Welcome to our 48th episode of the Gutenberg Change.com podcast. In today's episode, we will talk about the release week with WordPress 5.8 out the door, followed by the new WordPress.org panel directory in Gutenberg 11.1. We'll also discuss what's next with Gutenberg. I'm Bjergie Polyhawk, curated at the Gutenberg Times, and I'm here with my cohost, Jga Shalkowski, Code Wrangler, automatic, and WordPress core contributor on the core editor team.
Good afternoon, Jga. How are you doing? Good afternoon. I'm great.
I'm in the middle of the summer, the weather is good. It's so nice to meet you again. So how are things on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Oh, we are getting ready to jump over it on the plane to head to Germany in a week, and we are glad that we finally can visit our parents after two years.
Well, so we say for a while and work from home home, like the real home, kind of rethink of our parents' homes for a home still. So yeah, we're getting quite excited and we'll stay for a long time. We have five weeks to eight weeks, so it's really our parents are delighted. It's the least to say.
That's really exciting. And also, we will be on the same side of the ocean when you fly to German. And also, it's the counter next to Poland. So that's exciting.
Right. Same time zone. Same time zone. Yeah, it makes scheduling so much nicer.
Yeah, but I don't think we're going to travel a lot to other places than just the hometowns, like Munich and South Britain and Freiburg, Kenzing, and so it's more on the South East side than on the North West side or North East side. But I will go back to Poland very soon. I really loved Warsaw and when I was there, oh, it's now five years ago. And I met so many nice people there.
It was really great. I want to go to Krakow, I want to go to Danzig and so German word. It's really... You should go visit Rotswah from my hometown.
Yes. It's eight hours away from Munich by car. So I recommend Poland. Yeah, yeah, definitely do that.
So, but getting back to our changelog here, what's being released. So there was a lot of things happening in the WordPress space this week, especially around Gutenberg and the new features in WordPress 5.8. And we will catch up with it also in upcoming episodes. But for this week, I'm quite busy from all the releases.
So, yeah, I don't know how y'all do it. I think it's a lot of people are working on it and WordPress 5.8 is out. It's named after the American Janspanist or Tatum. And if you ever had here in play, there are quite a few videos on YouTube that I played them.
And it's a virtuous Janspanist player. It was just amazing to listen to it. So but the release is the reflection of hard work of 530 generous volunteer contributors, collaboration occurred on over 320 tickets on track and over 1500 pull requests on GitHub. Well, these are mind-boggling numbers, but that's what Matt Monovic wrote in his release announcement.
So J contributors and J Gutenberg team. Yeah, that release is spectacular in my opinion. One of the biggest in the, at least since I joined the Gutenberg core team and I'm contributing to core. And this release is really packed with new features.
It's probably already centers already know because we talked about them quite a lot. This is the blog with the widget editor template editor dual don't feature a list view and the new preference model. And also it's not only the WordPress 5.8, it's also new WordPress packages that all the updates were published just after there is went out. So if someone is using pieces of WordPress in a different way, they also can benefit from all the same functionality plus everything that was added to the Gutenberg plugin after the release was cut out.
That's awesome. Yeah. So those who use Gutenberg and Drupal or those who lose Lara back. So get these updates in their system.
So and on the evening of July 20th was the release date for 5.8, but on the evening the meta team also announced that the first version of the WordPress pattern directory is live. And it comes with a ton of curated blog patterns that were curated by the design team as well. And now you can just copy paste them into your blog editor. How cool is that?
Blog patterns are available in 13 languages. So the point lots not only had to translate the WordPress 5.8, but also blog pattern sites. So many more languages will follow. So shout out to the Polyglot team that had to work on a lot of more translations than usual for a release.
And I think 55 locales that not necessarily languages, but 55 locales are actually 100% already finished the translation for 5.8. That's really amazing. Yeah. Yeah, that's impressive.
It's almost amazing. Yeah. And the pattern directory has, I don't know, over 80 patterns in there and they patterns themselves also released. There was a moment in time before the release where you saw the same pattern in 15 different languages.
Yeah. It was just interesting. It was just a lot of different signs and the Chinese signs and then the Hebrew. Oh, yeah.
And say, wow, this is amazing. Yeah, it's a worldwide project. And sometimes we forget about it, but when you see all the languages coming in, it's so eye-opening for me. Yeah, but this is not all because we had blog, we just editor enabled, so the body press team, they released a new version, 9.0.0.
And it contains the transform all the legacy widgets into blogs. So you can use them now with the on the screen. And that's a great way to start with blog when you try to convert shortcuts or widgets into blogs. And then of course on Wednesday, the Gutenberg team released Gutenberg 11.1.
Yeah, that's a good point with converting widgets and shortcuts into blogs. Yeah, I think you can connect with the body press team and if you have trouble, kind of connect with them and see what they did and how they did it and what trouble they had and how they overcome that. I think that will be a good way to start if you haven't worked with blog set. So now Gutenberg 11.1 comes with a lot of enhancements.
And I really like that release because some of the blogs actually got some additional features and it was more a content creator and those who worked with blogs to actually publish things get a lot more features now again after many, many releases where it was more about foundations and it was more about the future of Gutenberg rather than here and now. Yeah, I think that's the benefit of having this WordPress, big WordPress release out that contributors can finally focus on bringing maybe not like big features but some small enhancements, some small improvements, better workflows that improves the daily work for the whole group of people who are using Gutenberg, not only those who are waiting for full site editing but also all the users that use it for a few years now and can like benefit from all the feedbacks shared during that time. It's now materializing to a nice user experience. Yeah, and speaking about user experience, Elavant-Dorp has added a PWA and we talked about it I think in the last show a little bit about it but it's a PWA is a progressive web app that you can install on your mobile phone and she has normally the front end of our website is installed as a PWA on a mobile phone but the back end lives from the mobile responsive side of the desktop version but Elavant did something else and she allows the WordPress admin to be installed separately as a home screen and you have an easier access and it's separated from the front end and I tested it yesterday quite a bit and it works very well for adding content to a site from your mobile phone.
I use it together with a hypernotes plugin that's a private note-taking app and it works very well with the PWA features there so I can make notes when I'm on the plane on my phone and when I'm on the internet again it kind of updates the site when I'm back online so that's really cool. I guess the offline support is only for the plugin you mentioned that Elavant-Dorp is together with this change because I don't think that it would work out of the box for the regular post or page publishing. Yeah, I need to test this. This is right now it's a theory.
Yeah, but I guess that's the ultimate goal to have this support. That would be a game changer for all the content creators. They can just go just right whenever they want. Yeah, that's kind of the aim for it.
I hope. There might be some overlap just for those who tested out with the PWA plugin that the WordPress team at Google put in the repository and has already had quite a few and so on. I think about 40,000 active and so on but I saw on those PWA notes or issue notes that one of the developers is actually actively working on the Google PWA plugin to avoid any possible conflict with the Gutenberg WA experiment there. So we'll see how that works out.
Yeah, and we have some enhancements also to the blocks. Like one of them is at least a block. It has now link color control and for instance columns block it has a new feature which allows to stack columns on the mobile screen. So instead of having six columns displayed in a tiny screen, now you can enforce the setup where just like every column takes the full width of the screen.
So it's a very nice enhancement that I probably made a website on its head to work around with CSS now it's natively supported. Yeah, and it is supported without actually mobile breakpoints because those are moving targets. So if you don't have to set them out but you could if you want to. So the PWA that's linked in the release notes, there were quite a few discussions and design testings and everybody shared how they worked it out and what certainly needs to be done.
So I find it quite educating to go through that and read up about what the problems were, how they were solved and how they fixed the edge cases on it. Sometimes just go and read up about some of those key art. Also in this release the post-term block now has a separate attribute for the separator. So sometimes you want to separate them by comma.
I think that's the default separator of the post-terms. So when you have multiple categories or multiple tags for a post, you can now also decide on the separator. You could even use emoji as a separator. I've seen that's quite funny.
Yeah. Yeah. I think there is also for the attack cloud block. There were some changes that removed editor styles that were causing the different presentation on the editor and on the front end.
So I don't see that so often these days but there are still cases that are actively improved being improved and that's great because the goal is just to have one to one experience, especially with the full site editing view that would be very important because people don't want to jump between the preview and the editing mode too often. And you are in one kind of a not liking customizer when you have this sidebar and you editing inside there. It's like just one place to edit everything. Yeah.
And that's a little bit different from the block editor in the post and page screen. When you go there on preview, you open up the front end and look at it but in the template editor, that's not how the preview works. So it's a little bit different for the template editor. Yeah.
And I really, I just read it again and I really like that you now have the ability to change the number on the tags that are shown. So if an editor kind of puts 20 tags on a post, but your designer says, okay, we only show far of them. So you can put this in as I are setting on the tag cloud block. There's also for the link editing.
It was a little bit cumbersome or you have to figure it out by as Moses, I guess, how to unlink a section from the link. And there's now an unlink button. It's more on the link control pop over. So it's more a link rather than a button.
But now you can just click on it and the link disappears again, which I think is nice. It's a fast way to do this. Yeah. There is also very important enhancement that we probably should mention earlier.
This is the change for the list view. So now there is support for drag and drop functionality. So in previously, we would have to go to the canvas of the editor and just grab one of the blocks, which is, you know, some blocks are very, take a lot of space. So it's sometimes it's really hard to precisely pick the place or scroll the screen.
Now you have this much smaller like handles because it's just the one row in the list view and you can just take it and drag it to another place. It's much more more smooth experience and much more easier to put the block exactly when you want, especially when there is a few levels of nesting. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a really nifty feature. Yeah. So you can move it just up to a higher place on the post without having to screen things or how to kind of, if you don't get it right in the selection and then, yeah, just it's so much nicer because drag and drop from off the screen to up the screen off the screen. It was kind of a little cumbersome.
But if you use the list view, drag and drop, it's so much easier to change things around. So yay, good routine. Yeah. One thing that I just thought about is can you drag something from the least you do the editor or the other way around?
No. No, you just drag it up in the list view, but it will be copied on the editor. Okay. Yeah.
Because it's something that people would want. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Nice. That's a challenging challenge. Yeah. Good.
Yeah. And then yeah. I just want to tell that there's one, like a small enhancement. So when there's only one block in the drop down menu in the blog toolbar, that's from the three dots icon, you could see move to even there was only one block which wasn't possible.
So now this, this is fixed. So it's more like a back-fitting my opinion, but it's also an enhancement for the experience. Yeah. And the same region is pretty much that this able to post published button if the saving, if it's saving non-post entities.
So yeah. So if the meta tags or something like that is saved, not meta, meta box items, yeah, that are in post meta. Also the preferences have polished label and consolidated option in the preference model that was just released. And of course, it's the second iteration of it and it gets some new updates there.
Yeah. I really like this new preference. But the way how evolved and everything is consolidated in one model that makes it easier to discover all the options that are there. Yeah.
I'm just still not getting out here for many, many years. Now I can say it for many, many years, it's more than three. I would like to have the block manager be a little bit more feature-rich because if I switch off a block, I would really know if I used it multiple times, especially when it's a block that comes from plugins. If I want to do a review under which blocks that I use and all that, I need a separate plugin to do that.
And I think it would be really helpful if it were out of the box in the block editor. But yeah, I try my best and I'm kind of, yeah, there are some good plugins out there that can be a good inspiration for it. So that's what I agree. So books of the block manager.
Yeah. On this note, we can move to the new API section and there are two changes there. One of them is in the Gutenberg plugin, we have now a stable, new stable end point, which allows developers to get the list of block editor settings. So it's more or less the same, what's exposed from the server from every instance of the editor.
But this one is a nice way to grab the same set of settings for special way of doing the editor. Like the mobile app is a great example because this is the actual use case in this case. But it also gives the opportunity for other plugin developers to find ways to build their own instance of the editor and have all the settings. And the other changes that we have now, a new search control component that's inside the WordPress components package or under wp.components.global namespace inside the editor.
And this control was used in a few places, so it was just extracted to make it available for third party usage, which is a really nice simplification if someone needs that UI interaction. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yes.
Back to the block editor settings. What kind of settings would that be? Is it per block or is it the editor itself? No, it's per screen.
So now at the moment you can just have there are two different screens out of the box. One of them is for the widgets and the other one is for the post slash page editor, which it's hard to tell what will happen with the site editor if it will be a new screen in the future. But that's the distinction. And so what you get from there is like there is a set of some default settings like all the types of the images you can use in the editor or you can get a list of color presets.
You can get the list of font size presets. You can, you know, it's like there is all those features that you have and some of them can be customized and like changed by the plugin which is of these big range of filters. But in general, it's like all those things that you would like to customize for your site. And that's like set on the server.
All right. Yeah. So it would also be something like the screen has a full site editing mode or the spotlight on or something like that. Is that part of that end point?
Yeah. Some of those settings might be there. Like if the full site editing team is enabled, that would be one of the settings. But for the spotlight, I think it's only on set on the client side.
Yeah. So, you know, just the best way to check is just go to the WordPress code base and check all those options. Maybe it's documented somewhere. If not, probably we probably should do that and expose in the developer documentation.
Yeah. So I'm assuming then when from the list that you had is reads the theme JSON file or from the theme as well. So you get all the color pellets and all that. Good.
Yeah. It compiles from the different services. So it's not only that, but also some existing functions that are in the WordPress for quite long that you normally use like, for instance, a set of image presses like, you know, the thumbnail, large and so on. And yeah, just consolidated in one API.
So I know that the border for the rest API endpoint, there is always an API schema. So this is a good way. So probably this is how it would be documented because this will be published to their API documentation. So we'll have automatically generated dogs there.
Excellent. So that's definitely a place to when you write plugins or themes to check it out and see if you can refactor some of your work before, because that is now much easier to do. Well, there were just some performance features. One is we talked about the list view and the team also improved quite a bit the performance on it.
So and that's all in one package, but it's on different places here in the changelog. There was also an accessibility. There are quite a few accessibility improvements here, but one is highlighted that the high contrast mode is now available for the icon buttons. And so that certainly is for those who are visually a little bit impaired.
Then there were 34 bug fixes and there are some of them are cross night eggs. Some of them are just some edge cases and yeah, like the search block button position drop down had some accessibility issues that are fixed. And now you can change the border radii. Sometimes when the Italian word has a different plural, sometimes it makes it into English language and sometimes it doesn't like comma and commas.
It doesn't, but radios and radii does. So that's why I'm kind of a little chuckling reading through this. Yeah. Yeah, there was also an backfizz for the do-a-ton feature.
So now it allows to avoid rendering duplicate style sheet and SVG files. And as far as I remember, there was also a change that consolidates all the changes to do-a-ton and it's moved to the footers. So that improves the ability of the DOM tree, which helps with CSS styling. And there was also some technical change.
So that was targeting the widget screen. So that's like shows how the backward compatibility is important in WordPress. So in the past long, long before the Gutenberg was a thing, there was a classic editor that was exposed under wp.editor global. And when the Gutenberg was born, it was also put under the same namespace, which probably wasn't the best idea in retrospect.
But to work around that, there is now a special so-called shim that allows those two objects to coexist and they just merge together and ensure that all the functionality is exposed also on the widget screen. Excellent. Yeah. Thank you.
So that was also a last time change for WordPress 5.8. So there was this fix for select all. So if you are using my command A shortcut. And so the way it worked in WordPress 5.7 was if you wouldn't have any selection, it would just copy all the blocks.
Whereas for WordPress 5.8, it didn't quite work. But eventually the last approach was that if you click anywhere in the editor's canvas, then it will copy all blocks. If you use this command A shortcut, and when you click for instance on the header, then it will just work as in another website. So it's like there's this distinction that in my opinion makes sense, but might be confusing for users if they are familiar with the old behavior.
Yeah. Well, thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. I didn't realize that but that makes for the sense.
Yeah. There is what we heard from the tags blog where the editor screen and the front end screen is kind of matching the layout. That goes actually some of the bug fixes where these kind of changes where some of the styling that was applied to a block or after the block has been removed. So it better matches the front end.
And so that goes through quite a few of those updates here. And for those who work on the theme JSON and try to switch off and on some of the features like the color duotone or the spacing units, you now can add empty values. So it will in the JSON file to signal that there is no feature for that. Okay.
So that brings us to the, well, there is one item that's that extracts snack bars into a separate component. Yeah. Is it lunchtime yet? I'm after lunch.
Yeah. It made you 100. It's a funny name for this little pop up that show up in Gutenberg on the bottom left of the screen after you do some impressive action like you publish a post. And there was some issue with the layering.
So this is the index in CSS. So it was covered with something. It was fixed and it was also extracted to its own section in the abstraction that is built inside the block editor, which is called layout in the interface package. So there is some plan and follow up work for all the notices to be, you know, have a special handling.
So they're always displayed on top of everything else. Oh, yeah. So it's not covered up and people don't know if it worked. Thank you.
Yeah. And now we can go to experiments. We have 16 items in this section. So it's not the usual number we saw in the past because some of those experiments are now in core.
Or in the Gutenberg plugin. They're not necessarily all in core because the full site editor is not yet in core. The site editor kind of screen, but it's out of experimentation and the plugins. So when you install it, you have it right away and don't have to look at experimentation.
So the experiments are actually only three sections now. That's a component system. That's a G2. We talked about quite often already, but it's now getting into the plugin.
And then there's a navigation block and the screen into global styles. There are still an experimentation. Yeah, in the component system, we have a new experimental component, so to speak. And it's called fly out.
Fly out. And initially, the idea was to call it pop over. But this name is already taken by the existing component, but it has some different mechanics. And it was really hard to map the new functionality to the old ones.
So the decision was made to just introduce anyone. And the follow up work is planned to use this fly out in as many places as possible and figure out if the old components still need to exist or it can be deprecated or maybe the name will be pop over after all. It's really hard all those changes for the UI to make it happen, especially when you know that so many projects use those components, which is about humping, but also brings this complexity. Yeah.
So if a plugin developer develops a block or something like that, they could use all those components, right? And experiment with it. Yeah, I mean, they can, but there is no guarantee that the API will stay and they are also prefected with underscore, underscore experimental. So you know, it's use it on your own risk.
Don't try this at home. Yeah. It's always like in the, when you are in states, you just need to sign a waiver before you using any of the excursion or. Yeah.
Yeah. And the navigation look is getting some attention now that all the widget things is at least released and in the second iteration and has quite a few changes there, built from color options for the submenu to improved handling of the overlay to the inheritance of the placeholder for the menu item and also working on what also made it into the releases, the refactor of the navigation block rendering using a location attribute. Yeah. Yeah.
The changes for global styles sound very technical even for me. Yeah. And we talk about that a little bit on a higher level when we talk about what's next for Gutenberg in the change log, we're coming through the documentation section and that definitely had quite some updates that are interesting for the developers that working on extending Gutenberg. Yeah.
I guess it's for the, at least for the block API and for block editor API. This is something I work on. It's all the content that you would be familiar if you read DevNodes for the same topic, but it's brought to the documentation. I think the more interesting part for at least for myself is the team JSON changes.
And we have now examples and highlighted, the back part compatibility usage. But that's quite important thing to look at if you are experimenting with this team JSON format. Yeah. And both of course, game and update on the format with the WordPress lifeline eight changes.
Yeah. And also for this, for the same topic, I think the biggest challenge now is that there is still an active development. So new features are added. So in the documentation, it needs to be very clear what's already in WordPress core and what's part of the Gutenberg planning experience.
So I think there's also an entry and a change that covers that. Okay. So that's a good point. I think the last few years, there was quite some confusion is especially when you have plugins and you need to gear it towards multiple versions of WordPress.
Yeah. Who's in 5.7, who's in 5.6 and you have to kind of make that or work with even if the new features come, you need to kind of go back and say, not for you, not for you, not for you, kind of in your code. It's not for WordPress 5.1 or two or three or four, but it's only for 5.6 and seven. We're coming to code quality changes.
And it seems that there are quite a few that you could be talking about. Yeah. So I like the changes for the API fetch that we discussed in the last episode. So there was some follow up on that front.
So now there's a user auto computer component that doesn't, in the block editor that doesn't use this API fetch directly bar the abstraction built on top of that. And the same applies to the latest post block. So you know, those things are emotion and very quickly are changed in the WordPress. And there is also there are new components that were, I mean, those components were experimenters.
This is the Gradient speaker and the custom Gradient speaker. So those two components are now considered stable. So everyone is encouraged to try them out and use in their products. And the backward compatibility will be assured from now on.
All right. And this is the keyword for me. It's like radiance. I love gradients.
Yes. And I like that we have them in Gutenberg so much. Yeah. And then there were some additional two changes, 16 of them for testing dependencies and reflows.
And so now previously skipped widget tests are now enabled. There's some back and forth. I highlighted those items that I consider interesting that some tests were enabled, they're disabled enabled again. So it's very important for the project to have a reliable verification from end to end test, unit test and all sorts of tests that you can come up with.
So it's a very strong and very faces to have that, you know, always be something that you can look at and say, okay, it's working. I can just just merge the change. Because otherwise, there's so many contributors, it would be impossible to keep the pace. Yeah.
Yeah, I have to go back and do regression testing as well. Would you do? Yeah. There are also some new tests added and that's I encourage everyone if they want to figure out how they could contribute with code.
So finding a piece of UI interaction that isn't covered with test and writing an end to end test, it's a great experience involved to see how this automation work, how you can see the interactive mode and look how computer is just doing user interactions in your crown browser. That's really nice experience and really rewarding when you make it go and the test passes and all the verifications are checked. It's instant gratification and what can be better than that, right? Yeah, I have found that that's my programming style is I need instant gratification.
I can't wait till everything is compiled and all that. Yeah, that's why HTML was so fabulous for me. I can actually do it right away. We see it even better.
It's even better. It's open dev tools and just change something and you know that it works. Yeah. And you can change it only for you and you don't have to even publish the code for it.
The last item I had is just mostly for us when we are going through the change log is that now those, as I said, some of the experiments that were moved to the stable feature. So that's why we don't see as many items in that list. Yeah. And I think what's also was on the list that we kind of skipped is that the change log automation when the plugin is released, there is now a process there to look at each animation process to look at each PR and classify it as a different categories and then put it into the block library.
So when you read through the release notes, you can better identify what the change actually was about and have some of the changes clustered in one category. So I really like that and there's some great work to be done there. Yeah. I think that we should see that in two weeks when the new change log is generated because you know that it was too late to use those changes for the release.
But yeah, I'm really looking forward to it because it will have a better grouping and that will improve the reading experience. So that was then Gutenberg 11.1 and yeah, go out and test it and try it and work with it. I don't know how many of you use Gutenberg actually in production. I do on many sites and I have yet to have to return to a previous version, but I also know where the pitfalls are so that I can work around and say, no, let us work on do it to some of the code editors.
So that gets us into the what's an active development and what's discussed. Hector Crato has skipped the what's next focus post that comes out every month for July for the beginning of July because of all the work that was to be done for WordPress 5.8 and everybody was focused on that. So he published just also this week the new site editor status check for late July so for one week and then for the whole of August, which is the focus project. And you had a quote that you found interesting.
Yeah, so I reached out to Hector and asked him about like you know, higher level overview. So the main idea is to turn a page after 5.8 from the classic FSA foundational work to a new iteration that focuses apart from remaining things like navigation on design tools, patterns and all kinds of interactions that improve and ease the user experience as the editor complexity grows. Yeah, so that means that for the site in editing infrastructure, there were a few focuses. One is the of course, the template reviewing, making it easier for people to see what they are doing.
Then the browse mode, that's a new mode. I think and then mosaic view for theme templates. So you get a like cards from the theme template so you can choose them and do hopefully also see I see I saw some early mockups of that where you see some preview of how it looks, how each template looks so you can select the right one. And then restrict the block editing capabilities based on context.
That's certainly important when you have a block that's used on a page or a block that's used for instance in a block template or widget setting. And also if it's an inner block or an outer block or with a query loop block, I think that that comes very much into a fruition there. Yeah, I'm looking forward to see the browse mode because it essentially allows you to navigate with the links that are on the page. So you can just go from the whole screen and see how it looks like go to the out page, change something there, go to the contact page, change something there's like it will be very smooth experience once this is in action.
That sounds almost like a front end editing but in the editor. So yeah, I see that. Yes. Yeah.
And one other part is certainly the global science. Now we have it. Global science was always two parts. Yeah, one was the one that became the theme JSON feature where you have a center place for theme developers to have all the settings for a certain theme and that's in a configuration file.
But the second part was for user to change global styles with an user interface in the sidebar of the site editor and it has been an experiment I think since last December or November already, but that is now make it ready for more users to test it and get it out of the experiments into the plugin and then make it ready for 5.9 hopefully that will come out in December. So just to clarify, is it this feature that has its own sidebar presence in the site editor? Yes. Yes.
That's a close up. And it probably builds on top of the team JSON so that only stores the customizations you make to the theme. And if you have the theme could actually allow you to have multiple color palettes, but then it gives you that interface to change it up and then react to it. I think it's a big task to get this right and get it interesting for a user to actually pursue that but also to not be all things to all people.
That's kind of a direct balance just right there. But yeah, that's one of the focus items that Hector Prito highlighted in his post. He has other things as well. One of the theme blocks that have more of the post-date, post-excerpt, post-feature, post-content kind of blocks for the query block and also other side headers, side title and other header things that are already in there but there are of course need to be refined.
And then the query loop block will get some enhancement and another focus is the navigation block and editor screen and the site editing gradual adoption which needs to be kind of seen how can a theme move from a classic theme or a hybrid theme to be a universal theme or a block based full set editing theme only. All those interactions to be discussed and worked on. Yeah, there are even more. The whole post is I think about 3000 words long but it's quite a milestone to look at that.
Okay, we know that and what's coming up and we are not done yet. It's kind of, yeah, we are not there yet and there are quite a few things to be done. Yeah. I think that's so big because it more covers the scope of the WordPress 5.9 release.
That is what's in plants and rather than something that you can realistically do in August and when people on the north of the globe spend the time doing summer vacation. So I don't expect so much movement in that area but it's great to see the vision for there is and everyone can just focus on the area of interest and drill down later to the year and get involved in those parts. Yeah, it's really a great way to learn more about the details of all those things that might come for 5.9 or even 6.0 because we will have something that we had in April where we go look at all the features or the team is going to look at all the features that is it ready yet? Is it ready yet?
Yeah. Or do we punt it for 6.0? So the feature lead if such a thing is actually there. Robert End has an overview issue on GitHub now with what's next for the widget editor.
Now that's in core. What are the things to be worked on? And so that's definitely something to look through because it's how to smooth out the rough edges, improve performance and stability and improve extensibility for the plugin developers out there that now want to extend the widget editor or the widget sections. So that's a good overview issue and see what's all worked on.
And of course we shared that all in the show notes. And what I found was a little bit put on the side was the gallery refactor for the gallery block that switches from a to have nested image blocks in the gallery rather than create that the image is over and over. But we haven't done further with that. It hasn't been merged with the Gutenberg plugin yet.
It's still out there. But I'm really excited about it and I have been exciting since I started testing it because it has so much more potential. And I'm really looking forward to that. I think I'm going to go back to that and see if I can assist in some more testing there.
Yeah. I think it's mostly about the card compatibility. That's the only challenge that is making this process so difficult. And that's why it takes so long.
No, I totally get it. I was not trying to be impatient. I know the last 10% normally take 80% of the time that it takes to build something like that. It would be such an rich experience for a content creator that it's worth spending time on and getting it right, of course.
Yeah. I think everyone is aware that you could now use LeadView and use drag and drop to move your image to the gallery or move out of the gallery. And it's like a reorder some of the images. There's so much potential when you start using those concepts.
Yeah. Just to apply the image styles that you have a gallery of headshots that you can make round for a conference or just a little event or so that you have just a nice experience. Yeah. Or maybe groups inside the gallery.
So you could create columns, groups, whatever. It's like, you know, it's so exciting to think about all the possibilities that is open. Yeah. And I like that creativity.
So when we can do that, can we do other things? Yeah. So that's pretty much we're on the end of the show for all those that are in on holiday and our vacation and outside and away from the keyboard and still listening to it. I was so happy you're here.
And when you get back to the computer, you have so much great things to test out and work on. Do you have any last announcements? I think that you wouldn't be able to get in before that. No, no, I think we covered everything.
Exactly. As always, the show notes will be published on the Gutenberg time.com forward slash podcast. This is episode 48. And if you have questions, suggestions or news, you want us to include sent them to changelog at Gutenberg time.
That's changelog at Gutenberg time.com. And so we would like also to hear about our show and whether you like it or not. So we are looking forward for all the reviews. So we can improve what we cover in here.
And we are always happy to hear your feedback. Good point. Thanks so much for taking that on. Well, thank you all for being here.
Thank you, Craig, for spending time on this and working hard on this. And it was a pleasure talking to you. And thanks everybody for listening. Goodbye.
Likewise, thank you very much. We'll be right back. And see you in two weeks. Alright, bye.