Gutenberg Times to Hold Live Q&A on Block-Based Themes and Full-Site Editing

On Friday, June 26, Gutenberg Times will be holding a live Q&A on block-based themes and full-site editing. The Zoom webinar will begin at 18:00 UTC and last for around one hour, depending on how many questions are asked by viewers.

The target audience of the event will be theme developers or anyone interested in designing using the upcoming system that relies on blocks to build the entire front end. To attend, viewers should register via Zoom. By registering, Zoom will send viewers reminders about the event and allow them to ask questions to the panel. The session will also be streamed live via the Gutenberg Times YouTube Channel.

Birgit Pauli-Haack, the owner of Gutenberg Times, is hosting the event. The following developers from the WordPress theming community will join her on the panel:

Eileen Violini – Design Engineer at Sidetrack Studio and Customer Success Engineer at CastosHQ.

Carolina Nymark – WordPress Themes Team representative and creator of the Full Site Editing Course.

Kjell Reigstad – Designer at Automattic who works on the Gutenberg project.

“I find the four-people-Brady-Bunch-on-screen format the most appealing and gives people the opportunity to get their questions answered,” said Pauli-Haack.

Friday’s event will begin with a five-minute demo from Reigstad. The goal is to show how theme authors can create a page header and footer by taking those concepts and applying them to a block-based theme. It is an introduction point that theme authors can use in their existing themes without starting from scratch.

The second part of the event will center on answering questions that Nymark often gets from other developers, such as how to put block code within template files. Reigstad will be showcasing demos based on those questions.

“After that, it’s all about the audience questions that I will read and the panel answers,” said Pauli-Haack. “The discussion and demo are all conversation starters. In other Q&As, after introductions, I had my own questions, and then made it all about the audience questions.”

Potential viewers can watch past Q&A events from the Gutenberg Times archive to get a feel for the format.

There is no set direction for the event beyond showing the initial demos. Pauli-Haack wants to put the audience in the driver’s seat and allow the discussion to go wherever it needs to go. The panel is open to exploring all aspects of building themes with blocks, and it is a good opportunity for theme authors to communicate with developers who are at the forefront of the transition into full-site editing.

“I have the feeling it will be more about how to transition from the old way to the new way and how all the pieces fit together,” she said. “Beyond the demos, there probably won’t be many code examples. We will discuss the resources out there and how to approach them.”

Gutenberg Times is in its third year of sharing information about the Gutenberg project. Pauli-Haack describes it as her passion project. “The goal has been to collect all the fragmented information while Gutenberg was in beta before the release in Dec 2018,” she said. However, the site has continued going beyond its initial phase. Pauli-Haack has been holding live Q&As since 2018 on the site.