In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Carolina Nymark back to discuss recent Gutenberg releases (22.3, 22.4, 22.5) and preview features coming in WordPress 7.0. Birgit Pauli-Haack shares her recovery journey and emphasizes the value of Carolina Nymark’s expertise. Carolina Nymark introduces herself as a long-time WordPress core committer and theme bundle maintainer, explaining her role in triaging, testing, and updating default themes.
They highlight key updates in the Gutenberg plugin and developer resources, such as enhanced plugin settings page creation, streamlined theme development using WordPress Playground and GitHub, and new tools for AI integration. The hosts dive into major Gutenberg enhancements: block visibility controls now let users tailor which blocks appear on various devices, custom CSS can be applied to individual blocks in posts, and image cropping has become more intuitive. Pattern editing is stabilized, improving content-only editing and preventing accidental layout changes.
Notable new features include a dedicated fonts page in the appearance menu, improvements to navigation (like mobile overlays and submenu options), a responsive grid block, enhanced breadcrumbs and tabs blocks, and greater customization in the query and image blocks. They touch on the growing importance of collaborative tools—real-time editing and notes within WordPress—and mention plans for visual revision comparisons.
Throughout, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Carolina Nymark stress community involvement, feedback, and testing as crucial for these features’ success. The episode wraps up with encouragement to try the new capabilities, share feedback, and a reminder to balance tech work with life outside the screen.
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special guest: Carolina Nymark
WordPress Developer Blog
- What’s new for developers (February 2026)
- What’s new for developers? (January 2026)
- How to use DataForm to create plugin settings pages
- Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub
- From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter
Gutenberg Releases
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.5? (04 February)
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.4? (20 January)
- Gutenberg 22.3 (December 17)
Stay in Touch
- Did you like this episode? Please write us a review
- Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph.
- If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
- Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how)
Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 126th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg releases 22.3, 22.4, and 22.5. And in certain parts also about WordPress 7.0. 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. Dear listeners, have you missed me? I missed you. My voice is still not entirely recovered from the surgery I had in December. Everything else turned out totally okay. But I’m really glad I have Carolina Nymark back on the show and on my side. We will go through these last 3 Gutenberg releases that were released since before the holidays. So let’s start with you, Carolina. Please tell our listeners briefly who you are and what you do. Glad you’re here. Thank you for coming.
Carolina Nymark: Hi, thank you for inviting me again. It’s been a while. So my name is Carolina Nymark. I am from Sweden. I am a WordPress core committer and a bundled theme component maintainer. I previously worked at Yoast, but from mid-February, I’m now unemployed and I hope to come back to contributing to WordPress. And I’ve been away for almost a year, so I’m excited and looking forward to going back and seeing what you have been working on for the past year. Not only these 3 Gutenberg releases.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, yeah, we missed you, Carolina. That’s for sure. Yeah. Your voice of reason and creativity was really missing at some point. Yeah. I know you also— what does it mean, a theme bundle maintainer? Maybe you can explain that to our listeners.
Carolina Nymark: It means that when someone finds a bug in the default themes like Twenty Twenty-Five or Twenty Twenty-One, we triage new reports. We help sort people who should go to the support forum and who can, you know, who should be actually opening a ticket in the ticket system. Then we help people who are creating a pull request for these bugs and we test the pull request and we eventually update the themes. And when we update the themes, there is a new release in the Theme directory.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So even if you, if the default theme is Twenty Twenty-Five, which came out in December ’24, but that’s now in its version 1.4.5, 1.5 or something like that. So all the releases before that were done by Theme Bundle maintainers since the first release. Cool. I understand that.
Carolina Nymark: But only, but yes, we do have a couple of component maintainers who are working actively on it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it’s not all you. Nobody can really do it all by themselves in the WordPress Contributor teams.
Carolina Nymark: Most of the updates are actually part of the major releases.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So, and if people who don’t know you from before you had to stop contributing, you’re also the maintainer of a website called fullsitediting.com. Which has some great tutorials on theme building, on block themes, and also on getting started. There is a block theme starter kit there, yeah, where you can select, do you have one, a basic and advanced or full advanced kind of theme? And then on, on the press of a button, you can download a whole theme building kit, which I have found quite helpful learning everything. So Check it out, fullsitediting.com.
Carolina Nymark: Thank you. Uh, yeah, I just found that the best way for me to learn was to really deep dive into, you know, if I found something difficult, the best way was to go back and, you know, read the code and test things and look at what other people have, you know, recorded YouTube videos about and, you know, actually sit down and write it in my own words. That’s how I learn. The best. That’s what I did. And I published those articles or lessons on the site.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that was absolutely genius. And I think you started in 2020 with that during the pandemic. Yeah. So when the full site editing team was kind of getting started. Yeah. We also have some back then, some videos and you were on that. So we, we have quite some, you’ve been right at the forefront of all this cool stuff now.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, it’s, it’s still strange that it was so long ago. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But yeah, good things take its time. They have to take time. So I think it will be good to get started because we don’t have a whole lot of time, but we need to go through a whole lot of stuff.
What’s Released – WordPress 6.9.1
So we start with WordPress 6.9.1 has been released and it’s a maintenance release with 49 bug fixes throughout core and the block editor. And then the release was led by Aaron Jorbin and Aki Hamano. And they have release posts. And if your site has automatic minor updates, you already have it, but you should definitely update now manually. I’ll share the release post in the show notes in the interest of time because they were all bug fixes. So you can do your deeper dive from there.
I also want to point out, because we cannot cover everything, point out some updates on the WordPress official developer blog. There were two What’s New for Developers posts published by Justin Tadlock, and the one from January as well as from February, and that gives you probably also what is not covered with Gutenberg plugin releases that might come into WordPress 7.0. So you can catch up there. And then there were 3 tutorials published on the developer blog in January and February. One was to use the data form to create plugin settings pages, which is pretty interesting because you use WordPress’s own component for the settings pages. You don’t have to make any, not a whole lot of design decisions. You definitely have to. You don’t have to maintain that code for the components because that’s done by the core developers. So you have a streamlined pathway to your plugins and that tutorial walks you through it. Yeah, there’s also one that’s called Streamlining Block Theme Development with WordPress Playground and GitHub. That kind of covers the problem space that most, a lot of designers want to design their theme in the site editor. Over the global styles and the patterns and all that. But how does that— and everything there is stored in the database. But then there is a theme. So how does all that new or changed modifications all go back to the file system is through Playground and GitHub and the Create Block Theme plugin.
So these three tools play together so you can as a designer just work in the site editor and then post a PR to GitHub for the developers to sign off on and get it all into version control, which is pretty much the whole— yeah, developers get really antsy when they don’t have control over code or over settings. So this is a good way to work together with developers on, on a theme development. And then the third one was about the abilities for AI agents when Justin— no, not Justin, Jonathan Bossinger introduces the WordPress MCP adapter that was published by the Core AI team and to see how that all works together. So those are good. It kind of covers the whole thing, range of developer things on the developer blog, of course. Any thoughts about that, Carolina?
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, I mean, especially the settings pages for me who doesn’t, you know, normally create plugins. I really like that because it just seems like such a huge time saver to not have to do it from scratch. I mean, the choice of the topics, it’s really great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And if you, Carolina, now on you, if you have a topic that you want to talk about and you want to write about because you want to discover it, like you said, the full site editing, I have the right place for you. That’s the developer blog. That’s how I approach it as well. If I want to deep dive into a certain topic, I say, okay, I’m going to write about on the developer blog and then we’ll me through an example plugin or example theme or something and then walk through my steps and then publish it. So I’m inviting you to kind of think about things.
Carolina Nymark: I mean, there is a GitHub repository. I know that there is a list of suggested topics that someone needs to pick up and write about.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We have a few topics that are not— that are approved by an editorial kind of group that haven’t been picked up by writers yet. So that’s definitely the first thing you can look at. But if it doesn’t fancy you, go ahead and just suggest your own topics. We will have the next meeting on the first Thursday of the month, every month. So get it in before that, and then you can start writing after the approval. And for the listeners, there is a subscribe button on the— or subscribe feature on the WordPress Developer Blog. So you will never miss another post again if you haven’t looked at any of those before. All right.
Gutenberg Releases
I think we need to get started on the Gutenberg releases. So this time we’re going to do it a little bit differently because we have 22.3, 22.4, and 22.5 Releases to cover and with over 700 PRs over all three releases. All we can do today is pick and choose and summarize features. Most of them have been worked on for the upcoming WordPress 7.0 release, but there are also updates that lay the foundation for future WordPress releases or that might not get into 7.0. So whatever we say today that might go or that will go, we only know it next week for sure, because that’s when the WordPress 7.0 beta 1 comes out. And beta 1 is always— there have been exceptions though— feature freeze. And then 4 weeks later is the release candidate 1. That’s the string freeze. But between beta 1 and release candidate 1, there’s a whole 4 weeks where we work on bug fixes that come out of the release or from other places. So that’s when we know. And yeah, so I link in the show notes to all 3 release posts from the Gutenberg releases. And so you can follow up on the specifics.
So first, a few numbers. I said one number already, that’s 700 and over 700. The next one is 22.3 had 131 PRs among them, 23 enhancements, 36 bug fixes. 22.4 was a whopper. It had 406 PRs. So many because we skipped the schedule around the holidays. So there it’s a 4-week period and that’s what you get. You get 100 PRs per week and it includes 119 enhancements and 86 closed bugs and 22.5, which was released just last week with 153 PRs and 49 enhancements and 39 bug fixes. So yeah, you might appreciate that we are cutting down on going PR by PR. So, but let’s go on to some of the features. Are you ready, Carolina?
Carolina Nymark: Well, yes, but I also just want to say thank you because I know that you have helped publish some of these releases, including the latest minor. You’re the one who’s been pushing the button so that the rest of us can download the updates in our, you know, through our WordPress installations. So thank you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. It’s always fun to get through some of the releases. So I, yeah, I released 22.3 and 22.4. My coworker on the team, Juan Margorito, did the whopper, the 22.4, and in between we kind of looked again on the release documentation because we all kind of hit some blockers there where we needed help. And so yeah, it’s definitely something interesting to do once in a while.
But I must say the automation of those releases is really well thought through. Yeah, so If you want to try it, if you have been a core contributor and on the Gutenberg release, on the Gutenberg and a member of the Gutenberg team, GitHub team, contact us if you want to get into release processes. All right.
Major Features
So the major features, the first one is it’s random. There are a lot of good ones in there, but it’s not the first one. It’s not in the order of importance. So block visibility controls. In 6.9, we had the hide button. You can hide it or show it, but you couldn’t really say when and not when. It’s only yes or no, which was good when you do just draft sections or you have holiday things and you just want to switch it off. But now we have viewport-based visibility rules. Do you know more about it, Carolina?
Carolina Nymark: I’ve tried it. I also read a couple of the comments in their pull requests. Actually, I struggled a little bit with finding where it was, and then I remembered, yes, it’s actually in the list view. So when you open your post or page and you go to the list view, you have the visibility control, and then you have the additional options with the different viewports, and it’s a checkbox. So it’s super easy to use. And yes, of course, it works well on the front end. It’s hidden depending on the CSS class name on the block. But I’m really interested in knowing what’s next. Speculations, like when are we going to be able to change, you know, our custom viewport sizes? When do we, as, you know, site owners or developers, When can we decide? Very curious to find out that. But yeah, it’s very, very easy to use. It’s excellent if you need to do something quick.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. And kind of mobile is everything under 480 pixel width. Tablet is between 480 and 782. I don’t know where the 2 comes from. Can’t we do just round numbers? And then the desktop is everything the desktop view, viewport is everything above 782 pixels. It works, yeah, just out of the box. And the only thing I found is when you want to test it and you just do it by using the browser view, sometimes it doesn’t— the browser small one doesn’t get under 480. So, but yeah, I use it through the developer tools and then see it as well.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah. So speaking of doing something quickly, the next feature we chose was the custom CSS for individual blocks. So previously we’ve had, you know, you select your block and you can add a class name and then your CSS is elsewhere in a CSS file or maybe even in the customizer CSS setting. Who knows if you’re using it, you know. An old theme. But now you can actually add CSS directly in the editor when you’re selecting your block. And this CSS is of course only applied to that specific block. So if you have two groups, they will have diff— they will look differently because only one of them is gonna have this CSS. So the difference between the old setting, which was in the site editor, that was for every single block. That was for all the groups. All the paragraphs. And this setting is for the individual single block on that specific post or page.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s another, I don’t know if you had this. I really like this because now you have post and it’s not only for this block. It’s just the block in this post. Yeah. So it will, every post has a new set of blocks that need to be customized CSS. So if you do it twice, think about it, go back to the styles. To the blocks and put it in your global styles so you don’t— you remember, okay, it’s always going to look like that. But I think in the process of making decisions for your whole site, that’s a really good place to try something out, to see how it drives. And then once you know, okay, this is the right setting or this is the right way to do it, then you kind of take it out of there and put it into your global styles. There’s also a global styles custom CSS that’s actually hidden, but then you go to the styles three, three dot menu on top of the styles section. And there is the additional CSS that kind of covers the whole site.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then another place to do custom CSS is actually in the theme.json file. And that’s kind of the best way to get it out of the hands of users and cement it there so you can lock down some of the blocks. Some designers really want to have those guardrails. And I need to look for the dial to turn it off.
Carolina Nymark: So, yeah, in theme JSON, you can have the CSS for the entire site. For example, if you need to change something on the body Or, and you also have the CSS for the individual block types, but never for a single block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when everything is in the play, it’s going to be hard for designers to track down some CSS things that are not working right. I have no idea how to actually mitigate that problem. There’s one feature request to have for the individual blocks in the post that there is in the list view a little CSS kind of thing to know, okay, which block actually has custom CSS. So you don’t have to go through every block, through every paragraph block, for instance, if you have one kind of stands out, but we’ll see how that works.
Carolina Nymark: So for example, if you add a very simple CSS for a text color to a paragraph block, and then you go to the color settings, the color settings, if you pick a color in the color picker, will actually override your CSS unless you start using CSS important. Then your CSS is going to override the color settings. So this is, this is, you know, that’s something that I looked at immediately and it seems like it’s been tested really thoroughly and everything seems to work as, you know, as it should. So I like that. Seems to be tested really well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so the next thing is image cropping tools. Well, we were able to crop images in the editor as well as in the media library, but it was very haphazard. It was kind of, it wasn’t very intuitive. And now you can, it’s much easier to do that. There’s a new package built that works in the media library as well as in the editor. And now you can crop either by certain aspect ratio, or you can actually have drag and drop that you know from other graphics programs, how to crop things. So you can really go in and pixel perfect crop it without having to figure out how to enlarge it so I can crop it. It’s kind of, that’s my brain always had a hard time with it. I have to zoom in so I can crop it. So now I can just say, okay, here, this is the rectangle that I wanted to crop to. You can also rotate it. And what was the other one?
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, the support for the rotation is supposed to be better. That’s what I read. If I understand correctly from a developer perspective, it’s now also a public package. So it’s much easier for you as a third-party developer, plugin developer, to actually use the new image copy package now than before. So that’s good.
Next we have stabilized pattern editing. So this is something that has been in Gutenberg for a long while, I believe. But now it’s stabilized in a way because we want to add it to 7.0. And as a user, I believe that the biggest change is that when you insert a pattern, it’s kind of locked. You will see, for example, if I was testing patterns from 2026, from the bundled themes anyway. And yeah, so the colors are locked when you start, but you can start typing in, for example, headings and paragraphs. I believe that’s the biggest difference for users. The risk of breaking something is lower. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: What I also found is that there’s a new kind of entity there. It’s called the section that kind of guardrails the pattern. So it can do just the content-only editing and people can kind of feel a little bit secure in there. It also helps with changing the design, if there are style variations for certain blocks, that they can do it, but they cannot break out of the pattern. Yeah, the original pattern was that as soon as it’s on the canvas, the blocks are all individual blocks. There is no reference back to the pattern itself. And I think that has been, has been mitigated, yeah, it kind of gapped that that is possible if it has the content-only kind of attributes. It now can be followed back to the original pattern, I think. But its editing has been quite complicated. So making it easier with these new attributes and features is probably a good way to go to have a little bit more, so content creators who are not technically kind of, they have a better trust on the patterns and they can’t break things easily.
Carolina Nymark: They have to try harder to break it, which is good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Try harder. Yeah. That’s what we say to developers. Oh, it works. Oh, I wanted to break it. Try harder.
Carolina Nymark: The panels do look a little bit different than before. But I do believe it’s easier.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the sidebar also has an additional tab in there. That’s the content tab. We’ll see it for the image block as well. And we see it in the patterns or even the COVID blocks, all those container blocks here, column blocks, and they have a sidebar now with the content. So it’s a little bit duplicated from the list view, but it’s just block-oriented. So you know exactly what’s in the block or in the section that you kind of highlight there. There’s another one that will come that’s a list view for the— the list view on the right is a different list view than to the left. Terms, it’s hard naming things. So we name it all the same. On the right-hand side, there is a list view when you have actually lists in your canvas. And you see the items in there and you can manage that from there and don’t have to kind of fiddle around with the canvas there. I don’t know. I think it’s people kind of try to figure out or contributors try to figure out what’s the best way to do that.
Carolina Nymark: So I haven’t seen that, but it sounds kind of like the separate list view for the navigation block. You’re dragging the in, you see the inner blocks and you can move them and you can delete them and et cetera.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, it’s for all those that have components inside, like the buttons block has other buttons inside. Those social icons block has social icons in there and you get them in that list view, the same as the list has multiple list items. So it was also important for the other combination of blocks that are coming to WordPress 7.0. Or have already been the accordion block, the tabs block, the breadcrumbs block. They all need additional detailed interfaces.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, they’re quite complicated compared to most other blocks, but they’re good additions.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, additions that we have been waiting for quite a bit. So the next thing on our list is the dedicated fonts page. So Block themes now have a dedicated fonts page in the appearance menu where you can go directly to managing your typography selection. And it moves from the controls and it was always hidden in the global styles under fonts controls. So who— nobody actually found it unless you deal with it on a day-to-day basis. You remember where to look. For those who are not working on block themes, the non-block support is planned. It will not make it into 7.0, but it’s definitely on the roadmap for the next following releases.
Navigation Improvements
So navigation improvements. Oh, where they’re needed.
Carolina Nymark: Well, I haven’t actually been able to test that. I tried, but I actually couldn’t figure out how to activate it. So maybe you can teach me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the idea of the feature is that you now have choices to create mobile overlays for your mobile versions. That’s another way to a full responsive design. And that you have, you were always having overlays were all available, but you weren’t able to edit them. And the way they do it now is to create a theme parts, the theme part like you do header and footer and call it overlays and then push it into the design for the navigation. So there is now on the right-hand side a menu where you can say for the overlay and you can pick the various parts and there are patterns for that. So the team also created a few patterns, I think 8, that will come with 7.0. So you can kind of have a selection. You don’t have to come up with the overlays yourself, or at least get started. So there is a— with the accent color or black backgrounds. And so you can also say, okay, always show the navigation, the overlays. That means that the navigation, it’s always the hamburger menu and even on the desktop side and then comes with the overlay. There is also a sidebar preview of those overlay patterns and some, some controls there to add blocks like you do with a navigation block as well, because what you do is actually have a navigation, a second navigation on your site. So it definitely needs testing. There is a call for testing out by the team who built it. It’s under the Make Test Block. And I will add it to the show notes. That’s the best way to learn is to kind of heed a call for testing and see what it’s supposed to work. Because Dave Smith published that a couple of weeks ago. And he also added videos how it was supposed to work. And so you can really follow up on that if you want to kind of dive into that because you’re so keen to doing it. Like Carolina is. Yes, it’s always hard to test something if you don’t know how it’s supposed to work. So it’s like jumping into a pool, not able to swim. I mean, if you don’t— there’s quite.
Carolina Nymark: A few buttons to choose from. Do I click here? Do I go there? Do I go to edit or navigation? Or do I go to my header? Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s not a lot of choices. Or you can do it through your header and then the navigation block. So like that, that’s definitely a good entrance to do. Yeah. All right. I have not yet experimented with additional patterns for that. But I wanna kind of go in there and make my own patterns.
Carolina Nymark: You have 8 new designs. That’s really nice. That’s a lot. Can you just, you know, imagine the amount of work that went into this?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Big part of it was by Maggie Cabrera. Yeah, when she came out of sabbatical, so she, that’s how she jumped in to kind of get working on that, I think. Yeah, but the mobile menu overlays are not the only new advanced navigation features. There’s also the improvements on the submenu handling. You can say, okay, that always needs to be open, and then you can better handling of the custom overlays as well. Also, the link picker is a little bit easier to manage. And there were in previous Gutenberg releases that will come to 7.0, there was also background. When it’s not 100%, it’s opacity, the opacity of the background for the site menu. So because it goes over the website, so it needs to have a different background. And you can select the color as well as the opacity of it. So is it shine through or not? And so that’s kind of interesting as well.
Carolina Nymark: I know so many users who have requested this, the feature to keep the submenu always open, especially if the menu is vertical, then you don’t always want to go there with your keyboard or hover over it to open it. So I think that one’s gonna be very well received.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it really helps with the left side navigation. That was, yeah, for the navigation block was really hard to do, but now with the submenus being always open and kind of you, you can organize them with the overlays and, or in a separate, yeah, it’s, it’s really nice to, to work with navigation that way.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But. It’s always going to be complicated because there are some— oh, what they also fixed was that the links to pages are actually dynamic. So if you change the pages, the slug or the title, it kind of replicates it in the navigation menu. That was something that came over from the classic menus. And in the first iteration of the navigation block, that was not the case. That was all hardcoded and you had to, you had to kind of figure that out that if you change the page, you also needed to change all the navigation stuff. Yeah. So sometimes you think, oh, okay.
Carolina Nymark: Well, we have to start with something.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly.
Text Alignment Standardization
Carolina Nymark: Right. Yeah. So next we have text alignment standardizations. I don’t believe that there is anything visible for the editor or the user for this, but this was something that we needed to do to enable other options that are planned because it was inconsistent. So different blocks had different settings and they were, you know, the code was, they actually did kind of the same thing, but in the code they had different names. It was kind of confusing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: True. Yeah. And some of the blocks didn’t have text-align because they also were referencing that from the parent block. But now they do. And I have to update. There is a roster for all the design kinds of things, features we published for 6.8 and 6.7. And I guess I need to update it now for 7.0. I haven’t found a very good automatic thing yet, but I might be talking to my AI about that. So we can publish it.
Carolina Nymark: Maybe that’s good use of it. But you also have until April, I suppose.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right, right, right. I can do it manually. But I’m also working on the source of truth for the other content creators in the space.
Carolina Nymark: So thank you.
Enhanced Block Features
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff. To go through. Yeah. So it becomes— some blocks are just have been enhanced, and one is the COVID block now has a focal point picker for the fixed backgrounds. So if you have a background image, you can actually decide where’s the focal point of that. That’s good if you use a picture that it’s actually tall, but you use it in a horizontal cover block, you kind of— it crops it, but then you need to use the focal point picker to figure what’s actually in, in the block. The paragraph block got an enhancement of the text column support. So you could select that under typography that you can have a paragraph displayed in multiple columns automatically. And it kind of depending on the screen size, it kind of does the pattern, the columns there, which is really nice.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, classic design elements. And now you might need to use, for example, the row or column block, and you can just use your paragraph.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and it’s flexible, so you don’t have to decide what’s happening with responsiveness and all that. Because sometimes well, anyway, it’s always a little hazard.
Carolina Nymark: We have some image block improvements and we already mentioned the improvements to the focal point picker for the COVID block, for example. We also have aspect ratio controls for wide and full width blocks, image blocks, excuse me. Because before this you could actually get a little bit weird results if you choose one of the aspect ratios that’s supposed to be wide and your block wasn’t wide, depending on, you know, how big you actually want it. So that’s nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I tested this and I think the headline is a little bit confusing because the image block per se doesn’t have wide or full alignment. It’s only the hero section or so, the COVID block, if you put an image in there and then you couldn’t decide how it actually uses the image. So now you can select the aspect ratio for the image in the COVID block when it’s full or wide width.
Carolina Nymark: Interesting.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then the other, that is a little bit of an orphan in there, the reorganize content tab and inspector controls. That’s what we talked about earlier, that there are additional tabs in the sidebar of the block editor. That is actually for the image block as well, where you can see the image in a small thing and then can click on it and replace it. So there are a few controls that were before in the block toolbar are now also replicated in the sidebar and for a content tab. And that also includes the alt text. So you don’t have to hunt for the alt text. It’s just in the default open content tab.
Next one is the breadcrumbs block. Well, that breadcrumbs block comes into, will come for 7.0, and the team has been working on in the last, I think, 6 Gutenberg plugin releases. So in those last 3, there’s now theme.json block support for it, block schema support, and then also it applies now post type archive titles into the breadcrumbs. So, and you can decide how many breadcrumbs you wanna display in there. But it actually knows your categories and all that. So don’t forget to put in the primary category when you have more than one category so it can pick up, pick that up. And then there’s also a filter hook to override the final array. And so there are some, some good improvements there that roundup the breadcrumbs block for the WordPress 7.0 release. Actually, Yoast had in the SEO plugin had some nice breadcrumbs features in there. Yeah, but there were never, I don’t think there were block related. They were all in the classic theme paradigm. This breadcrumbs block you can put anywhere. You can put it on a post, you can put it on a page, you can put it in a template for archives, for authors, for anybody. And it will pick up in your header. Yeah. And if it doesn’t pick up as you think it would, file a bug report because that’s a living experience. And it’s just the— it’s the first version, but it’s actually for a first version really powerful.
Carolina Nymark: So the next on the list is the tabs block has been restructured. I’m not familiar with this change, so maybe I should be quiet.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Why? So yeah, there were from the original proposal, there were a few changes that after feedback from core contributors and users, there needed to be a few changes. So what it does is you have tabs on top or writers and you need to tackle those in an array. So it’s tabs 1, tabs 2, tabs 3, like, or product details. Technical specs or whatever you think needs to be in a tabs block. So that’s the tabs menu items. And then you need to manage those because you can say, okay, you want to go left or right with one, you want to change the order. So there is a way to do that. And that’s one section.
The other one is the content panel, the panels for each one of those tabs. You have different panels and in those panels are actually content blocks, like a paragraph, a picture, and all that. So it’s probably a little complicated to style, but they’ve made some changes. So it’s a little bit easier to handle. It’s definitely worth testing out in the latest Gutenberg plugin release to see if that actually works for you and to have your feedback as well. Dear listeners, it’s important to get real-life use cases on it so it can be improved for 7.0.
Carolina Nymark: I mean, I would suspect that WooCommerce would be interested in this for their tabs. Absolutely. That would be like, you know, that’s my light bulb. So I haven’t looked who’s actually working on this. Maybe they are. Maybe that’s the team who’s been contributing feedback to it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s, yeah, I’m sure they have because, or also WordPress.com who also has business sites. But the developer who’s working on that was Seth Rubenstein, who is from Pew Research Institute, and he has done some amazing block development stuff for his own company. So he knows blocks in and out. So it was good to have a first version from him and then kind of modify it to fit into the core paradigm. So that was actually some great work from Seth in there.
Carolina Nymark: Oh, great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there were some grid layout enhancements. The grid block is now responsive when columns are set. Before, it was only responsive when it was on auto columns. So the system decided how the columns worked. And now you can actually set column widths and it still will be responsive. So that’s definitely an additional feature there. And it’s a little bit easier to edit in, just kind of move things around and remove the drag handles because it’s just clutter. You know, you can drag and drop from one section to the other of the content. And there’s also a height block support for the dimension, added in the dimensions. So you can also say, okay, I want to, this block needs to be kind of 25 and everything kind of wraps around it.
Carolina Nymark: I really appreciate this change because I was stuck on always using auto. The other options were, you know, basically unusable for what I wanted to do.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Same here. Same here.
Carolina Nymark: Set width. Yes, that’s really nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the query block gets just a little feature, but it’s definitely big from getting more customization, more flexibility into the block was that now you can exclude specific terms when you select a category or a tag. So you can say without this. Yeah, you can say multiple categories, but then you can say, oh, not this. Or say, okay, I want all the blocks. All the posts in my query loop, but not the site news or something like that. Yeah.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, exactly. Or categories.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s really cool.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah. I’m always worried about the panel because, you know, we now have so many filters, but we are, I mean, it has to be easy for users. You have to make it as easy as possible, which means you’re entering either the, you know, the slug or the ID or the But then with all filters available, you know, visible, then it does get kind of wild. There’s a lot of features now in the interface.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. And then you install Ryan Welcher’s Advanced Query Block and you get even more because he has a whole other section about how to filter some of the queries.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, it does feel a little bit like You’re taking what Ryan did and then just, you know, adding one thing at a time until we eventually begin to have something very, very similar. I mean, not exactly the same panels, but similar features.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, I think when he finds time, he might update the Advanced Query block and take some of the filters out because they’re now in core, which is pattern for plugin developers that they say, okay, I did this for 8 years and now it’s actually in core and I can take it out. So yeah.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, except you still have to redo everything because, you know, different ways of using it, different names to have for everything.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, or people have used it for 8 years on their blog and now they have thousands of blogs in that. Yeah, don’t take it out. It just makes a migration path or something like that. That’s a whole different problem space here.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So as with the data views, there’s also a data form package or components there. And they also— it’s not going to be used yet for WordPress itself. But some of the site editor or WordPress core, but the site editor uses those components and you can also use them for your own plugins. So there’s an additional form field validator with minimum and max support. And then Form Blocks also switched to SVG icons instead of the Dashicons. So yeah, there are some smaller enhancements in those releases, but the team is working on the data views and the data form since last year in summer, I think for a whole year now to kind of get this all done for the whole WordPress ecosystem to use before it actually will also be used by core.
Carolina Nymark: So yeah, so core in 7.0 is not going to use any of the new data forms for like posts or pages, but there is, I mean, again, we soon have better one, but the plan is to do at least a UI refresh so that the interface is actually going to be looking more like Gutenberg or block editor or site editor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s a UI refresh. I think it’s a CSS refresh.
Carolina Nymark: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Based on the component color scheme.
Carolina Nymark: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: As well as the width and this. Yeah. It’s not yet perfect and I’m not sure if it’s going to make it into 7.0. That’s true. But there is I can, I can link the track ticket into the show notes so people can kind of check up on that and also share opinions. Yeah, that’s in the stage where opinions matter and voices matter.
Carolina Nymark: So it looks pretty nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It looks nice.
Carolina Nymark: Form field sizes changes and buttons.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it looks more like the site editor. So the mental model of, oh, this is the 15-year-old admin stuff. This is the new stuff kind of merges together. So it kind of bleeds into each other, which is nice because then you know you’re at the right side. We talked about Ryan Welcher before with his advanced query loop. He’s actually working on getting the icons block ready for 7.0. He has another week to merge the PR. And there is a big discussion that are the icons block really helpful if you can’t add custom icon collection? Or is it just with the Gutenberg icon collections? Is it still— it’s not as useful, but it’s still valuable to kind of put into core because the whole API to add additional custom icons collections might be for the next version.
Carolina Nymark: So yeah, that’s, that’s how I feel as well. I mean, We cannot add custom icons now, but I can’t believe that the plan is that we will never be able to do it. But there is still that debate about, you know, users adding SVGs and are they safe or not. And that does not— doesn’t look like that’s going to be resolved, and you know, in our lifetime. But then again, I didn’t know AI was coming either this way, right? Maybe, maybe next year we’ll say something different. But, if we have developers adding what they would consider like icon sets, I, I mean, that has to be part of the, you know, the plan for the future, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we’ll see what happens, what the powers that be will decide.
Carolina Nymark: But yeah, I’ve been watching the live streams where he’s been working on the, on the blog. So I guess we’ll see later this week if he’s going to—.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, next week now. I think he published another live stream yesterday, but I think that’s one of the decisions to make is for designers, the design leads or the Gutenberg leads to kind of say, yeah, we, we take it in 7.0 or we wait till we have API to update icons collections.
List View and Navigation Improvements
Yeah, that the next one is what we already talked about, the ListView access for the button blocks, list blocks, social icons, and pattern editing. That’s in the sidebar. And then there will be some component overhauls. That’s for the primitives. This new UI component is actually for the admin redesign that has been in there. And it won’t come to WordPress 7.0, but it’s definitely interesting for people to try out if they want to. So the primitives are for the field, for the icon, for fieldset buttons, badges, select tooltips. So you have fixed components that you can use in your own apps. Editor performance has always been in the mind of the contributors. And there are a few— it’s all very technical, so I’m going to jump over that. That. But definitely the editor has been really fast on certain things. There’s also the data view has now density picker for styles and group headers and daytime formatting implementation. That’s very important, especially for localization. You get a total count in the footer. So the beta views have been really been involved now.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, I really recommend that people do, plugin developers especially, go in and play around with it. I did with data forms and data views.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, they’re definitely stable. People always ask me kind of, are these data views stable? Well, they’re in active development, but Gutenberg is using them. So at some point they’re considered stable. Yeah. So they will still have additional features in there and additional attributes and variables, but the storyboard of those is really helpful in figuring out what’s all in there. The next thing is real-time collaboration, and I just found an update from yesterday from the project lead. It’s now ready to test in trunk of Gutenberg. They merged a sync provider that works on every WordPress installation. It’s via HTTP. And it even works on local Playground. I learned local Playground instances since the database is backed on local file system. But I’m not sure how collaboration would work because it’s my browser. So it probably, we need to kind of figure out how that should work. It probably is in Studio where you can have multiple people going to the same website, but the Playground browser. Probably doesn’t work. You don’t have to look for it to disable it. It’s disabled by default. And you can enable it through the settings, the writing settings. And it just has a button, a checkbox there, enable real-time collaboration. And then you can test it. You either use 20— no, it’s not yet in the latest Gutenberg release, though you can use the Gutenberg Nightly from the Gutenberg Times. You’ll find it in there.
In the release candidate 20.6 that’s going to be run next week, just before WordPress beta. And then we see how that is. Real-time collaboration is really something that single bloggers won’t use. But if you have an editorial team of maybe 2 or 3, you definitely want to use it because it eliminates one step on your content creation, and that is the Google Docs collaboration, then the copy paste into WordPress from Google Docs.
Carolina Nymark: And maybe I’m guessing no more of that. Would you like to take over this post? Well, you know, someone is already editing, etc. We can now, you know, back together. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. People can work on the images and other people can proofread it.
Carolina Nymark: I mean, I’m thinking it works really nice together with the new— what do you even call it in Webflow now? The new notes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Notes.
Carolina Nymark: Little notes that you can add about, hey, excuse me, user B, can you please add this tomorrow? And then, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. What also happens with the notes is that there are a few more features in there now. And one of them is that you can now highlight partial paragraphs. At least that was planned. I haven’t tested it yet and I haven’t seen it on change logs. So I need to go back. Maybe I just overlooked it, which is highly possible and probable even. And I definitely gonna surface something for the source of truth for that.
Carolina Nymark: Of course, I’m thinking I can actually write my whole novel in WordPress and then just let my editor just log in and hey, you need to fix this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right, right, right.
Carolina Nymark: Using the wrong tense in your text. Okay. Yeah. All right. Nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I really like it. Yeah. It’s an end. I hope we’re gonna get real soon, get it into the developer blog as well, because that’s where I kind of do my editing stuff. Yeah. So I, we have a few writers and always something new and Yeah, we need to kind of have that. And right now we are really doing everything in Google Docs and we need a first review and a second review and we’re all kind of in there. But when it goes into the website, so I want to start to actually compose in the developer blog and not go through the Google Docs section. And it would be so much easier to do this together because we have a few doing reviews. Yeah, and if you’re doing it all on the same page, that would be really cool.
Carolina Nymark: And I mean, I kind of like the revisions that are in WordPress when multiple people are editing, you know, compared to Google Docs.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a whole PR about handling the revisions rate in the collaborative editing things. Yeah, read through this and said that, well, that’s mind-boggling that people can think about how to do the complicated things. But speaking about revisions, it’s probably not going to go in 7.0, but Ella has made— Ella Van Dorp has made some real progress in making revisions being block— no things about blocks. So you can have the comparison next to each other and you see actually how it’s going to be, how it looks in blocks and not just the text and the coding that you see now, which is kind of— you have to squint a lot to find things.
Carolina Nymark: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I’m really looking forward to that. I don’t think it’s going to come to 7.0 because it’s only the foundation will come to 7.0, but the interface is not yet built out yet. So yeah, I think we are through the most important stuff. Have you seen anything that you over— that we overlooked and that you want to talk about?
Carolina Nymark: No, they’re just so— the amount of changes and improvements is huge for 3 releases.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, yeah.
Carolina Nymark: So I’m really looking forward to testing the navigation overlay now that I understand a little bit better how it’s supposed to work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Carolina Nymark: So that’s, you know, it’s my weekend fun, I guess.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So weekend fun. Yeah. Some people have some interesting fun stuff. Yeah, I read somebody’s blog about— so I’m always thinking about doing a good life balance at work. And the interesting question is, if technology is your hobby, how do you get that? Yeah, because you definitely need to have a break from your screens and all that. So I’m kind of working on that because I need to get it out of my head that I want to— oh, I need to test this and I need to do this, and then I’m sitting and now. Yeah, it is. Yeah, but it’s also fun to go outside and go into a museum, meet friends.
Carolina Nymark: Yeah, well, I have a screen in my pocket if I go outside.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s true. You can read anywhere. And I actually, if you have never tried to do editing of a blog post on your mobile phone, do it now. The mobile app actually works. So that was kind of my fun yesterday when I was off the screen and I found out I wanted to add another link to my blog post and kind of was able to do it. I said, oh, this is cool because I get my ideas out of that.
Well, dear listeners, I think we are long enough into this show that we’re going to cut it off here now. As always, the show notes will be published on the gutenbergtimes.com/podcast and this is episode 126. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, Carolina, for being my backup here and being with me here on this mammoth of changelogs and going through this and making things all a little bit more palatable. And so it’s goodbye. Goodbye, Carolina. Goodbye, the listeners. And we will be back in 2 weeks.
Carolina Nymark: Thank you, everyone.
