordPress Block Theme structure.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Muhammad Muhsin senior engineer at Fueled gave a talk on Building a Web App with the Gutenberg Framework at WordSesh earlier this year. What is Gutenberg as a Framework? It’s a way to use the block editor in a JavaScript application outside of WordPress. Muhsin “built CareerVision.io using Gutenberg outside WordPress—a standalone React framework for block-based apps”. You can watch the presentation on YouTube now.

Ryan Welcher was the Pro WordPress Developer Watches AI Build a Custom Block… and is Blown Away! He put Automattic’s Telex to the test, to build a live audio visualizer block inspired by the classic iTunes music visualizer. The AI writes the React code, handles audio input, and even makes the block respond to live microphone sound, all in about 15 minutes. It’s an impressive look at how Telex could reshape the way developers build custom blocks for WordPress.

JuanMa Garrido, developer advocate at Automattic, livestreamed his ongoing discovery of the Abilities API. He explored how to register custom abilities, expose them to AI models, and understand how this fits into WordPress’ broader AI architecture alongside the MCP Adapter and PHP AI API. The recording is now available on YouTube.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

The episode covers new features like section styles, the highly anticipated accordion block, and improvements to template management, aimed at making theme and site building more flexible for users and developers. They also talk about experimental features such as PHP-only blocks, block bindings, and upcoming blocks like breadcrumbs and table of contents, which promise to streamline site navigation and content organization.

Birgit and Beth underscore the importance of continuous testing and learning, encouraging listeners—especially those hesitant to adopt block themes—to experiment, seek support, and embrace gradual change. The episode wraps with practical advice, recent security updates, and a look at promising innovations coming to the WordPress ecosystem.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Beth Soderberg

• Bethink Studio
• WordPress.org Profile + Slack
• Talks by Beth Soderberg
  • My Process for Building a Custom WordPress Theme in 2025
  • Bill Erickson,Ellen Bauer, Beth Soderberg: Case Studies – How to Prepare your Theme for Gutenberg
  • And more

Calls for Testing WordPress 6.9 

• Template management 
• Ability to Hide Blocks
• Accordion Block

Community Contributions

• Block Galore by designers and developers using Automattic’s Telex 
• Moar Blocks

What’s Released

• WordPress 6.8.3
• What’s new in Gutenberg 21.8? (8 October)

New Blocks still in the works

• Time to Read (m) 
• Accordion Block (m) 
• Breadcrumbs Block (m)
• Terms Query block (m) 
• Dialog Block 
• Icon Block
• Stretchy Text
• Tabs Block
• Table of Contents block

= already merged into trunk, as experiments.

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 122nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9, what we already know about it. And I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at Gutenberg Times, co contributor on the Word Open Source project, and I work as a developer advocate for Automattic. I’m thrilled that I finally have Beth Soderberg join me on the show. Beth is the CEO of Bethink Studio, a special web design and development agency in Alexandria, Virginia, in the U.S. Beth, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Beth Soderberg: Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to my morning. I’m doing great. Good to see you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I tried to recollect how we actually met or we met over the last few years, and I think it was the first time we met at the WordCamp New York in 2019.

Beth Soderberg: I think that’s right. Ish. I definitely have eaten tacos late at night at WordCamp New York. Okay, so that tracks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I definitely met you sometime before the pandemic, so I’m not sure exactly, but that sounds about right. And then I know we had lunch at WordCamp us when it was in San Diego.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. Nice. Oh, right. We had this.

Beth Soderberg: There was.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There was a group of women kind of coming together.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, I saw a table of women. And if I see a table of women at a conference like that, I’m going to sit down at it. And you did exactly the same thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. So.

Beth Soderberg: But that’s the first time I saw you after the pandemic, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And in between, I think we did together the WP Blog Talk virtual conference that was organized by Automattic, but there were a lot of community members in there talking about the Gutenberg and the stage of it and all that.

Beth Soderberg: That was when I realized that I don’t like presenting at virtual conferences in front of audiences that you can’t see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s interesting.

Beth Soderberg: I’m good with Zoom, because you can get some feedback. But the speaking into the void was. I don’t know. It could have also been that I wasn’t speaking to anyone in real life at the time, so it felt extra weird.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no. I get it. The pre-recording and then just be there for the live part of it. But we had a great live discussion there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. It was fun. And we actually did the presentation live. I think that could be why later things were recorded, because it was a really weird experience. It was very strange because you knew you were live. You had no idea if even your audio was working, but you just kind of had to keep talking. And, yeah, it’s the least feedback I’ve ever had from anything I’ve ever spoken at. And I think that not even being sure that the technology was working part. Like, even that level of feedback wasn’t there. It was fun. And hopefully next time I do something like that, it will be recorded in advance.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it was a. It was a good place talk because it was kind of together with Ellen Bauer, and you had 15 minutes, Ellen had 15 minutes. And I think Bill Erickson was there as well.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: There were three of us.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And every one of you kind of took a different take on the block themes. Yeah. And that was really interesting to kind of. Well, we started out in 2020 with that. Yeah. Now it’s five years later, and we finally connected again at WordCamp. Us, because I made it there again.

Beth Soderberg: I know. I was excited to see you. And I think. Yeah, I mean, doing that talk was interesting. I think there’s still some divergence around how people are building and how people are utilizing the tools. That set of like 15-minute talks was a really good microcosm of that because each one of us had been actively building with all of the new tools and had a slightly bigger, different approach. I still think there’s some divergence there, but we’re starting to see some patterns of, like, actual best practices with the new tools, which I think is really exciting. And also it’s fun to sort of invent on the fly. Like, okay, how should this work as the people who really are using it with clients right away, what is the standard we want to set? What does and doesn’t work? And I think that was still in a time period where we were learning so much about what you could do, what the restrictions were. I know in a lot of what we’re going through today, there’s like little tiny changes that end up being so impactful. Right. Like, my favorite thing I hated from that time period was it could have been a little earlier, I don’t remember. But originally you couldn’t set text colors on lists.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Stuff like that. Where it’s so small, but when it’s missing, it’s a big problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah, I think that a lot of work has been put into having consistent design tools for each block that you can control through the theme JSON file and then make it really a unique experience or unique design for your clients. Yeah, that’s definitely something there where you don’t, oh, I can’t do the fonts. Yeah, well, I guess I need to do a variation of it. So there was a lot of coding done to kind of get around those restrictions. How do you feel about kind of ripping out all this additional around coding now that certain things are in core and that are available? Does that kind of trip you up a bit?

Beth Soderberg: I feel great about it and there’s not that much I need to rip out. Some of that is because of how I’ve built things over time. Some of that is because things like the tab block, which I am so excited about, I know it’s not ready and all that, but I have a few sites where I have random solutions for that, but I’ve got them compartmentalized. So pulling them out and putting in something new that makes more sense is going to be easy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because I know, you know, like, especially something like the tabs, they don’t appear that often. And the other thing with stuff like that, you can just search the database for the machine name of block to find where you’re using it. I do that a lot and sometimes I don’t know. I ripped Jetpack out of a site recently because it was only being used for slideshows in like six blog posts. There was no need for it. And it might have been more than six, but still this is a major publishing website that has thousands of posts. They didn’t need Jetpack sitting there doing this like a very minor task. And so that’s one of my tactics for sure. When I’m going to rip something out. People forget that you can search easily. Not even in the database. You can use the WordPress search. Search.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. For the posts. Yes. Yeah, that’s what I do. Yeah. Kind of. You can kind of put the blog name in there and then see which post uses what block, especially the third party blocks. When you find out, okay, I have now three query blocks and core blocks and why am I doing this to me?

Beth Soderberg: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I’ve always been pretty conservative about what I’ll add.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So I think that’s part of why it’s not super daunting to me. Because if I can make it work with the tools that exist, I will.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I’m not going to over engineer it just because I could. And that makes it easier to clean up long term.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think the last big feature that was introduced to theme development was the section styles. Style variation in one and then the section styles, the smaller things and block styles, now that you can edit them in the global styles. How much do you use about that? Is that something that comes up quite a bit in your work?

Beth Soderberg: I use them a lot. Especially when you’re dealing with semantics, I want to give people the ability to have something look the way they want it to look, but also be semantically correct. So especially with things like headings. Right. Having tooling that’s easy for an end user to understand to say this should be an H2, but I would like it to look like an H4 without making it an H4 is a game changer. It improves SEO, it improves accessibility, it keeps everything cleaner. And so that kind of tooling, I think when used strategically can really help. When used randomly, you’re just going to confuse people. But you know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, aren’t we in the business of confusing people?

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, sometimes. Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah, no, it’s interesting too. So are you using also side styles variations or just the section styles or block styles?

Beth Soderberg: Heavily using block styles. Okay, not so much the whole site variations yet. Yeah, there hasn’t. It’s again, it’s like you want to use the right tool for the right use case and yeah, normally you don’t.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Want to change how the site looks.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. There’s only. You kind of need like a site within a site to make that required. And the only thing like that I’ve been building lately is a voter guide that’s like within a site but the voter guide has all the same styling as the rest of the site. Because it’s supposed to match.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve always felt that the style variations are more for theme product developers that want to give more options to modify the theme. For agencies, I didn’t see that there are a whole lot of use cases for. For them. I might be wrong, but. Yeah, but you’re kind of confirming a little bit my bias here.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I. I don’t know. I look at anything that’s coming in that’s new. I look at it in terms of strategic utility and there’s a bunch of stuff that is super cool but it’s just not necessary for my clients. Right. Like it’s not the use case for that but for somebody else that could really help. And I’ve had a few where you end up building this random micro site within the site because some weird reason why they need it. And like that’s really what you would use that for. It doesn’t happen all that often.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah. Do you apply section styles to your patterns? Yeah, so that. And you give them design choices and they don’t have to spend time with kind of reorganize their design just because they want to have a pair of a pink background or a yellow background or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I also, I restrict color palettes, of course, because we don’t want anything looking like, you know, we’re in the. We’re in some sort of sci fi. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Geocities. I’m dating myself now.

Beth Soderberg: It’s okay. I told the checker at the grocery store the other day about how I worked at Blockbuster in high school and how that dated me, but it was a good job because you could I had to walk around to put the movies back. So I also use a lot of synced and partially synced blocks to achieve design consistency. So paired together. Because that I have found is really good for editorial teams where you can give them a style guide. And usually I make a page on the inside of the site that’s just privately published so that they can see like, okay, we have these patterns to work from. And, you know, this is the human part. You have a discussion about how, yes, you can do all these things, but you should use these things that we’ve all agreed upon that follow the style guide.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, it also makes for production much, much faster when you don’t have to make those design decisions. They’re already there and then.

Beth Soderberg: Exactly. And you don’t have to train people. I mean, the number one thing I see real clients, real site administrators doing weirdly with formatting is inconsistent vertical spacing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: The tooling is there to make it consistent, but people don’t. Even if you train them, they’re like, wait a minute, do I pick it at the fourth hash? Or like, which setting is it again? And does that look. And like as much as I can look at spacing on anything and know if it’s wrong, many people cannot.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, no, no. Yeah. That’s a skill.

Beth Soderberg: It’s a skill.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And many people really. And I found that like syncing those patterns that way and getting. Locking down some of that basic stuff that like, you don’t want your end user to be thinking about how much space they need below something.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Like that’s not what they should be ever actively thinking about. So that’s how I have approached that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. So far. Yeah. Makes sense. Have you taken a survey of how often your clients actually use the spacer block? Because I found that WordPress.com that’s one of the top five blocks used, I.

Beth Soderberg: Have not, but now I’m curious and I. Some of them, I mean you definitely have some, some where it’s used more than it should be. But I think that we’ve avoided some of that and some of it is what we’ve been able to do recently. Right. A few years ago you had to use it if you were going to get any consistency at all across things. But I think sometimes the patterns and the pattern syncing, that type of thing has dramatically reduced the need to use the spacer block, which is great because the speaker, the spacer block is so annoying on mobile.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing. It’s also, you cannot rip it out when, when you redesign the site or something like that, it’s going to be the. In your content.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I haven’t seen similar dislike as it sounds of the spacer block, but when you shrink a screen down suddenly you get wildly different vertical spacing on mobile. And for the average person there is not a straightforward way to make it not do that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You have to know how to write a workaround for yourself to make it work and that’s not great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, well, yeah, it’s good to know. So before we head into our usual sections, is there anything else that you would like to tell people who have not yet done the jump into block themes, why they should do it?

Beth Soderberg: I think, I think that it is, it’s a scary jump, and I have always been an early adopter of the new tooling, and so I look at something like that and it freaks me out a little bit. And then I’m like, well, why not? And I just push myself through and I know that I have the liberty of doing that because I’ve been working independently for almost 10 years. So I am in a lot of ways in control of what is and is not allowed in my environment. I’ve talked to a few folks who have. They understand how it’s working and they, they personally buy in, but their employer does not.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And so for those folks, I think building up your skill set with your personal site or a personal project so that you can advocate for different things internally. It’s very hard to advocate for something that you haven’t done and that you don’t have hands-on experience with. But you know, the ability to spin up a little like MVP demo of, hey, this is how this would solve a problem that we have systemically is really how you sort of gain permission in those sorts of environments. There’s some really good resources out there on learning how to do this. I think that they are much harder to find than they used to be. When I was first learning how to code, it was much easier to find like beginner entry level stuff, to like level yourself up. And now I think fewer people are creating it and I think it’s harder to find just because of how it’s labeled. Everything starts to look the same because it’s all named the same. But I think giving yourself the challenge to – even if you don’t understand everything, listening to a podcast like this, listening to a talk that you’re finding online, having it playing in the background like it does, seep in to how you think about it. And what will happen is that later you’ll encounter the same subject again and you’ll be like, oh, wait, that’s what they were talking about. And that’s how you start to connect the dots when you’re learning anything new. And I think the idea that you’re going to get somebody who has been building themes the classic way, building themes that are heavily reliant on advanced custom fields, something like that, to just magically one day pick up a whole new set of tools with a whole different way of thinking and be completely comfortable from the get is like ludicrous. That’s not going to happen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But, you know, giving yourself the ability to slowly absorb it, because it is a different way of thinking, it’s a completely different way of thinking about how to structure the theme. And for me, that has been the hardest part to learn. Once I figured it out, it was great. But of course, it’s always the hardest thing to figure out a new way of thinking. When you say it like that, it’s so obvious. But I think people really get down on themselves about it. And I think really just paying attention, reaching out to folks, you know, when you have questions, not being shy about it. What I’ve figured out over the course of the last, I guess we’re almost at eight years of Gutenberg. Yeah, Gutenberg is a month older than my eldest child. So it’s very easy for me to keep track of how old it is. But we are in a time period where what I have noticed as an early adopter, when I talk to the other early adopters, everybody is making it up. Everybody is inventing their process, everybody is inventing the “ right way.” We’re starting to congeal on some common things. But it has been a time of innovation. And so being a little bit afraid to stick your toe in. That is so reasonable. And at the same time, when you think about it that way, it becomes less scary to fail in air quotes. Right. Because ultimately, how many light bulbs did Edison make before one worked? Like, it’s just, you know, you have to experiment in order to figure out how something works. And I think it is challenging to be mid-career and have to go back to that beginning.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: You know, Yeah, I feel a certain.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Confidence that all of a sudden is going away.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah. So. So I. I just think people need to be a little less hard on themselves, push themselves a little, be okay with failing and talk to people, talk to people. Just keep going, Just keep swimming, as the fish say in Finding Nemo.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right, so you’ve listened here to a very experienced theme developer and yeah, it’s never going to be easy. You need to start now. What is it, the Chinese proverb to the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So it’s kind of exactly for that. Yeah. 

Announcements

So, okay, so we have a few announcements. Now we’re going a little bit into the Gutenberg change log message here. We have a few announcements and they’re all calls for testing because we get new stuff and. And the testing team is really on top of things. Last week a call for testing was made for the new template management features that are coming to Core, which. have you checked it out, Beth, on what’s going to come with that? We talked about it here two weeks ago with Anne Katzeff and it’s the tool where you can now have multiple templates with the same slug and of the theme hierarchy and then activate and deactivate the ones that you want to use or not use. So it kind of puts a new layer in there and gets the user a little bit more in control on how the template management actually works and figure that out in there. Because template management is something WordPress users have never done before because it was always a developer designer kind of scope and there was no user interface for it. And now it’s here and the confusion is there, but it’s also something that can be learned and can be helped with.

Beth Soderberg: I think it’s also going to be great for launching changes to live sites where. And you know how to launch code for Gutenberg is a whole other conversation. But the best practice is to keep your live site database as your database of record. Right. And some of what I see with the new template management changes are enabling you to more easily respect that without having weird, momentary blips of your content looking bizarre while you’re changing something over on a live site. So I think it’s going to be, again, another adjustment in how we think about how we work. But ultimately we’ll offer more granular tooling that will allow for the elimination of some of these use cases that haven’t always ended up being really strange, where you’re like, yeah, should we put up a maintenance message while we’re doing this? Because everything is going to look bizarre for the next 20 minutes. That kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s really good. Yeah. Yeah. And the first version is going to be not perfect and probably have some bugs, but that’s why the call for testing is there. So I leave the link in the show notes for you so you can start testing and share your experience with it and also share what still confuses you or what didn’t work or where you thought it would work, but it didn’t. It’s definitely something – conversation needs to happen. And if you are not sure what to do, come into the W in the WordPress Slack into the Outreach channel and there are a lot of people there that will help you figure that out. So if you don’t know if it’s a bug or you don’t, you’re not doing it right. I know that’s often kind of that with new things. Did I get this right or is it not working? Most people, and I’m one of them, I default to okay, I’m not doing this right. What’s happening? And there are two more console testing. 

One is on the ability to hide blocks, which is kind of the first iteration of a blocks visibility kind of plugin idea that you can hide and show blocks conditionally. Right now it’s only on and off or hide and show. So you could have a block in the editor, but you hide it on the front end. But because you’re still working on it or you don’t want to, you want to put it in there so your editor knows about it, but it’s not going to be pushed to the show version until a certain date or until a certain sale happens or something like that. The instructions for the call for testing are really good and they also show you with little videos how it’s supposed to work to kind of offset my am I doing this right or not? Idea. And the other one that I wanted to point out in this podcast is the accordion block calls for testing. That seems to be really settled. Came in 20.5, I think, and had some iterations, especially for those of you who started styling it. You need to double check your references because the name changes in between for the panel and for the items and all that. So call for testing for accordion block and what you can do with it. Have you experimented with the accordion block?

Beth Soderberg: Mm, I’m really excited about it. This is one of the ones that I’ve been dreaming of for years. It’s one of the ones where I had an external plugin where like, the only reason I was using the external plugin was because I needed accordions. The detail block is sort of an approximation, but it’s not the same semantically speaking. So I’m excited about this one. This one and Tabs are my two that have been a thorn in my side for years.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m also. Well, we can talk about the other blocks that are supposedly come or at least been worked on for Core, even if they don’t make it into 6.9 at a later date. 

Community Contributions

There’s this new AI feature out there, it’s called Telex, which is automatic block building AI. And there are a few designers and developers that have actually done some great experimentations with that. One is Tammy Lister. She has started a challenge, kind of the blocktober, meaning every day in October she will build a new block with Telex. And I’ll of course share the site in the show notes. She started out with a kind of reaching back into history of computers and started out with an esky Tetris game. And that’s when my afternoon, uploaded my afternoon was shot because I got addicted to Tetris again. Yeah. Did you do any experimentations with that?

Beth Soderberg: Nope. That one, I mean, I know about it, I know about Tammy’s blocktober. I’m paying attention, but I don’t have time to just play with it right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I. I feel the same way. It’s kind of letting other people do that. I. I look at what other people do. Yeah. And there’s Marco Ivanovich. He’s a designer at Automattic. He has some animated icon blocks. They were kind of sparkling and all that. And then he also created a post-it note block where you can put post-its on your site with an image and with a background gradient background. So pretty cool to look at. 

And then there was Jeff Paul from Ten Up. He actually also created a game of Pong Hung block that’s kind of the tennis kind of back and forth where you need to up. It was just handy as an easy, medium and hard. Yeah, that was another afternoon. I tried to figure it out. Yeah. Juan Margarito, he created a mermaid diagram which is actually a markdown diagram. And then you put the. The diagram code in markdown and then it kind of creates a. A diagram with errors back and forth. Yeah, it’s kind of a flow diagram if you want to. So that was really interesting to see. Yeah. Anyway, so I just. Yeah, check it out. If you want to play around with it. It’s telex.automattic.com automatic with double T. The second T. Yeah.

What’s Released – WordPress 6.8.3

Okay. So now we come to the heart of the show, which is what’s released. And before we head into Gutenberg 20.8, I wanted to let everybody know WordPress 6. 8.3 is out. It’s a security issue. No, it’s a security release fixing two security issues. And if you haven’t updated yet, please do we wait. Go and update. The two issues were mentioned in the release post. One was data exposure issues and the other one issue and the other one was a cross scripting vulnerability for the nav menus which has been fixed and you are in a secure environment again. But don’t forget to update. Yeah. Any thoughts?

Beth Soderberg: Always update. I’m. I’m of the. I’m of the camp. I always update on the security releases right away and then major releases. I always wait and see what happens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How long do you wait? How long do you wait?

Beth Soderberg: I usually wait until a point release has come out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Beth Soderberg: That’s usually the trigger but sometimes it’s really stable and we’re like, well there. I guess there’s no point release and it’s been three weeks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So.

Beth Soderberg: I do the same thing with updating like my iPhone. Yeah, I don’t. I’m. As much as I am interested in technology, I am also somebody who just recently started using mobile deposit for checks. I’m skeptical.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think that makes that an early above to decide where to early adopt and where to be cautious.

Beth Soderberg: That’s true. Yeah. My risk tolerance is very high for certain things and very low for other things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if it changes my work environment that I need to retrain my muscle memory. I’m opposed to any change, but I recently had to change my Mac updated and they fixed a bug. That’s the problem with bug fixes. Yeah. If you, if you have for years known about a workaround and the muscle memory is in. You hate that bug fix that fixes that once and for all. So kind of. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. Moving on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. 

Gutenberg 21.8

So Gutenberg 21.8 is the second last before 6.9 beta. There’s one more coming, that’s a 21.9, of course, and that’s coming on October 17th. So we are recording this on October 8th and next week we have the last Gutenberg release before 6.9 beta comes. Which means bug fixes, yes. New features, no. From that point on forward to get into Core. Gutenberg 21.8 had 118 PRs by 47 contributors and five people were first time contributors. Congratulations, you got your merge done. That’s fantastic. Because I can see that the first one is always a little tricky getting it past the reviewers. 

Enhancements

For Gutenberg, we start with the enhancements to the block content. Comments. Block comments is a feature that creates a commenting method for each block in your editor so you and others can add comments to your blocks and have an editorial kind of process going. It’s a a lot of PRs made it into that. But the first one that I wanted to point out is a discussion field with trackbacks and comment status aggregated for the post page Quick Edit. So you know, in the Quick edit, are there commenting places? Quick Edit is not the quick edit in the WP admin. It’s a quick edit in the design. But that’s actually not the commenting. The block commenting thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, this is hard to contextualize even looking at the PR, right? Yeah, the PR. I think ultimately it’s unifying. It’s again, it’s one of those things that’s unifying design across components to make things more consistent no matter where you find them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you have the new design view, what was missing that you were able to manage trackbacks and comments. So it’s not the feature that I just said. It’s just getting on par with the previous WP admin kind of thing. Especially for pages. The posts haven’t been included yet in these new designs, but for pages, definitely. And if there’s a post experiment in Gutenberg where you can have the post view also in the new design view, as the site editor. And that’s where this actually comes to pass. So that is kind of labeled wrong in that changelog, but that’s okay. We can handle that. Do you want to do the next one?

Beth Soderberg: Sure. So displaying a message when there is no related block, which is the most logical thing you could do with commentary that has no source attached to it anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Anymore.

Beth Soderberg: Anymore, anymore. Right. So again, it’s giving context to something so that your actual conversations make sense. And basically what it’s doing is just adding a little message that says, hey, your original block was deleted so that somebody reading through it understands and also gives you the ability to…part of why I like this one is because you’re going to end up with people who in collaborating with each other are going to remove things. And you want to have a record of the conversation for editorial purposes, but understanding what has happened is a key part of creating that record.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, definitely you want to have a record of the decision making process for certain things. Yeah. The other one that I wanted to point out is that it now shows the dates of the comments in a more human readable part, like 30 minutes ago or two hours ago or three days ago. So you get a little bit more relation to the timestamps of that. I think there was an option to do this, but I’m not quite sure that you can switch it on and off. But if not. No, it’s not. It’s the first. It’s the first iteration and there are no options.

Beth Soderberg: I think that’s coming later.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, but it’s. It’s known that there will be something like that needed.

Beth Soderberg: Yep. And then the highlighting of the related block. Again, a lot of these changes are improving context indicators and so, you know, this just gives you a clearer sense of what you’re connecting to and which thing you’re actually talking about with the comments.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I’m just going to look through. If we missed something new, we can now go right into the block library section and there’s a ton of PRs that actually work on the accordion blocks. That’s also in the bug fix sections. But I think the most prominent stuff is more like the term description block with the context support. So that if it’s in a template or in an archive template that the term description block is more. You can use it in patterns like you can do post title and query title for that. Yeah, the term description block is something that’s a little bit of a… I have seen people that are quite adamant that they need the block editor in the category description section for editing the description because I wanted to make it more there. Design it a little bit or make it a little bit more versatile. That’s quite interesting because you also can now create a page with all the features that you want on that for a particular category and then just have a query loop on that category displayed on it. So you get around that need to have the term description be a block editor or something like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. I had never thought about that before because theoretically you always could do the latter. Right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But you had to have a certain level of technical skill and knowledge to do that. The idea of adding block support to that description opens up possibilities for folks who are not as technical to make modifications in that presentation of the. The term pages. I don’t know. I could go either way there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I could also create massive. I can see this going very wrong.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think that’s why nobody touched it for now.

Beth Soderberg: That’s a new concept to me. But I don’t know. My gut says no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So. And then we get a new block. It’s the time to read block. And now it has been in the Guternberg plugin for ages. Similar to the table of content block. But they were to get it into core. There were always kind of missing things or quirkinesses that weren’t dealt with. And the time to read had massive accessibility objections because it only had one time that it takes to read a block. Not everybody has that reading skill or is on that level like a lot of people are. English as a second language. They don’t. They don’t read so fast or dyslexia is pretty. Yeah. It’s out there. And they don’t read that fast. And so it kind of makes them feel bad about not reading in that 15 minutes kind of thing. What they’re doing now is kind of offering a range option. It says it takes one to five minutes or something like that. And which I feel is kind of even for someone who is fast reading but tired is a good indicator. Yeah. That’s how long it’s going to actually take. And then they added also a word count to it.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I like that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. When there are word count plugins out there. Word count blocks, plugins out there say that 15 times fast. But I think having a core block that actually offers it option is really cool.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t bold that, but I wanted to talk about it.

Beth Soderberg: No, I agree. I think it’s. It’s a kinder way to deal with the problem because you’re giving people enough information to very quickly self assess without shaming them.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the next one is part of the Data Views section actually. It’s the data forms package. And there’s now support for certain form elements validation in the data forms package. So if you use that as a plugin or your settings pages. You now get help from the packages that drive that. I think that’s a. Yeah, it’s an enhancement for extensibility, for sure.

Beth Soderberg: In the block editor section, block multi selection, disabling transforms and inspector controls.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. So when you select multiple blocks, you still get the. Sometimes the options that you can transform them. And for paragraphs, a series of paragraphs. I like it. Because then you have. You can transform them to list views. But if you have a mixture of selected blocks, you don’t need transforms or inspectors back the controls. You just probably want to move it or move the selection. Yeah. So I think it’s a good way to not confuse people.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And that’s a good example of a tiny change from an end user perspective that probably won’t be noticed, but will reduce friction for people. All right. In global styling, adding a reset button to our background controls panel. Hooray.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hooray. You don’t have to unselect stuff. Yeah. Just click on things and you make it all go away. It’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And then making the additional CSS UI less prominent, which is great because the less random CSS everywhere, the better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. And. Well, it’s. I totally agree with that. And that’s also the. The justification why they want to put it some. So they’re going to hide it. Again, it was hidden on the left hand side of the global styles or styles panel. You always could edit it on the right hand side when the styles panel where sooner or later we probably need to decide if we want to use the left hand side or the right hand side for the styles features. But it now is going to be in the ellipse menu in the header of the styles section. So it says add additional CSS as a menu item on top. So. So you are not going to be. Well, it was there and then it wasn’t there. So where is it kind of thing situation. It ended up in the ellipse menu on top of the screen.

Beth Soderberg: Block bindings. I love block bindings.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There’s an experimental feature there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: To support block attributes from the server side. I haven’t completely read through it. I’m not quite sure I understand that. So I would need to go back to the developers and say what’s the use case and why you’re doing it kind of thing.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think. Did you get something?

Beth Soderberg: I would have to clarify, but my understanding of it is the big thing with block bindings is like which things are supported and which things aren’t supported and how that is communicated is improved from doing this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Doing it service sort of the nugget.

Beth Soderberg: Of truth there. But I think anything like that. I know it’s experimental but making block bindings easier and more accessible for people to use anything that helps. That is a good thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think there are two areas where they come from. One is to make block bindings available for more than 14 blocks which has been the case until now. That’s one thing. But also to increase extensibility and use have not only blocks use the block bindings but also whole features use the block bindings for external things like the remote block plugin by WordPress VIP USO. Yeah. They also use block bindings to identify the data that comes in and put it into the block editor. But I think it’s hard to bring the server side and the client side together with the same information. And this one will have the server side be the moment of truth. No, the source of truth for block bindings. Yeah, it’s definitely a late edition. I’m not sure it’s going to make it to 6.9. I’m skeptical though. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. Right. Right. Mode Try adding content roles to navigation blocks is the name of the PR which I think is delightfully named and I. Even the way that this is written is pretty great. I wanted to see how far we can go with just adding content roles to nav link in some menu blocks given the improvements to content only logic we’ve had. And then it references another pr. The next sentence is I think it’s working better now. Whoever this contributor is, I love your writing. Tell the machines.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, that’s.

Beth Soderberg: Fun times. But I think it’ll.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Isabelle Bryson. Yeah, she’s been on the podcast before and she’s actually worked also on the grid layouts and yeah, she works for Automattic on the team. And the other I think the tri part is okay. We experiment with things. So that’s when it says try and then there’s also add is kind of definitely need to fix this or add this feature or fix means fix this bug. Yeah. So they have these prefixes on their PRs and the try thing is. Yeah, let’s try it out and see what happens. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But this one, it looks cool. People should check it out. Components. The text area component. Adding a default resize vertical rule just to make things more make sense visually so that you can move stuff around the way you need to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you can control the vertical size of things. That’s always a good thing. And then the other component PR is actually adding storybook examples for the fields package. So there’s more documentation there for the plugin developers who want to use it. Also of course, for the core developers who are going to use the Fields.

Beth Soderberg: Package for their work patterns, we have a change to the block inspector adding a content tab for section blocks that displays content only descendant blocks. So similar to the existing styles tab, but for content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s up until now it lists the blocks that can be edited in a section pattern or in a content only block. But that’s all part of the write mode, and we will see how which part of it actually will come into 6.9. But I think it’s very helpful for content creators who use a pattern to just see the pieces that you can edit and not be confused with any styling of that, even if it’s only the section styles. And from the PR before and after, you can see that the little drop water drop that’s in the block toolbar actually gives you a way to browse through the styles for this particular section. So it’s not taking anything away, it’s just kind of making it clear where the things the information is going to be for you. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I think for anyone who might be confused about what we’re talking about, look at the pr. The screenshots will help you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s a little bit. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard on the podcast to make things come to life on a. In a visual component.

Beth Soderberg: The screenshots make it make sense if you’re confused by what we just said.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the PR we’re talking about is 71714. The next one is an easy one, but it’s definitely something to talk about for Black Friday and all the WooCommerce stuff. There is now a WordPress gift icon available for content creators and developers. So you can use that. It comes from a WooCommerce team, but they contributed to Core so anybody can use it. 

New API

The next thing I want to point out was the block API has now the block visibility, control support and the ui. That’s the part where the underlying architecture for the hide and show of blocks I think it is. And that also is the foundation for when you. Later on we will have the conditional Hide and seek. No hide and show. Yeah. When you want to say okay, I want it for logged in users or not. I want it for people who come from Twitter or not. These kinds of conditionals, they’re not yet in there. For that you still need the block visibility plugin by Nick Diego. So I think we have one more. No. Yeah, there’s an accordion block also in write mode. We hide the add button in write mode so you can add an additional accordion block in write mode. But I’m not quite sure that’s particularly helpful for a content creator. But time will tell.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, that could go either way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a 5050 kind of thing. You do it right for 50 people and the others are going to hate you for that. 

Bug Fix

And then one bug fix I wanted to point out there is a bug in the pattern override. Some users might have found it is that editing was allowed on non-enabled override blocks which kind of defeated the purpose, but it’s now fixed. So there’s another experiment. I don’t know how that comes about, but the PR definitely has some interesting conversations. 

Experiments

There is allow registering PHP only blocks. What do you say for that?

Beth Soderberg: I say I think this is gonna be, this is gonna be so much bigger than it sounds.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Beth Soderberg: Because basically what you’re doing is you’re enabling developers to create blocks using only PHP. So you’re opening up the can of worms about who knows PHP and who knows JavaScript and are we gatekeeping by moving everything to JavaScript and blah blah.

But then you’re also changing the structure in a way that might make things less portable between projects. So I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s definitely an experiment.

Beth Soderberg: That’s true. I think, you know, and I. One of the things I have noticed, there is a developer on my team that I have been mentoring for years and really started learning WordPress specifically post Gutenberg. And what’s fascinating about watching her is that she struggles with some of the traditional ways of doing things, but can do them the new way. Right. So for somebody like that this might be terrible, you know, and I. It just becomes a context thing about what you know and how you’ve been progressing with different skills along the way if you’ve completely forgotten PHP or you know, various things. So I, I don’t know, I think this, this one is going to be a much bigger deal than I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. And there will be restrictions to that and I think the documentation will show that because it actually uses something the server side render component that actually was not considered best practice to use until now and the registration of PHP only blocks will actually use the server render component. So I think there is also something a little bit of a movement in the core contributing ranks about that. And it definitely needs some more. Yeah. Experimenting with it and exploration and. But it’s in there. One listened and maybe there’s something that can be pushed to the finish line outside the experiments. All the developers out there who were waiting for something like this go have at it.

Beth Soderberg: Oh. Interesting to see what people do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. And I added a. The label needs developer documentation and a project manager on the team also removed it because it’s experimental. So the developers that created it have some leeway in backwards compatibility. And it’s experimental. It means it’s not documented. You cannot build on it. You need to be part of the experiment spirit about it to use it and not rely on it. That it’s going to be working like that for the foreseeable future. So yeah. It’s also that caveat on it. Just wanted to point it out.

Beth Soderberg: I just saw that that’s important because you’re going to have somebody who goes off and builds a whole new thing on it and then in two weeks it’ll break.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Which. Yeah. Any plugin developer that built plugins for Gutenberg has been doing kind of living through that for multiple years now. Yeah. So. But that’s 21.8 release with quite a few new features and the final release will be today on October 10th. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

And now we are coming to the section where we talk a little bit about what’s in development and discuss. And there are new blocks in the works and we know this because Matthias has. Matthias Ventura has published that discussion about new blocks that were previously thought about plug into territory. And now quite a few theme developers think that they are held back with their designs if there are not more additional blocks in core because then now they can style it in their themes and make it available on templates and all that. So Justin Tadlock also did an opinion piece on the Gutenberg Times for it about four weeks ago. I can link it again in the show notes. But we are getting new blocks and the ones that have been merged they’re not entirely out of experiments yet. Time to read. And we talked about it because it just was merged. We also talked about the accordion block that was merged a while ago and still in experiments. But there are two. Oh, we also talked about the terms query block that has been merged but we haven’t talked about the breadcrumbs block. And I’m really excited about that because it felt such a need in the template area that people are getting so confused where am I? And I have a better map and I have breadcrumbs and all that. Yeah, it’s such a useful tool and I’m looking forward to get that tested. And yeah, watch out on the test team. They’re putting some more calls for testing together to get this all in the hands of people who want to help with making it better.

Beth Soderberg: I’m excited about the breadcrumbs block too. That’s another one where I’ve had to do sort of weird things to make things work over time and it’s going to be nice to not have to do the weird things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was using Justin Tadock’s breadcrumbs block that he developed and he had some thoughts in this VR on how broad or restricted this new. This first version is going to be. And I think we all going to like it because depending on the context you can get additional. The breadcrumbs will change. And I really like that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I’ve. I’ve used his plugin too. I forget which one it was. There’s a few independent plugins for breadcrumbs and my team has run into some weird edge cases of what they will do depending on your content structure. So I think that’s part of why the scope of the breadcrumbs block being limited at first makes so much sense, because the complexity of what you’re actually trying to do from a templating level, depending on where you are in a site and how your site is structured can get incredibly complex. I don’t remember which plugin it was, but we had a site. It may have been the Voter Guide. The Voter Guide within the site that completely killed everything. Like something about the logic of where we were just. And we had to use a different plugin just for that one site to make it work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I might have even re. Ended up doing something sort of manual instead. I don’t remember. But those plugins have been incredibly useful, but are also prone to edge case weirdness. Basically generating navigation on the fly. And if you don’t know where you are within the structure of the site from a structural standpoint, or if someone has made some odd decisions about where they’re putting things or how their hierarchy works, you’re going to end up with a really confusing breadcrumb.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you don’t have the controls to actually make changes. It’s just all this black box kind of mystery mute kind of thing again. Yeah, yeah. And I. While we’re running a little bit out of time or short on time, I just wanted to mention there’s also a dialogue block in the works. There’s an icon block in the works. My favorite one is the stretchy text. It sounds so weird, but it actually makes sense. It’s text that stretches over a certain container and it’s flexible depending on how the container works. So you could do this for hero sections, all that. And then here’s your bestest favorite. The tabs block is in the works. And then also my favorite is a table of contents block. Because I have these long posts all the time and I want to do the table of contents block. But it had some weird issues. That’s why it’s not in Core yet. And they’re trying to figure that out how that all can be done. It’s now attempted to be a dynamic one and allow usage outside of the post or page that is actually referring to. But for instance, in a template, you could put it in a single post template in the sidebar and you will always have a table of content for your posts. So I think that’s a really good use case for pages, when you have landing pages or tutorial pages or documentation pages that you don’t have to fiddle with it while you’re creating the content. And it’s just there in the template.

Beth Soderberg: This is one where my weird workaround for it. There’s one of the SEO plugins has a table of contents block built into it. I forget which one offhand, but I’ve used that before to get this type of functionality.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because it. Sometimes you really just need it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 

So that’s it. That is the Gutenberg changelog 122. Thank you so much for being with me on this, Beth. And it was great to chat with you and talk about block themes and all these good things. Block style stuff. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on the gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is 122. I already said that. But if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and I forgot a question for you, Beth. And that is if people want to get in touch with you, what is a good place to do that?

Beth Soderberg: You can find me in the WordPress slack under my name, Beth Soderberg. And then you can find me at work at our website, which is Bethink.studio or bethinkstudio.com. but you know, it’s really fun when you can get the non.coms to work with your name.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yes, all right. So I’ll list of course, all those contact information, more in the show notes.

And thank you all for listening. Thank you for being here and see you when I’ll see you back. Well, in two weeks. Goodbye, and have a good time. 

After meeting so many people at WordCamp Gdynia, on the plane and then on the train, I caught a nasty cold and struggled all week. I call this stage mushbrain, and everything becomes much harder, especially reading comprehension suffers. I am over it now, though. It also wasn’t the first time that I sounded horsey on a podcast episode.

It’s the time of year now here in Munich when the days get shorter and the weather is cold, drissly and overcast. A time when snow would brighten the sights, with its whiteness covering partly the darkgray, dark brown background.

Enjoy again this weekend edition and stay healthy.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Gutenberg 21.8 is now available and release lead Carlos Bravo hightlighed in his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 21.8? (8 October)

1. Block Visibility Control Support and UI
2. Block Comments Improvements
3. Accordion and Time To Read Blocks

This week Gutenberg Changelog 122 recording, Beth Soderberg, lead developer at Bethink.studio and I chatted about the release and other WordPress topics around Block themes and on going change. The episode arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

It was JuanMa Garrido‘s turn to write the monthly roundup post What’s new for developers? (October 2025) on the WordPress Developer Blog. The 21.6, 21.7, and 21.8 Gutenberg releases add features for developers. The Command Palette now works throughout the admin, the new Terms Query block makes taxonomy layouts easier, and Block Visibility controls allow for conditional display. Notes (that’s how we call Block Comments now) improve team collaboration, while content-only editing maintains design integrity during client handoffs.

Help testing new features for WordPress 6.9

Release test co-leads Krupa Nanda and Jonathan Bossenger, published several calls for testing in preparation in WordPress of the 6.9 release. Each of the post has a detailed description of the feature, and instructions on how to test is with specific scenarios. It’s much easier to follow along with any of the calls for testing, to also learn what’s new in the next release.

Help test changes to template management is probably the most elaborate call for testing, as template management received a completely new feature, and it needs to be working for many different use cases, and has consquences on existing sites.

Call for Testing: Ability to Hide Blocks for this feature it’s the bare minimum of a new feature, that will be in future releases see some refinement and extensiblity.

Call for Testing: Accordion Block lets you dive into a whole new block, many users asked for an several plugins are already available for. Now it will come to core.

Your time spent on testing the new features for WordPress 6.9, has a lot of impact, as the bugs found now, make the release the best it can be for millions of other users.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Lesley Sim informed us that EventKoi Lite is now available from the WordPress Plugin Repository. I mentioned the premium version before, Event Koi is modern, WordPress events calendar. Create single or multi-day events and display month, week, or list views via blocks (or shortcodes).

Mike McAlister announced a new product: OlliePro Extensions on Bluesky. He mentions: Animations, advanced grid + column controls, keyboard shortcuts, and more. Watch the vidoe Introducing Ollie Pro Extensions – Supercharge Your WordPress Block Editor

All controls are seamlessly integrated with the Core editor sitebar sections. Mark Howells-Mead commented in the WordPress Slack #outreach channel: ” I’m very impressed with how he’s been able to integrate the little add-ons many of us are integrating to our own projects, but in such a seamless way by extending core controls.” McAlister shared an example Gist on GitHub.

David McCan took a deep dive into the world of Block plugins. In this blog post Performance of Third Party Blocks and Core Compared he tries to answer the questions many site builders and owners have: “Can you add the features Gutenberg is missing yet still be performant like core?”. McCan tested ten third-party Gutenberg block plugins with WordPress core, specifically focusing on performance.

Matt Medeiros, WPMinute, took the Mega Menu Designer, also made by Mike McAlister, out for the spin. He shared his thoughts in the Video How to Build Mega Menus with WordPress Blocks. He provides a detailed walkthrough calls it “Perfect for anyone looking to enhance their website’s navigation experience.” As reported earlier the plugin is available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.

Rae Morey, publisher or The Repository, reported Ollie’s Menu Designer Flagged for Core, With Automattic Developers Set to Help Shepherd It. Automattic’s Anne McCarthy says developers are preparing to review Ollie’s Menu Designer for inclusion in the Gutenberg plugin, marking the start of a collaborative push to bring the plugin’s features into WordPress. This follows WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s suggestion that the menu functionality should be part of core. Details and links in Moery’s article.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

This episode of Greyd Conversations show, Switching to FSE from a pagebuilder, covers the story of Buro Staal, a smal dutch agency, which switched from Elementor to Full site editing cold turkey. Greyd’s host Sandra Kurze and agency owner Rosanne van Staalduinen shared why and how her agency switched and the lessons learned along the way.

The biggest hurdles were limited functionality of navigation block, not able to create Mega Menus, and the need for controls for mobile sites and responsiveness. So they augmented their tech stack with Kadence Blocks and Ollie Pro theme.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Ryan Welcher published another recipe from his Blockdevelopment Cook Book on YouTube. How To Make A Simple Fade In Effect Fast. “In this recipe, we’re adding a little flair by loading custom JavaScript and CSS for the Cover and Image blocks to create a smooth fade-in effect as they scroll into view. To keep things efficient, we’ll only enqueue these files when the blocks are actually on the page.”

What’s new in and around Playground

Nick Diego announces that WordPress Studio version 1.6.0 now supports Blueprints, which are lightweight JSON files that predefine site configurations for quick and consistent setup. Instead of starting with empty sites or using large snapshots, teams can create portable recipes specifying WordPress versions, plugins, and settings. Studio offers three featured blueprints for quick starts, development, and commerce, while users can also upload custom blueprints. The feature integrates into the standard site creation flow and helps streamline workflows for solo developers and teams alike.

Playground documentation now has Ask AI button, to get help finding and understanding feature sets and APIs.

Ajit Bohra of Lubus shared on X “The Visual BluePrint Builder for Playground is shaping up nicely. All the latest updates are in, and it’s feeling solid. Stable version coming soon, but you can already check it out and start building visually.” A blueprint builder with blocks, how nice. You can test it via this Playground link. The code is available on GitHub.

Jamie Marsland also tries to make it easier to create blueprints for Playground sites and open up the WordPress in a browser tool for a broader audience. Details in his post Introducing Pootle Playground — My Experimental WordPress Blueprint Builder.

Adam Zielinski created an online PHP code editor using Playground. It allows developers to test PHP snippets quickly in their browser. The tool supports WordPress functions, enables switching between PHP and WordPress versions, and allows sharing code configurations through links. Built with WordPress Playground, it runs entirely client-side with network access and popular PHP extensions included. He’s currently experimenting with adding CLI and file browser capabilities to support composer packages and frameworks like Laravel or Symfony.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

And just like that, the last quarter of 2025 has begun. It’s been an interesting year again, and now we are on the home stretch, heading into a Holiday season. It’s become my favorite time of the year when Autumn make nature paint trees and bushes in so many colors. After a life near evergreen Everglades of Florida, the middle European changing colors of the fall seems magical.

Soon it’s time to plan for 2026. Speaking of which, in case you missed it, WordCamp Asia Call for Speakers has been out for a couple of week, and the deadline is quite early: October 31, 2025. If you were thinking about going to WordCamp Asia, what would be a talk you would be interested in seeing in April of 2026?

Anyway, the present is pretty amazing right now, too. So without further ado, the news.

Yours,
Birgit

PS: This weekend, on October 3rd, Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Reunion after the Iron Curtain was lifted.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

.Jonathan Bossenger, WordPress 6.9 release co-lead for testing, is asking for your help to test changes to the template management. The new feature is a great enhancement to the way templates are handled in the Site Editor. More eyes are needed to make sure it’s the best it can be in the short amount of time until the first Beta version is released. The instructions are detailed, and Bossenger added a video to show how the various sections of this test should work.

The security and maintenance release, WordPress 6.8.3 is now available. John Blackbourn led the release and shares the details in his release post. Update as soon as you can, as it plugs a few security holes.

Carlos Bravo issues the release candidate for Gutenberg 21.8 and it’s available for testing. The final release is scheduled for October 8.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In the WordPress VIP blog post and video, Pew Research Center Builds Interactive Content at Scale, the Seth Rubenstein and his team share how they rebuilt their website using WordPress VIP to tackle challenges in a world where people seldom visit original sources. Their old method took weeks of custom coding for interactive content, which delayed publishing. By adopting a block-first strategy in 2022, they cut production time from weeks to minutes, enabling editors and designers to create quizzes and maps on their own. This shift allowed developers to focus on innovation while increasing publishing frequency and lowering costs with evergreen interactive content that engages audiences directly.

In his video Level up your Product Collections, Brian Coords demonstrates the new features in WooCommerce 10.2. He covered carousel layouts, taxonomy filters (Category/Brand/Tag), and an improved Cross-Sells collection for displaying products.

Joanne Courtright of Groundworx released a new Testimonials plugin in the WordPress repository. Get the skinny from her blog post: Introducing Groundworx Testimonial: Modern Testimonials for WordPress Block Themes. “Most testimonial plugins are still stuck in the classic era. This one is designed for developers and site builders who want testimonials that “just work” with Gutenberg, she wrote. It aims to be Gutenberg-native, theme.json aware, and accessibility-first. It includes a dedicated Testimonial post type + flexible blocks.

Justin Tadlock released the first version of an Authors List Block for multi-author sites. “This is especially useful if you’re coming over from using a classic WordPress theme and need a block that’s similar to the old wp_list_authors() template tag,” he wrote. The plugin comes with a full array of block design tools. It also sports options to display number of posts, various order filters, and feed links.

Mike McAlister released his Ollie Menu Designer for free in the WordPress repository. It is a powerful way to build mobile and dropdown menus in the WordPress block editor—no coding required. For more details, watch his announcement video on YouTube.

Blocks Galore with Telex

In his post, If Automattic’s Telex Builds This, You Might Not Need That Page Builder, Jamie Marsland explores how Automattic’s Telex AI tool could transform WordPress by enabling users to extend existing core blocks rather than just creating new ones. Currently, Telex generates custom blocks like video effects and timelines, but extending core blocks like paragraphs, tables, or buttons requires complex developer skills. If Telex could extend core blocks and offer a public directory for sharing these extensions, it could replace traditional page builders by unlocking the full potential of WordPress’s native blocks without adding technical debt or duplication.

Tammie Lister started her personal Blocktober, posting a block a day on the newly created site. Every day at noon, she uses Automattic’s Telex and builds a new block. Spanning the arc of history back to the 1980s, Lister started with an ASCII Tetris block. Here goes my Thursday morning….

In his latest blog post, Marko Ivanovic made a set of blocks for designers with the help of Automattic’s Telex. Earlier he also created animated icon blocks. Ivanovic is a designer working for Automattic, and since 2022. His post on how he rediscovered WordPress and why any designer should embrace WordPress is worth a read, too. And I love those sticky notes.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

In preparation for the WordPress 6.9 release on December 2, Justin Tadlock published a new tutorial on the WordPress Developer Blog: You on how to implement Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9. “You define an array of sizes that users can apply to blocks that support border radius. You can also reuse them within your own theme stylesheets and theme.json file.”, he wrote.

At WordCamp Gdynia I shared how to use WordPress Playground and GitHub for No-Code Version Control of Site Editor Changes The recording of my talk is now on WordPress TV. You will learn how theme developers can leverage WordPress Playground alongside the Create Block Theme plugin to create a seamless, browser-based development environment that integrates directly with GitHub for version control—all without writing a single line of code. The slides are available on Google Drive.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Long-time block developer Kevin Batdorf at Extendify just updated his Block Starter plugin repo—an “opinionated starter template for crafting WordPress block plugins,” as he calls it. It uses Tailwind v4 with output for the editor and frontend, TypeScript and Biome.js for code quality and type safety, and runs Playwright tests on PR using the Playground CLI. It also includes a Plugin Check on commits to main and before a release.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special guest: Anne Katzeff

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Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 121st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 21.6 and 21.7, as well as about theme development, block themes, and all this good, good stuff. And I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times, developer advocate, and core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me is Anne Katzeff, a dear friend of mine. She joins me in this episode. She was here before on the show, and she’s a longtime WordPress theme builder, educator and artist, and a longtime friend of mine. He previously connected on WordPress Meetup Co-organizers in Southwest Florida, but that’s ages ago. Anne has been on a podcast before, and it was episode 109 almost a year ago. So glad you’re here, Anne. How are you today?

Anne Katzeff: I’m good, Birgit. Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to see you and reunite. I hope you’re well. I was just thinking, I can’t wait to catch up on all the WordCamp stuff that you and others have been posting. I’ve been immersed in two things recently. Redesigning a client’s very old website.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: When you say very old.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, it was using. It’s still live, although it barely displays correctly because the code is so old. It uses custom templates from a custom theme that has some of the content baked into the code.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh. Oh, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: So it’s really hard to edit. The client has a real hard time doing that, as I do as well. And now I’m rebuilding the site. I’m using a cadence theme, and it’s a whole new area for me. I’m seeing the pros and cons of that system. And I’m also redesigning my own website. I don’t even want to tell you how long that’s been since I designed it. It’s built on Bootstrap. I do have a WordPress blog, so I have to update the bootstrap part and the WordPress part.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. So you have the design and the styling is in Bootstrap, and you kind of massage it into the WordPress, so.

Anne Katzeff: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Seamless. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: And, you know, people ask me, why don’t you do the whole thing in WordPress for me? I do occasionally build bootstrap sites, so this is a way. It’s kind of an excuse for me to keep current in what’s happening in Bootstrap. So I’m using new tools like figma for my prototyping, and once I get that finished and we’re nearing that point I’ll start rebuilding and bootstrap, and probably I’ll use the 2025 WordPress default theme for the blog part. So with both of these projects I’m using these new tools and riding a learning curve and it’s all good. It’s challenging and stimulating and integrating the new with the familiar. So it’s like my mind is like uhh.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but it could be. It’s a great exercise. You have to kind of see okay, how far can I still rely on what I’m doing? And oh this cool new stuff is also good. So I know that Jonathan Bosinger, he’s a co-worker of mine and he was one of the educators on the Learn team and he has started live streaming and this last livestream he’s trying to. He got a Figma design from a designer and now wants to create a block theme about it and finds that there are no like you know in the old days where you had a Photoshop to WordPress kind of. Yeah, yeah. He kind of had hope that there is a from figma to WordPress kind of thing and there is but you need to be very deliberate on how you set up Figma exactly to make this work. So.

Anne Katzeff: God, I was just thinking about all that. That’s so interesting. Yeah. You have to have they call it auto layout and of course I don’t, and I’m not going to redo all my stuff in Figma just to pray that whatever plugin I use will work. But that’s what they recommend the so. Oh well it wasn’t what I had planned. I wasn’t going to do an automated thing but. But now this kind of validates a reason why I can’t. It’s not quite there yet. Yeah, there are curious things in Figma and there are amazing things in Figma.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s like any new tool. Yeah, yeah. It has your tradeoffs and you need to kind of unlearn a lot of things before you can learn. Yeah. So the VIP theme builders or designers, they actually have a process where they go from Figma to theme JSON because they’ll have websites where they like you do. There’s a component that’s not WordPress and there’s a component that’s WordPress, or they have customers that have multiple different brandings for different things but they’re also, they’re all in Figma but then you can do themes and then that theme, you can use a plugin that you can then export your design decisions on the, on fonts and on colors and other things to migrate to theme JSON and then immediately kind of start up a block theme. I’m going to find that, dear listeners, I’m also going to find the link for you, not only for Anne. Thank you. We had David Bowman on the live Q and A maybe two years ago where he kind of demonstrated that all. So we will share those in the show notes and kind of see how that, I don’t know how that kind of works with you and how you approach figma, but it might be a good way to see if that works for you.

Anne Katzeff: That would be fascinating as well. I mean, I am using variables for some of my styles. I’m limiting it because again, of the learning curve. But I’ve got so far the color palette and very basic typography assigned to, you know, text in the six head levels to match up with a bootstrap scenario. And I’m thinking ahead even beyond that. Well, how will I translate that into a WordPress theme? So it’s. I like the complication. I don’t mind it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, the complexity is really intriguing because all of a sudden you kind of have these, all these pieces that fit together very well and you feel like, oh, this is genius.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, I actually, I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but I saw, I watched a YouTube video. Maybe I’ll find it and I’ll send you a note about it. But he explained the Figma variables really well, and he has maybe an hour and a half tutorial that I’ve yet to just scratch the surface.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I know that Justin Tadlock, who is our theme guru, I would call him, he is working on a design system where he combines the color palette and the fonts with semantic kind of. So he’s not saying, okay, this is the main color, this is the background color, foreground color. But he’s saying, okay, this is a text color and has a separate design system that’s built into theme that he builds into theme JSON. So he can actually switch out a theme if the theme actually follows the same standards in there. He just can change colors and then the theme looks totally different.

Anne Katzeff: Exactly. That’s kind of the idea behind the variables.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, exactly.

Anne Katzeff: Definitely try to be semantic.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Michelle Hunt did a good funnel from Atomic Design to the Design system at WordCamp US and the video is online. And she also had a similar custom color setting design system in Theme JSON actually built into. Yeah, so I’m, of course I’m going to share all that, but with you and our listeners.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah. We can’t anticipate everything that comes up in these conversations, can we? No, we don’t have all the links right here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But at least I know where I can look. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m writing a blog post and I’m still a little bit stuck in that. But on how to use Playground to build a theme demo where you can have content, like to showcase your theme and then create a Playground blueprint to share with your clients or your customers so they can test WordPress with the theme and some content in there.

Anne Katzeff: So great idea.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So they know how the patterns look or the color scheme or how the front page can look. And because sometimes you have this problem that you have a theme and you see that there was a front page, but when you install the theme, it doesn’t look like that. Yeah, so, yeah, so that’s kind of part where theme builders or even agencies can really make some great showcase for their product. And I’m using Playground, but there is actually importer. So you can put all the content into your local site and then export it and then import it into Playground with the blueprint. Kind of have the XML file on GitHub and it kind of puts it in and you can do all the settings here. What’s the front page like? A blog post or a block theme? Or is it a page? Or is it. Which one is the news page then? And so you can build that all out. And now I’m kind of. The missing piece is still navigation. So the navigation, if you just build the pages, it automatically builds the page layout or the page list layout. But if you do a custom navigation work, it doesn’t get imported yet because somehow the parser doesn’t know that those links need to be transferred to the new site. So it didn’t work. Right. But I’m working on it and I know that the Playground people are really busy on doing stuff, doing this and fixing things. So that’s what I’m working on. And I’m.

Anne Katzeff: So it sounds like you’re using it also as a prototyping tool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You could, you could. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Is it like the concept, like a live link that you can share with a client and they can view it? Yeah, okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. You could also do the prototype thing with. Well, you can share. You can. Yeah, you can share it with a client and every client who kept the link gets the same site. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: So is it stored in GitHub?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s stored in memory on browser. On the browser, it’s Playground is a tool that runs WordPress. In the browser. You don’t need a server, you don’t need a database. You just need the playground.WordPress.net and then you have a WordPress site. And then with blueprints that are configuration files in JSON written in JSON, you can say, okay, which plugin do I want to install? Which. What’s the landing page? Which theme do I want to have in there? And do I want to have additional content in there? Yeah. So you can use it to showcase your plugin or your theme. And we use it for. For all kinds of different things as well. And on the team, we use it to test PRs from a good look and track that are not merged yet, that are not yet in a. In a version of that. So you can just kind of isolate the whole thing and just test this particular thing. That’s really cool. And I’m going to have a talk at a WordCamp about using Playground, GitHub and the great block theme. Okay. To change themes without touching code. So making changes to the themes through the editor. So if you need a new template or need to change a template, change or add colors and all this kind of things, but then at the end you export it to GitHub and it creates the PR that then one of your developer is going to merge with the theme where all the other developing things are happening.

Anne Katzeff: 

That sounds really cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Well, clearly I haven’t used Blueprint very much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or Playground.

Anne Katzeff: Or Playground. Sorry.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but I get what you said before. Yeah. I like the complexity. So. Okay, let’s see how complicated and easy we can make it. Yeah. Well, I think we could now head into Gutenberg 21.6. 

WordPress 6.9

So WordPress 6.9 is coming. Let’s talk a little bit about WordPress 6.9. We will have other shows about that, of course, but just to get the timing right, we are about four weeks away from Beta 1, and Beta 1 is pretty much feature freeze, and it will all have in there 15 Gutenberg releases from 20.5 when WordPress 6.8 came out, 20.4 was the last one. So 20.5 until 21.9, it’s pretty much 15. But there was a period of Gutenberg releases for about four, four months when not a whole lot of features came in. But that is going to be offset that in the last two or three releases. There will be a ton of things in there. So we will change our cadence from having two Gutenberg plugins in a show to one and do another. I hope we can go back to every other week instead of every month recording. 

Gutenberg 21.6

What we are talking about today is about Gutenberg 21.6 before I go in there. So release is going to be December 2nd, so everything you need and beta one is October 21st and in between are release candidates and release candidate one, I think is November 2nd or something like that. So by that time we hopefully have all the developer notes in there and Source of Truth will come out there at the same time or a week later. So just so you can prepare a plan or not. I’m a planning person, so I always need to know the dates. I always have. Most of the time I have a plan. So when something changes, I know what to change. Yeah. So. Well, let’s head into the Gutenberg 21.6. 

Enhancements

It has a few enhancements and we start with the Data Views enhancement. And one of them is. Seems to be a minor thing, but there is a card layout in the components for the Data Forms where you can support combined fields and show the description in there. And that’s fairly new. So there’s also a storybook documentation out for those plugin developers who all kind of want to try out the new Data Views and the Data Forms. Data form is really where people then can enter stuff, filtering and all that. That’s all in Data Forms. And then there’s also in the Data Views we have the grid layout is now a little bit more flexible. You can have it without a title and then you have the actions are available on Hover, which is quite nice.

Anne Katzeff: But yeah, I like that. That’s a wonderful enhancement. And of course it got me into another path of both grids and thinking about using the grid layout for the post template. So I started to play around with that. Got lost in that for about an hour. So far I don’t really see an advantage for using the grid over the default grouping with columns, but I’ll play around with it a bit more.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there is actually a more interactive way of using the grid layout in the Gutenberg experiments. So that might be. So when you use the Gutenberg plugin, there’s one menu item under Gutenberg that says Experiments, and there are probably 10 different experiments, amongst them the new blocks that are in there, but they will come out of experiments hopefully soon. There’s also the data view usage for posts. Because right now it’s only a site editor with pages where you can use the data views but also use them for posts. And there are a ton of experiments and one of them is interactive grid layout where you can drag and drop things.

Anne Katzeff: Oh really?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Use it. Yeah. For different kind of content as well. So you have pictures in there, you can have a cover in there and you can have just text in there and each grid and then you can also stretch it out over two rows.

Anne Katzeff: Oh yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or two columns or two rows kind of thing. And. And it. Oh, cool. Kind of merges all that. So it’s really cool. But it hasn’t gotten any updates for a while. It’s still an experiment because of our other priorities. But it’s definitely. You see what’s coming. That’s one thing. Also to kind of okay, how can we. How can this be improved? Yeah, and kind of. Yeah, let the developers know. That’s the. Yeah, I like the grid layout too.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do some interesting things with it.

Anne Katzeff: Definitely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. There were updates to the core data packages but they are so developer oriented and so technical that if you’re interested that just check out the changelog of 21.6. But 21.6 has one new thing and that’s. Well, it was actually in 21.5, but that’s the accordion block and I cannot talk often about it. Often enough about it. I’m really happy that the accordion block made it into Gutenberg. Now it’s still under experiments, so you need to switch it on. I think it’s the second. The second from the top on that page. I had a plan to create a post about all the experiments that I Gutenberg. But yeah, that kind of fell to the website.

Anne Katzeff: Well, it’s constantly changing I would think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing, but it’s also kind of. Oh yeah, well, let’s do the other cool stuff too. Yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the new accordion features and I checked about. Of course, you know, I had to look at that. I still think the UI needs some tweaks. Although of course I. I think the add button is a no brainer. That’s a really good addition. So I was looking at the accordion from a user point of view. Not on the front end, but the back end. And those pan. What do they call them? Panes. They’re tucked right next to each other. I think just from a UI point of view it would be nice to add a little bit of space between them. Because I had trouble acclimating to how does this actually work and what’s going on. I hit this plus sign and then it opens up. So just a little bit more tweaking on that, I think would be.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that’s also something to think about with block style variations, where you can actually put that in a style.

Anne Katzeff: Sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then I did some discovery on that because I wanted to figure out how many different designs can I come up with? My AI can come up with that. I can put a variation. How many did you discover? Right now, I did it all by hand and kind of do the discovery because I had the whole same thing. But I had too much white space. I did a background into the panel.

Anne Katzeff: That’s a good idea. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then I had a white space there. And so I needed to reduce the margin to get rid of that white space. But, yeah, I think that’s the design decisions. It’s so new that you’re. There are not all the supports are there. I think you can have some dimension support there with spacing and margins. So you can definitely see that in the side. In the inspector controls and the sidebar of the block. You just need to make sure that you select the right block, because there are four blocks. One is the accordion, that’s the wrapper, and then you have the header, and then you have the panel, and then you have the content. Yeah, there’s a. A lot of moving parts that if you create a style variation for that, people can just, with one click.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Change the design of things. Yeah. Kind of make it either an FAQ or pricing or whatever to do that. So style variations are really a cool feature. Yeah. So the next thing is. Well, the query loop block had a. Had a broken placeholder and it’s fixed now.

Anne Katzeff: And that’s on small screens, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s from plus on mobile, pretty much the next one is. Or Core Commands. So Commands is the command palette where you do Control K and then you get a little. Like on a Mac, you get little things and you can say Open Site Editor or add a page or something like that. And now you can now return to the dashboard. Yeah. Because you’re five levels deep in the Site Editor and now you want to go back to your post. You just open up Control K and say return to Dashboard or just type in Dashboard. And then it kind of gets you to. To that place. It also has some permission checks, so if you are not allowed to go there, you’re not you’re not going to go there. So that was kind of missing before. It was kind of. Yeah. Wherever you go, you go.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, so it was like a back door.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Access to.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wow. But it’s all, all in the admin. There’s nothing on the front end, but it’s. I think it will. So the command palette has those in. In 28. So in the next one there will be additional commands. So command palette, you can register commands with code. So plugin can say, okay, if, if that’s a team, a team plugin with team members, you could say add a team or yeah. Update theme or something like that. And then because it’s just a one liner kind of thing, you could also then tap it into the Abilities API. That’s kind of the next step. It’s not going to be in 6.9 for sure, but it is something that you can kind of daisy chain some workflows or tab into an AI ability kind of API that then lets you also do some AI stuff there. So it’s kind of that interface that you will be in in the future more often if you so choose to. But I think that’s a really interesting development there because now, right now you always have to remember, okay, which menu is it in and where do I go and what’s the name of it? Yeah, is it template parts? Is it pattern? Is it templates? Is it pages? Yeah, what’s.

Anne Katzeff: I tend to click on my little picture icon to get back to the previous screens.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I tend to do because I don’t know how often.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, how often do you do it?

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now you can just do Control K and I like that. Then you’re back there and you don’t have to do 15 plus things. Yeah. So no, I really am quite. I like the command palette anyway. But now it has so much perspective in the future.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah.

New APIs

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next thing is about global styles and we talked about. No, we didn’t talk about it. So you can now, in the theme JSON file, you can now have support for form elements like the inputs, all the inputs on your site, or the dropdowns and selects. So if you create forms and you can style them through the theme JSON file, you don’t have to do custom CSS for that anymore. Many, many theme builders ask for this too because it’s, well, what’s a website without a contact form? Yeah, what’s a website without a get me your quote or something like that? You need some forms and then you want to style it. You don’t want to kind of have another CSS file in there. If you have those tools for theme JSON and oh yeah, the developer blog, what’s New for Developers in September Edition that came out about two weeks ago had some code examples on how you can put that in your theme JSON. Yeah, how. How you phase it and all that. Yeah. So it’s okay. It’s really cool. It shows you how to. So you get into the elements section of your theme JSON and then you have text input and then you can do borders, colors, typography, or select and have the different colors for text and background, for instance. That’s the example in the developer blog.

Anne Katzeff: So more and more we can do things in theme JSON that will allow us to use additional CSS or custom CSS less and less.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, that’s one thing. And you could actually write CSS in a custom.

Anne Katzeff: That’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it’s. It’s such a habit to go to additional CSS and just fix something. Yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Or I have very little. Well, actually this comes up later in the changelog, so I won’t get too deep into it, but I have very little in my additional CSS these days.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s good.

Anne Katzeff: It’s just those few instances where I just can’t do it in theme JSON.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s still not particularly all covered there. Yeah. 

Bug Fixes

So now we come to the bug fixes. And one was the randomization of the gallery block doesn’t work when the lightbox is enabled. But you had a question there.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that randomization. I didn’t know about that bug. But in the projects that I’ve been working on, I noticed the lack of navigation in the. The light box. So I know that that’s deep in the works now. And look, I. I just recently went to the PR and it looks like a lot of progress has been made. I think they’re about to say this is a done deal, or maybe they already have. So that’s really good because otherwise you would do all the things you needed to do to enlarge the image, but you couldn’t get to the next image in the gallery. Well, that’s not really a light box, is it?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, everybody Lightbox, I think they’re around for 15 years now, so everybody has a different idea. But yeah, it was.

Anne Katzeff: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was definitely missing navigation to. To just kind of use it as a slider that you can Slide exactly. Forward and backwards without having to. You click on the X and then you’re at the gallery and then you have to click on the next pictures and then go it up. So it was a little tedious. After the third one, everybody escaped. Yeah, that. Yeah. And PR that Anne is talking about is the 62906. If you want to go on. On the GitHub and check it out. 62906. And yeah, they’re pretty far with it. It’s some nice previous and next. And you get some. Yeah, I tested it too. Yeah. With Playground you cannot do Gutenberg and then the PR and then you can play around with it. And that was quite nicely done. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people have given input not only from the developers or from the contributor, but also from other developers and from the accessibility. Because that was. I think the first part was the accessibility part was. It didn’t kind of pan out. So they. They did some interesting.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, were the arrows too small or something?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Errors too small? No area label, no announcement. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that need to happen for accessibility there.

Anne Katzeff: I’m deep into accessibility these days. I mean, with this client’s site being redesigned, her brand colors don’t cut it for accessibility. And I don’t know how, but I somehow convinced her to tweak the web colors to meet the accessibility requirements. I think I was so happy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, my God. Yeah, so it’s.

Anne Katzeff: It’s a big thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You don’t want to get them. Get them into trouble or. Yeah. Have a. The user less optimal experience.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think we talked about it. A plated science and classes to the experimental form block. That’s part of the getting the element section into the theme JSON part. There is an experimental form block though. So if you have the Gutenberg plugin installed and go to experiments, One of the 15 choices there is form block. So you can actually create a form from those blocks in your editor. But most people actually have a separate plugin for their forms. I’m not sure how expanded that’s going to be used. Yeah, that’s pretty much. We are through the bug fixes and then there’s one fix. So much. So the zoom out. We had this in 6.8. There was a problem that when you have the show template, you couldn’t show the template when you were in zoom out, and now they actually put it out. It didn’t work. You just didn’t get it to it. And now they actually took the. They now fixed it that the zoom out is disabled when the show template is toggled off. You need both. You need to in zoom out because when the show template is off, the renderer doesn’t see the main section of the page because that’s all the content anyway. But zoom out needs to have that main section. So it’s all kind of. Wasn’t consistently kind of working. So now they finally fixed it. Anything else? No, I think we’re through with 21.6. Except there’s some block library. Image block.

Code Quality

Anne Katzeff: Oh, yeah. And that got me thinking how useful it would be to have live updating with the alt text. Because if I change the alt text in the media library for an image, it doesn’t automatically sync to where it’s being used in a page or a post. Oh, I have to. I have to click on the image and the page or the post and replace it with the same image with the revised alt text. So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if that was all synced together? And then that got me down another path. So maybe you have the answer to this question. So I noticed for, well, quite a long time, I’ve been noticing that when you’re in the image library and you click on an image, the fields differ depending on your media library mode. If it’s list and you click on an image, you get a different set of metadata or fields versus a grid. And I think it’s. With the grid. Yeah. There’s no alt text option from a list mode, but there is from a grid mode. And so why. Do you know why those fields differ?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I have no idea.

Anne Katzeff: I don’t know either. Ladies and gentlemen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Well, it’s interesting that you actually notice that. Yeah, I. Yeah, I always have my media library on grid, so I’m not.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, me too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t. I don’t see the difference, but you’re right. Yeah. I know that the contributors are working on the media library for the admin redesign and I think it would be good to talk to them about it because they also will have a grid view and a list view, because the data views actually support that. Yeah. So to make sure that definitely needs to be consistent, you know that all.

Anne Katzeff: The fields are available here, maybe in the outreach channel. I’ll put it out there and see if anyone.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Or we wait until 6.9. After 6.9. Yeah. Because I think. Yeah, that’s where it’s not. 4619. We are. We are all hoping for. For the data views coming into 6.9. But I’m. The data views will be in there, but I don’t think that the admin design will come in for 6.9. That’s just not enough time. Right. It’s now only four weeks. Okay, so you have question. Oh, you have another question in there?

Anne Katzeff: Do I know?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Okay.

Create Block Theme

Birgit Pauli-Haack: About the Create Block theme and style editing.

Anne Katzeff: Create block theme. Oh, right. Create block theme. So it’s interesting. I haven’t looked at it in a month or so. It’s good to sometimes look at it with fresh eyes. And it looks like there used to be two paths to editing the styles and it looks like those have been eliminated. You were once able to edit via this path, Appearance editor, Design styles. When you get to design and you click on styles, there’s no longer the option to edit them from that point. And then the other way would be from a page or a post. I no longer see the cbt, the Create Block theme wrench. I see it only when on the side. Templates, template parts, sync patterns. And another interesting thing, I mean this is all. It’s a lot of information here, but let me try to slow down. So both of those previous paths gave access to that full featured. What I call the full featured Create Block Theme panel. It had all the things that you can do with the Create Block theme plugin. Now the other thing I noticed is if you click on a page as if you’re editing it like a normal person would edit. You know, regular person, not normal, but regular person, the wrench is no longer there. However, if I go through the full site editor path and click on a page, the wrench appears that way. So it’s just this inconsistency, and I’m a pretty well versed user and it was a little confusing. It’s like, well, why can I get to the full feature panel this way and not that way?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So one is that the page post editor, when you go from WP admin posts and pages goes in a slightly different editor mode than go into the appearance and editor. When I first listened to you, I thought you might. It wouldn’t be related to the create block theme because with the site editor we also have two different path to access styles. Yeah. One is through editor and then styles. There’s no design anymore. It only says styles. It’s with the navigation styles, templates and patterns. When you click on styles there, you have access to the same thing that comes if you are in the edit mode on a. On A template or on a page. You also on the right hand side there’s a styles interface. Both are now kind of pretty much on par with the features. So before a couple of months ago or maybe even longer, there was a discrepancy between what you could do on the right hand side in the styles and if you come from the left hand side. But that is pretty much eliminated. The only difference now is only how the style book looks, but it’s really marginally. Yeah, but we have one thing that comes with the next plugin release that we’re going to talk about is the additional CSS you will only access on the right hand sidebar and not on the left hand side. And that has been fixed now. So you get to the additional CSS from both sides. But the Create block theme has changed. So the great Block theme theme plugin only works in the site editor. So if you come from the pages or from the posts on the WP admin, you don’t have access to it.

Anne Katzeff: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you only have it in the Site editor. And I think that makes sense because that’s. It does what you do with that. Yeah, because that’s the place where you actually would edit a theme component. So it also had changed the right hand side sidebar. When you click on save the changes to the theme, you get additional checkboxes. What exactly do you want in your theme? So that definitely was an improvement there because it also included some localization from text and you could also kind of eliminate the navigation IDs and all that.

Anne Katzeff: And I brought another issue up with the team several months ago, which is the cbt, which I’m calling it CBT Create Block Theme Plugin. That’s my shorthand, the page for it from the administration sidebar. When you go to it directly from the sidebar, those options differ from the full site editor pathway to it. In my mind, all of that should be the same. You should have the same access to the same features.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, on that settings page, the only thing that you get from there is actually what you want to do. Do you want a greater theme? Do you want to create a from scratch, do you want to clone it? Or do you want a child theme? All the other features are actually in the site editor.

Anne Katzeff: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Need to be connected with the site editor. So I don’t think there’s a whole lot of benefit from it to put it in a settings page that you. That has no connection to any of the other features that are in there.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, I, I hear you. I understand that I just like consistency.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: I think it’s less confusing when you have the same. That’s a full page devoted to it. Why don’t I have access to everything that I can do with it? That’s my logic.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Because you need the editor too. The settings page doesn’t have access to the editor.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, yeah, I totally understand that. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s like when. Why, why don’t you have the font or dimensions in a settings page? Yeah. Because it’s not the editor that has that sidebar. Yeah. Okay.

Anne Katzeff: Fair enough. All right. This is why it’s good to talk.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. But I, I hear you. With all the questions that we have there. The inconsistency is definitely something inconsistent. User interfaces overall, the whole site editor. I think there have been great strides made in the last four months to make this all more consistent. Have all the support for all the blocks like the border and fonts and dimensions that every block. Who has. Who needs it, actually has it. Because there are really some inconsistencies that some. Why does the heading not have a font size or something like that? Yeah. When everybody else, every other block has it. But that’s. It takes a. A lot of perseverance to get through I don’t know, 60 blocks and kind of make them all consistent that have been built in the last three years. 

Gutenberg 21.7

Let’s get into 21.7. The release is going to be on Wednesday, tomorrow, September 24th. We are recording this on September 23rd. So the listeners. When you, when you listen to it, it will already be out because we are not publishing it until Sunday, our episode. So let’s get into it. We are doing that from the talking through the changelog from the release candidate one that was published last week. So just to. If there are changes on what we didn’t have in there from the final release next tomorrow. Okay. 

Enhancements

This release has quite a few additional updates on the block comment thing. So that’s part of the Gutenberg phase three collaboration phase. Where you have one is from the collaboration phase one is synchronized editing where multiple people are working on the same post at the same time, which is a bit scary, but it works in Google Docs. But we are not there yet. But what already is in the works and has been for a while is the block level commenting. So you can. You’re in your block editor and you click on. And anybody else who has access to it can go in there and say, okay, in this paragraph, change a comma, an acronym, a wording kind of thing, put it in a comment and then you can resolve it in a comment. So the comments show up in the right hand side in the sidebar and each block that has a comment has a little icon that there are comments in there.

Anne Katzeff: Oh wow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then you can add a comment by going to the block settings, block options drop down where you also have the grouping and the before and after. There’s also now comment on the block, and then you can start commenting on it, and then it shows up in the sidebar and then other people who are also come back tomorrow or something like that can answer that or you can also resolve it. So there are quite a few improvements on that. So first is that we only talk about two of them. One is to render the comment content. So it’s rendered in the comment the content completely. So it doesn’t. And it’s still. It’s a HTML kind of thing. So you can put in links in there without having all the HTML. Yeah. Kind of anchor links there. That’s one thing. And the other one is that the user text area auto size up until now you couldn’t. You could write in it, but it kind of would go underneath the box. You had to manually kind of increase it, but now it’s auto sized. That’s really cool. Yeah, yeah. So. And I know you are a single site producer so you probably might not have a whole lot of use case for that. But I can see, I can see.

Anne Katzeff: The use for it for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Would you kind of work with your clients on that or rather with another coworker like a developer or something?

Anne Katzeff: I think to educate my clients about the feature and then they could work together on content. It’s a nice collaboration tool but with any page or post only one person can edit at a time. So there’s that which is a useful barrier, unlike a simultaneous thing. So I can definitely share that with people, let them know about it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So there’s now the ability to reopen resolved comments to see enable inline comments for published posts. Yeah, so if you. Up until now when it was published, all the comments would go away. You wouldn’t see them. So there was a lot of thought going into that how it’s actually used from the previous versions.

Anne Katzeff: You know, actually my brother uses WordPress. He’s a writer and he works with a rather large company. So I’ll let him know about this upcoming feature because I don’t know how they manage the editing of content and it would be good if they could do it right there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s kind of. It could eliminate one step. So when you work with a team on a, on a content you normally go into, or we go with the developer blog and other blogs, we go into Google Docs, write the draft, have all the communication in there, including the comments there and then once all the things are resolved, you copy paste it over to WordPress and that sometimes gets you into trouble. And that copy paste step and the reformatting that is necessary kind of could be eliminated with something like that. Yeah, absolutely.

Anne Katzeff: Exactly. Back in the day when I used, when I was a print Designer, we used InDesign. There is a plugin, so to speak, for InDesign where content writers could do all their magic, all their writing right in. It’s. I think it’s. It’s not in vision, I’m not remembering, but it doesn’t matter. Same concept.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: What I really like about it as a designer, they had no access to the styling, they couldn’t change the colors, size. Yeah, I really like that. You know, the head is. Just leave the head alone. It’s 24 pixels or.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Print design points.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get this. Yeah. That is actually coming also to WordPress with the write mode. It’s kind of a content only mode that you can have patterns in content only and you can only change wording on that. But the rest of it is. Even the, the structure of the pattern is locked. So there is a design mode and a write mode. It also streamlines kind of the process because you’re not distracting by all the design features you could do. Yeah, so I really like that. But that. That’s coming.

Anne Katzeff: Same idea.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It’s also. Yeah. So yeah, in 21.7 there’s also quite a few updates to the data form, especially data forms, also data views. But it has to be kind of to make the form handling kind of bringing up to par to what actually other forms are doing. So the form component has quite a few additional updates in there. So it’s the radio control, be it the Boolean field types with a toggle, you know, being. Having a URL field that can be in the field control, having a phone field. So it kind of is a build out of what you actually expect when you do forms. But it’s all in the data view. So it will be in the admin section, not on the front end. So think about when you have a post or page where you have a quick edit. Yeah. Where you can change a few things. That is the form that this is working on. Yeah. Or what the people are working on is kind of. Okay. In the admin we have a user putting data in what can. What controls do we have available for that? Not on the front end or something.

Anne Katzeff: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or in the edit in the block editor. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Okay, so this is just for quick view.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it has a better panel for that. The whole data views has. I think Matthias talked about that in one of his blog posts on the Make Core blog about the different building blocks of the new admin design. And one of them was the infrastructure and what’s on the panel. So thinking about what are the rooms in the house. You have a kitchen that is differently furniture than the living room and you need the different tools in there. And the form is. Is in a tool you can actually create a form that is then triggered through a modal. Yeah. Or you can add. Open up another panel on the right hand side kind of the data. So those are decisions that the developer is gonna. Is going to make. So plugin developers for most of our plugin developers or core developers. And then you have different tools available for different use cases. Yeah. And. But you always need a form. Right. If a user is going to change something. So depending on how much space you need, quick is only Quick edit is just a very limited. Yeah, yeah yeah. This is going to be a little bit more comfortable to do. Yeah it’s really interesting to. To see it all come to together and how. How granular the whole development process is. Yeah. So the next ones are kind of navigation pieces. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: I noticed the changing add page to create page and it seems like such a small thing, but it’s, you know, it’s significant. I like that one. That’s a good change.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it reminds me, I did some. Some support in. In the forums of WordPress forums and there was one person who had trouble distinguishing between creating a pattern. Yeah. Adding a pattern.

Anne Katzeff: Oh yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s it for. For mere mortals, I would say. Yeah, it’s the same. Yeah. I add a page. Yeah. Let me put the count. Or. But the pattern is you create a pattern that you can reuse or. Or you add an existing pattern to the page.

Anne Katzeff: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s kind of that. Yeah. And this is pretty much similar to add a page or create a page. So add a page would be a page link that you add from your existing page and create a page as okay, I want that link, but I don’t have the page yet. And now you get a button that says create the page. And of course in the write mode it’s going to be hidden.

Anne Katzeff: And you were asking me to check on the status with the navigation block and I don’t see anything that’s changed. If you edit the navigate via the navigation area. So you go appearance, design, navigation, the UI seems to be the same as it has been for months, which is in my opinion, ugly and confusing. But if you edit via the design area. So if you just stop at appearance design and click on the navigation there, the. It’s so much more aesthetically pleasing. It just makes for a more enjoyable experience. It’s attractive and intuitive. So I know this has been on their plate for a while and when I say them, I mean all these wonderful WordPress team developers. Maybe a good place to start improving this UX is to somehow merge what we’re seeing in the design UI with the navigation UI.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, I get you. Yeah. I. When I was creating my theme demo, I had the same. I couldn’t do anything with the. Well, I saw the dark side of the site editor. It’s the dark side menu and on the right hand side. So when I go into a template header and just click on the navigation, it opens up the sidebar on the right hand side and there you can add blocks or add another page link and it’s, it’s very pleasing to kind of add to that. That part. You don’t have on the right hand side or on the left hand side in the dark area of navigation or all you can do is I think click on edit and then you go somewhere. But it’s the isolated navigation and it’s kind of plucked on top of the. This.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah, exactly. It’s just this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: You don’t see very nondescript piece of navigation plopped the top of the screen.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: On top of the content design it. You can’t, you can’t. You don’t see it in context. Yeah, so exactly. It’s definitely something to think about in, in the. In the next few versions to come. Yeah, yeah. And there was this big or that issue that Matthias wrote about. What other new blocks do we need?

Anne Katzeff: Oh, yes, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And Justin Tadlock kind of reversed his stance on what needs to be in Core and he wrote of the Gutenberg Times on why we need new blocks, and that is so theme developers can actually prepare for that out of the box. They don’t have to check. Is an accordion available from. I don’t know, the other 15 plugins that have accordions and how to style it. There is one in Core and that’s what my theme is styling the same with a table of contents block. Or there will be. So they are working on grading the table of content ready for coming out of the experimental stage, which it has been for I think three years now. Yeah. So. But there were no resources to kind of attribute to the table of content block.

Anne Katzeff: So would this be something you could use in a blog post to identify the sections of the blog post itself and they would be anchor links to that section. Oh, nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s a table of content block. Yeah. And if you.

Anne Katzeff: I know a use of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Several of my own blog posts.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And if you don’t have Gutenberg installed, the plugin installed, you don’t have that block. Yeah. Because it’s. It’s only available in Gutenberg and it’s not yet in Core. But there’s a big push to hopefully get it into Core. The implementation had some accessibility issues and then some usability issues, but there was kind of. The first version was in there, but then every so. And then the other contributors tried to change it, but then they couldn’t follow through on this because. Yeah. And now maybe this time is the right time. And then there is a new block. It’s called the terms query block. It’s like the query block for post, but it also is for terms. So that’s the categories and the tags. So you can list them in a rolling block in a post. So I need to see it, how it works to kind of find a good use case for it. But we probably have that. It’s already in Gutenberg and it has an order by. And with a single drop down and. And these kinds of things. So.

Anne Katzeff: So it’s almost like integrating. Could you integrate that on the same page as a. A category?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. With the descriptions and all that. Because it has the tone blocks in there. Yeah. So you can kind of. So if you. For instance, if you have a parent category and you have a blog post in that category, you can say, okay, I want. Underneath every single post, I want a list of all the categories for that parent category or the children category. So people can navigate a little bit deeper into my content forest.

Anne Katzeff: I bet that would impact SEO positively, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, yeah, if you don’t have too many. Too many categories and too many terms. Yeah, because that definitely. If you have too many terms, you get into the duplicate content issues when multiple terms of the same content in there, but that’s a different story. So. But it gives you more flexibility on how you can link deeper. That definitely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then we mentioned that before that in Site Editor always show the additional CSS button is now finally available in and it will come to 6.9 is what we talked about before that you did we talk about it. Well, with the Site editor you have a place where you can add additional CSS for your site. That what you, you know also from the customizer from classic themes where you had additional CSS. CSS that wasn’t in the theme. It was on the right hand side on the styles. Yeah, you could add that. But when you were on the left hand side of the styles you didn’t have a way to add the additional CSS.

Anne Katzeff: See now this really. This threw me for a loop because I never noticed that, and I can’t reconstruct the sequence of events from. I have a tutorial site using the 2024 theme and it has just a little bit of additional CSS in it. So yesterday when I noticed this and I explored and I saw my additional CSS field disappear when I deleted its contents and I was like, oh, that’s not good. And it really threw me for a loop because I always have a backup. So I uploaded my theme backup and thinking it would be in theme JSON and reinstate itself, but it wasn’t reinstated. So then I had to look at my revision history and find the spot where I was before I deleted really unsettled me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I imagine. I imagine. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: So now if you’re saying the additional CSS in the right sidebar is the same as what shows up in the. Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So if you said okay, there must be another way to get to the additional css.

Anne Katzeff: Exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Clone to the right hand side. But that, that is such a. Yeah, it kind of really threw quite a few people. Oh yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: So but why didn’t it show up in my theme JSON? That’s what I was.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s not, it’s not routed through theme JSON. It’s user content. So it’s in the database and when it, when that renders, it renders the last item before the in the head with the styles. That’s the last thing that is going to pull in. So it overrides everything else what you had in theme JSON in the default. So that’s why it kind of doesn’t show up in theme JSON because it’s a different level of customization. Yeah, it’s the last defense, so to speak is the user oriented stuff. I’m glad you pointed this point in pulled in last. Yeah. You will see it so if you go to View Source, you see your additional CSS, the last style tag before you start with the content tags. All that.

Anne Katzeff: Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All it takes. Okay.

Anne Katzeff: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re welcome.

Anne Katzeff: I can breathe now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it shows you that it’s really hard to kind of keep it all straight when you have multiple places where you can change styles. Because the same thing will happen when you change. So you could change your. This appearance of a block for the whole site in the styles styles and then you go further down this typography layout and then you have blocks there. You change how each block, how a block appears every time you use it. But there’s also a place when you have a paragraph on one page and you change the look and feel of that paragraph through the right hand side with the. With the tools there.

Anne Katzeff: Sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s two places. And the other places theme JSON also kind of controls how a block looks. Yeah. So if something is not right, you have to look at multiple places to find the place where you can change it or where you can. Where it actually was controlled. So that’s why the additional CSS is just another place to look and to kind of control this. But I think to eliminate the cognitive load, I think learning how to put custom CSS in the theme JSON is probably a good additional skill set to have kind of take away think about not doing the additional CSS right because the advantage is also it only will be loaded. So the additional CSS is always loaded on each page even if the block or whatever you have is not on the page. But if you do it in theme JSON, it will only pulled in when that particular element or block is actually on page. So it’s actually a performance issues as well. But not a whole lot of people put a whole lot of in additional CSS. So I think it’s negligent. But just a cognitive load that kind of eliminate another place to.

Anne Katzeff: Right. And that ties into a whole other subject. Not for now, not for today. But CSS specificity, that’s a whole other thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Gets very complicated.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Volumes of books have been written about that. So the command palette is getting another update with 21.7 that is made the navigation commands available on all screens. So you can now go into your Tools menu on WP admin, hit Control K and say go to Site Editor. Then you can kind of jump like that. You don’t have to be in the editor to use the command palette. We talked about it before, but it’s getting more and more in there. Oh, there is a nice template API change that it reads really non-ecstatic. This kind of allows template duplication plus the concept of active templates. That’s something I would ask anybody who does works with template to test out. Because what it helps you is that you can have multiple single post templates on your site and only one is active. So if you have a plugin that kind of adds templates to your site. So through the template hierarchy that WordPress has, there are certain templates need to have a certain slug to be pulled automatically. So the single post or the archive pages or that. But if you want to test out different kinds of templates, right now what you do is use patterns for a certain template and you’re not adding them to templates, but you’re adding them to patterns.

Anne Katzeff: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But if you can do, okay, I have a single post template. Oh, and I also want to know how it looks without the featured image to add another single post template and then you can activate each one of them. And that makes it for a much clearer proposition on what templates do and what patterns do. And that also when you have a plugin that adds a template, because plugins now can suggest. Oh, push templates into the template editor. Yeah. Like woocommerce. Yeah. Is going to do that.

Anne Katzeff: Right.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or when you have a theme, a team plugin or a business directory plugin, you can get the templates into your template editor. So you can modify them. Yeah. As a user, but you already have a team member custom post type template, so the plugin would overwrite it. But if you can have multiple template duplication, deplete duplication or multiple, not only two, but more, you can just. With the activation flag, you can say which one is the one that’s going to be rendered on front page. Does it make sense?

Anne Katzeff: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, cool. So. And I’m totally excited about that. Yeah, I can’t.

Anne Katzeff: This is. It’ll take me down so many different paths. I won’t get any work done for a month. I’ll be busy exploring and testing. That’s all good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But Ela Vandorp, one of the Goodmoor developers, has been working on that for so long. Yeah. And when you go to the PR, it has, I don’t know, 150 comments or something like that. Yeah. But it’s. It finally made it into the Gutenberg plugin release. Yeah. Now we can test it before it goes into WordPress core in a month. So go and test it, please. Okay, everybody here on the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast needs to test this. And Aki Hamano, he’s a contributor from Japan.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, sure. Yeah.

New API

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. He has a few things that really he contributed quite a lot to Gutenberg in the last year and he introduced a new function called Use Commands. So you can register more than one command for the command palette, which is good, especially when you kind of think about kind of getting the abilities API kind of connected with the commands palette. So yeah, for developers it’s definitely something to check out how you can add additional commands to the command palette for your users. Your agencies probably can change some of the workflow hiccups that some of the clients have. Yeah. If you can add a command to it and you teach them to control K and you something, that’s definitely good. 

Bug Fixes

A lot of bug fixes, bug fixes, data form fixes. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything I wanted to point out except the global styles bug fix was. Is that the border radius presets kind of had a little bug in there that it generated the wrong variable name in pattern code. And that is definitely fixed. It works. Thank goodness it works good for them. In the block library accordion now has a block gap support. I think that’s what you are kind of thinking about.

Anne Katzeff: Oh sure. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That is now in 21.7 and then you also have a term list drop down.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, there was a limit. What is. What is the new limit?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it’s now 100.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, I was just thinking yeah, 100 would be good and I would never get to 100 but someone might.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It takes 10 to 100. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: So okay, that’s quite a limit. 10.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, you shouldn’t use too many terms because each term creates another page. A page that needs to be indexed and doesn’t have a unique thing there.

Anne Katzeff: Content only pattern patterns.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely something to test. Is kind of added content in.

Anne Katzeff: So the purple icon was taken away.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think so, yeah. Well, in the right mode. Yeah. It’s kind of that mode where you only can change certain things and not do design. So unsync patterns are actually content only by default. So when you add them to the page you only kind of change content if. If it’s in the write mode. Yeah. So you don’t get distracted by certain things like edit. Yeah. If you want the pattern to be. It’s unsynced so it doesn’t propagate the design over every usage. But you still want to have a consistent layout. And then editors who use that in on the page shouldn’t change the composition of the pattern, only the content that’s. 

Experiments

And then there’s a pattern content only experiment that makes the template parts section blocks. Yeah, that was one thing that came out of section styles that’s in 6.6. IIn WordPress 6.6 is that you have patterns that are actually sections and you could style them through JSON files. And then you only get in the style section of the right hand side. You get, I don’t know, two or three styles and every. The pattern changes its look and feel according to their styles. But it was hard to figure out what makes a pattern a section and whatnot. So it ended up that every group block was actually a section. So the styles would apply to other group box as well that were not meant to do. But there was no way to say okay, only for section styles. I want these. So this call for action or call for call for action block or book kind of things. So it was a little confusing for the users to apply that and some of the features. So in zoom mode when you added a pattern you had a little, little drop, kind of a. A fluid drop that would. You could toggle through. Not toggle, browse through. All the styles that are. Can be attached to that pattern. Oh yeah. And those also needed to be sections. But it wasn’t clear what does one pattern distinguish. The other pattern is a section. And now they are trying to do that in an experiment and see how far it gets with also the styling part. I don’t know if all that makes sense what I’m saying, but.

Anne Katzeff: No, no, I understand.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think that was it for 21.7 that I kind of saw. Yes, that’s it. Yeah. So now we’re coming to. I think we’re really out of time today with our. With our episode here. 

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

So I wanted to talk about tabs, we need to kind of have it in front of us. Yeah. So it. They are not. So one of the new blocks that are. Is worked on is the tabs block. Okay. And the other one is the modal block or the pop up block is kind of when you. So you have a trigger, you have a block for a trigger and then when a user clicks on it, then a modal comes up and you can fill out something. That’s also in an HTML standard, but there’s no blocks there. And it definitely is a common use case for certain things. And those things are. And the same as tabs. So you have not as an Accordion where you have one header and then the panel opens and then the next header is. You have multiple tabs on top and then the panel changes. That is also in the works. I hope it makes it.

Anne Katzeff: Oh, nice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Makes it to the 6.9, but I’m not quite sure it actually goes there because I haven’t seen anything in the last week that kind of contributes to that. But I’m also. I might have been out of the loop there because there are so many things that going on at the same time. And I’m. I’m waiting. I know that Anne McCarthy, she’s working on the kind of what’s the state of the development now? But I hope that it comes out next week or something like that and then we have it for the next episode.

Anne Katzeff: Good timing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So WordPress 6.9 comes with really a lot of good features and also quality of life changes for. For the editor and for the flow of things. So I’m really excited about that. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: And wasn’t there a reduction in the number of releases that was decided to condense?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. So in January there were initiatives when Automattic said, okay, we are going to stop contributing for a while. And then the core committers then decided, okay, if it’s not that we have one more release, that was 6.8 and that would be the only release in 2025. And then in May, Automattic decided to contribute again and kind of push everything further and then said, okay, then we can also have one more release this year.

Anne Katzeff: Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s 6.9. And that’s what we are building up to. That’s also why there are so many and Gutenberg releases kind of put together into one of the. Into the major WordPress release. Normally it was kind of between 7 and 10, but now we have 15.

Anne Katzeff: Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so yeah, yeah, but that was a good question. Yeah. Not everybody kind of know they stopped, but did we start again contributing to Core? You know. Yes, we did. Yeah.

Anne Katzeff: Excellent. Well, I look forward to the next release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We do, yeah. So we are at the end of the show. Thank you so much for going through that with me, Ann. It was great to talk to you again.

Anne Katzeff: I know. It was great to talk with you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. As always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 121, 121. And if you have questions, suggestions or news you want us to include next time, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com and the show notes will have all the contact information for Anne and it will be on, as I said, Gutenbergtimes.com. 

So thank you, everybody. 

Anne Katzeff: Thank you for thank you, Birgit. 

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you, Anne, for your time. And I hope you have a wonderful time in fall. Take care. Bye bye. 

Anne Katzeff: Bye. Bye.

I send you greetings from Gdynia, a polish port city on the East Sea, with some pirate roots, maybe. My only clues are pirate theme of the WordCamp Gdynia, with the Wapuu, the harbor cruise on a pirate ship, and the branding assets of the WordCamp. For one of my slides, I had Gemini create a background image to celebrate the Site Editor the pirate way.

Enjoy the weekend edition and have a fantastic weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

WordPress 6.9 is coming into focus.

I almost missed it; Anne McCarthy commented on the Roadmap post that some priorities changed for WordPress 6.9:

• “Added in a “New blocks” section under “Refining Content Creation” after there’s been a shift in momentum there.
• Removed “An initial experimental version is planned in the Gutenberg plugin, where contributors can opt-in and offer feedback” under “New WordPress Admin experience” as that’s no longer planned based on the current state of work.”

McCarthy is also Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9 v2 on her personal blog. You’ll find videos and links to all the pertinent information. It’s a lot; you probably have to be selective to digest it all. She updates us all about:

• Ability to hide blocks: The first version will just be a hide/show menu item. Don’t get rid of the Block Visibility plugin just yet.  
• Command Palette everywhere: It is already available in GB 21.5. Additional work is done on the back end to solidify the API.
• Block commenting has received a myriad of updates, and the UI is still refined.
• New block: summarizes work around already merged Accordion and Post Term query blocks and work on the way for the Page breakcrumbs, Icons, Stretchy, Tabs, Time to read, and Table of Contents blocks.
• Simplified site editing: Two different experiments are pursued, one more Write/Design mode and the other is a Pattern ContentOnly idea. Videos and more details are in the post.
• Expanded template management: work around duplicate templates, switch which one’s active, disable theme templates & keep your custom ones, and use the new “Active templates” view.
• Various dev updates—standardized UTF-8 support, Abilities API, Interactivity API, Block bindings.

Jamie Marsland gave a sneak peak on WordPress 6.9 in 250 seconds and covers Block-level commenting, improved template management and portability across themes, block hiding, and more powerful editing controls.

Last month, Justin Tadlock already published a tutorial on how to register custom social icons in WordPress 6.9 on the WordPress Developer Blog. With the new WordPress version to be released on December 2, 2025, developers will be able to create block variations using JavaScript for editor registration and filter the block_core_social_link_get_services hook for frontend display. The tutorial demonstrates building a plugin that adds Ko-fi, IMDB, Letterboxd, Signal, and YouTube Music icons, including proper brand color styling for both logos-only and standard variations, making social media integration more flexible and customizable.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

During their latest WPCafe #128 show, Keith Devon and Mark Wilkinson of Highrise Digital shared how they use the block editor to support their sales effort.

Ajit Bohra, Lubus, released the BlaBlaBlocks Formats plugin that adds custom RichText formats, like highlights and tooltips, to your WordPress site. You can review the documentation on GitHub.

Justin Tadlock, developer advocate at Automattic, announced the release of a new Breadcrumbs Block plugin version. It now supports the built-in Layout and Block Gap (Spacing) features, and developers can extend the block with custom code. Checkout the Changelog notes for information on styling this block in your themes.

Troy Chaplin updated his Block Accessibility Checks plugin. Version 2.1 brings a mix of accessibility improvements, developer-focused enhancements, and a much cleaner user experience. Chaplin recorded a short demo video walking through the plugin in action, including validation of both core and custom blocks right in the editor, as well as a tour of the brand-new settings page. A demo of version 2.1 of the Block Accessibility Checks plugin for WordPress

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Mitch Canter just wrapped up an awesome online workshop for the WordPress training team on Mastering the Query Loop block in WordPress. The recording is now up for you to check out! You’ll dive into how the Query Loop block works and turn it from something that seems super complicated into your new best friend for creating dynamic and eye-catching content. You’ll discover how to tell WordPress exactly what content to grab and how to make it look good… all without having to write a single line of code.

Bud Kraus looked into variable fonts in WordPress themes, explaining how these fonts can hold different weights and styles all in one file, making them faster than regular web fonts. With the update in WordPress 6.1 that adds theme.json support, variable fonts can load quicker, offer more design options with custom weights, and adjust nicely for different screen sizes. Kraus shows how to use fonts like Vollkorn in child themes, create simple plugins for controlling weights, and add fonts through the Font Library, highlighting how variable fonts are both efficient and versatile in design.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

In his post, Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer, Nick Diego explores Telex, Automattic’s experimental AI tool that converts natural language prompts into functional WordPress blocks. Unlike traditional block development requiring React, JavaScript, and PHP expertise, Telex democratizes the process for site owners, agencies, and developers. Users simply describe desired functionality, and Telex generates working blocks within minutes using WordPress Playground. The tool supports iterative refinement through follow-up prompts or direct code editing, making WordPress block creation accessible to everyone regardless of technical background.

You can also review the discussion on Reddit r/WordPress space: Did you try WordPress Telex? it’s awesome!

Ryan Welcher continues his Blockdevelopment Cook Book series on YouTube with Customizing the WordPress Build Process Made Easy! He explained how to customize the @wordpress/scripts build process to bundle a plugin with a single custom block, a JavaScript file that registers a block variation, and a CSS file to style it. “We’ll keep things neat by organizing the block code in a blocks directory and the JS/CSS in a resources directory—a clean and tasty setup for your project! ” he wrote.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

A month before Beta, is the time I get excited about a major release. Many new features—I see it all coming together via GitHub and Trac. The Source of Truth is in the works, but it will take a few more weeks to be published, as only when Release candidate 2 comes out I can be sure about what actually made it into the release.

Until then, check out Automattic Telex for your personal block-building needs. Below you learn from others who went before you.

Today the 190th Oktoberfest 2025 started in Munich. Should you be in town, give serendipity a chance and let me know. We could meet up.

Enjoy the weekend regardless of where you are.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Block-level commenting is Gutenberg Phase 3 feature and in very active development. Although still experimental, it is worth testing now, as it heads to WordPress 6.9.

Aki Hamano, core contributor to Gutenberg, has created the Block Commenting Data generator plugin to help him streamline his testing process for this feature. The plugin is available on GitHub, and it is not for use in a production environment. On activation it creates users, comments, and other data.

Gutenberg 21.7 Release candidate is now available for testing. It’ll be released on September 23, 2025. Block Commenting is a big part, as are DataForms improvements and write mode updates.

As a side note: You don’t have to wait for the next Gutenberg release to test things. You can use the Gutenberg Nightly with Playground

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Check out Wes Theron’s latest video where he shows you how to build one-of-a-kind page layouts in WordPress. He dives into crafting a clean, distraction-free landing page, promoting a special event, and even how to give a specific page its own unique header and footer. Custom templates are totally where it’s at!

Justin Tadlock updated his Progress Bar Block plugin to v 2.0. It now supports Core features like drop shadow, blockGap and layout controls. It’s a feature-rich block that feels at home in the block editor, using the known interface components in the sidebar.

Dennis Buchwald, founder of the dbw-media agency in Germany, released his first plugin into the WordPress plugin directory, an infinite logo carousel block. You upload all the logos into the media library and into the block editor, and it displays a logo carousel with customizable speed, spacing, and hover-pause. A great way to display client, partner, or sponsor logos scrolling over your website. You can even control the overlay at the two sides. This one is a slight pink. It’s also on brand for dbw-media.

Welcome to the open-source community of WordPress plugin developers, Dennis Buchwald at dbw-media.de

Building blocks with Telex

Automattic Telex is like the next big thing in block building, all thanks to natural language! Just tell it what you’re dreaming up, and Telex will whip up the code, package it as a plugin, and you can test it out right away. It’s still experimental, but honestly, there’s no better time to start making your ideas into real WordPress blocks!

Not everyone who’s tried and shared their journey has hit the jackpot. Jamie Marsland totally had a blast, as he shared over on X (formerly Twitter)!

Jeff Paul also gave it whirl and shared his experience in Pong Block: A Fun New WordPress Plugin (and a Nod to Telex). He wrote, “That simplicity is why I’d recommend Telex to anyone curious about experimenting with block plugin creation. It feels like a fast way to explore an idea and get it live.” His plugin already landed in the WordPress repository, and you can add some playfulness to your site.

JuanMa Garrido, developer advocate at Automattic, also took Telex for a spin. You can read about this journey in his post Playing with Telex: Building a Mermaid Diagram Block in Just a Few Prompts. Mermaid Diagrams can be created via Markdown notation and then displayed on the front end.

Marco Ivanovic, designer at Automattic, built a plugin called Space Dots with Telex. A fun block to display a bunch of moving dots that will react to your mouse movements.

Nick Hamze shared his Telex creations on X (formerly known as Twitter), like this flash card block. He also promised to submit his best 10 creations to the WordPress repository.

Are you ready to try it too? In his post on wp-content.co, Automattic Launches Telex: An AI Tool That Turns Prompts into Custom WordPress Blocks, Nithin Sreeraj shares some more voices around the community and then walks you through what to expect when engaging with the AI interface and what happens when the first version is available in the Playground-based interface. It’s well described.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Mary Ann Aschenbrenner, first-time speaker at WCUS 2025, was interviewed by Nathan Wrigley for the WPTavern podcast. #185 – Mary Ann Aschenbrenner on Switching Clients From Classic to Block Themes. They discussed the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical advice for switching to modern block-based themes. She shared why to make the switch, potential challenges, and client conversion stories. Perfect for anyone wanting to understand how block themes make site building more accessible.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Ryan Welcher has been on the quest to build the Core Icon block, inspired by Nick Diego’s Icon Block plugin and has been livestreaming his adventures with all kinds of tribulations. He dedicated two live stream sessions to this task.

• Building the new Icon Block for WordPress core
• Building the new Icon Block for WordPress core: Part 2

Brian Coords, developer advocate with WooCommerce, asked, Are you down with MCP? because he initially didn’t get the hype—why waste AI tokens on simple tasks you could do faster manually? But after building a custom WordPress plugin for his wife’s bakery to track ingredient costs, he realized MCP’s power isn’t just data connection; it’s combining that with AI’s natural language interface to replace clunky forms with conversational commands.

This week, JuanMa Garrido tackled in his livestream REST API Authentication. Together with ChatGPT, he took a deep dive into WordPress REST API authentication methods, starting with the basics of how REST APIs work and setting up WordPress with proper permalinks. Then Garrido walked through WordPress’s core authentication systems, showing how cookie authentication works in the block editor by examining network requests and cookie headers. He explained WordPress’s built-in CSRF protection using nonces and demonstrated creating custom REST endpoints with permission callbacks. The tutorial also covers application passwords as an alternative to cookies, comparing them to JSON Web Tokens and discussing security considerations for token storage. Finally, Garrido explored more advanced topics like implementing JWT workflows with proxy servers and OAuth2 authentication for third-party apps.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Welcome to the WCUS Part 2. The workshop recordings are online, and my chat with other dev advocates has also been published. You can read about it in this article, which includes the video: WordPress, AI, and the generational shift: insights from #WCUS Creators Studio.

A few publishers assembled to come up with a license standard for machines, aka AI. As site builders, or owners, you’ll be interested that there has been some work on the way. More below.

Have a splendid weekend ahead!

Yours,
Birgit

WordCamp US

As mentioned, the recordings of the Workshop are now online. The block and site editor related ones are:

• The Block Developer Cookbook with Ryan Welcher
• Launch Your Personal Portfolio — A Hands-On WordPress Workshop w/ Jamie Marsland.

If you are more interested in AI and development, these might be for you:

• Turn Your Local WordPress Install Into Your AI Coding Assistant with Jonathan Bossenger
• Scalable, Ethical AI: How to Own Your Content and Your AI with WordPress with Jeff Paul
• Unlock Developer Superpowers with AI with Adam Silverstein

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

It was Ryan Welcher‘s turn to publish this month’s What’s new for developers? (September 2025). The updates include:

• Composer package for the Abilities API now available for early testing ahead of WordPress 6.9
• Four experimental Accordion blocks (Accordion, Accordion Item, Accordion Header, Accordion Panel) powered by the Interactivity API.
• Theme.json now supports styling form elements, including text inputs and select dropdowns.
• Data Views received multiple enhancements, including infinite scroll and card layouts.
• The Date block now supports custom dates and block bindings
• A new Query Loop Title block variation displays post type labels.
• WordPress Playground added support for multiple theme installations and new CLI flags, plus PHP debugging improvements through XDebug Bridge.
• The AI team released stable versions of core libraries and introduced new development tools.

For details and more, you need to read the post.

Don’t miss a new article on the WordPress developer blog again. Subscribe!

Carlos Bravo managed the release of Gutenberg 21.6 and highlights in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 21.6? (10 September):

1. New add accordion button
2. Improved DataViews grid interface.
3. Form elements now support global styles

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In her latest post, The Pattern System: Publish Faster with Reusable WordPress Layouts, Anam Hassan breaks down how WordPress Patterns can save you tons of time by letting you reuse the same layouts over and over instead of rebuilding them from scratch. She explains three types: synced patterns that automatically update everywhere when you change them once, unsynced patterns that give you the same starting template but let you customize each one differently, and locked patterns that keep your design safe when other people are writing content.

Synced pattern overrides are however missing from the post.

Tune in to the latest episode of the WP Behind the Builds podcast on Open Channels. The Founders of Podcaster Plus Share Product Development Experiences and Community Insights. Host Mark Westguard speaks with Dan Maby and Nathan Wrigley, founders of Podcaster Plus, about their new WordPress plugin designed to simplify podcast publishing and customize audio players. The plugin uses the Interactivity API for modular blocks like play buttons and volume controls, enabling users to create personalized audio players. Podcaster Plus automates publishing by generating posts for new episodes in RSS feeds and offers add-ons for custom post types, SEO, and automation.

You can sign up for the beta of the new plugin at the website PodcasterPlus.

At WordCamp Sofia last year, Jordan Hlebarov explored in his talk how the Gutenberg block editor simplifies the workflow for both agencies and clients, by making content management more intuitive and efficient, as well as how it benefits both clients and streamlines agency operations. The video is now available on WordPressTV and also offers a link to the slides.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock published an in-depth tutorial on Building a light/dark toggle with the Interactivity API. He demonstrates creating a toggle that works without custom blocks using modern CSS techniques and WordPress APIs. The tutorial covers theme setup, color scheme storage using user meta and cookies, implementing the toggle button with interactivity directives, adding JavaScript functionality, styling with icons, and registering a block variation for easy editor insertion, resulting in a complete light/dark mode toggle for block themes. You can follow along on the Block Developer Cook Book website.

Rino de Boer normally uses Elementor to build sites. Recently he explored Block themes and the 2025 default theme. You can follow along via his YouTube video Exploring WordPress Block Themes (Spectra, Raft, Ollie, TT5 & more) — Live Test

Jason Crist published a new plugin: Synced Patterns for Themes. He writes in the description, “This plugin enables theme developers to ship patterns that behave as synced patterns (reusable blocks) while maintaining the benefits of theme-bundled patterns. When a theme pattern is marked as synced, it automatically becomes available as a reusable block that updates across all instances when modified.” The plugin description also elaborates on the features and how to use it.

Crist also authored the Pattern Builder plugin, you can also find in the repository. “Pattern Builder transforms how you work with WordPress block patterns, providing a comprehensive solution for creating, managing, and organizing patterns right from your WordPress admin.”

I have not tested these plugins. Use at your own risk!

Bud Kraus again has a great tutorial to unregister all kinds of core block features, i.e., block styles, blocks, or theme style variations. He shows you example code and also what happens when things are unregistered that were already in use. Check out his blog post on Kinsta: Unregistering style variations in a WordPress block theme.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Ryan Welcher chips away at his Block Development Cookbook series on YouTube. In the video How To Convert WordPress Blocks Into (Almost) Anything!, you learn how to enable transforms for your blocks, a way to migrate a current block into a different block. The block editor has a few transforms out of the box, like changing the content of a paragraph block into a list block. Or a into a Quote block without losing the content. Ryan helps you solve this using the transform API for your custom blocks.

New in the Playground world

In his post, The future of WordPress? A complete website from nothing but a link, Jamie Marsland explores how WordPress Playground runs entirely in your browser without servers or setup, and Blueprints transform it from a demo into a powerful tool. Blueprints are recipes that create complete professional websites with one click, benefiting agencies, educators, freelancers, and developers. Marsland built PootlePlayground.com and PootleSites.com to expand Blueprint creation capabilities. The future roadmap aims to push these temporary browser sites into permanent hosting.

AI News

In his post, Boosting WordPress Development with GitHub Copilot, Seth Rubenstein explains how GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, helped his team quickly build four WordPress features that would have taken months to complete manually. The AI handled tasks like creating admin panels and fixing SEO titles with minimal human oversight. However, the AI couldn’t test its own work, so Rubenstein integrated WordPress Playground, a browser-based testing environment, allowing the AI to actually browse and check the websites it builds, making the development process more reliable and efficient. Rubenstein shared all the details of how he accomplished it.

Matt Mullenweg shared on his blog, “one of the more interesting things to launch.” this week:

RSL (Really Simple Licensing) is an open standard that helps content publishers protect their rights in the AI era by embedding machine-readable licensing terms directly into web pages using XML markup.

The system supports various compensation models, including attribution-based licensing, pay-per-crawl, and pay-per-inference arrangements. Publishers can specify different terms for different usage types, particularly for AI training applications.

The standard addresses challenges content creators face with AI systems using their work without clear compensation or attribution by providing a structured format that automated tools can understand and respect, giving creators standardized control over their content usage.

The founders are Eckart Walther, who is also the co-creator of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard, and Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com and former CEO of IAC Publishing.

The RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films.

Russell Brandom at TechCrunch has the whole story. RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing.

James Le Page, team rep on the WordPress AI team, built a first version of a plugin for publishers using WordPress: RSL Licensing for WordPress.

And I am left to wonder how public LLMs adhere to this standard and more interestingly, if they will pay licensing fees. Brandom wrote, “Without some kind of licensing system, AI companies could face an avalanche of copyright lawsuits that some worry will set the industry back permanently.”

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com